Before I say anything else, let me state that I love both of my jobs. One consists of working for a guy that is absolutely great--handing people cigarettes and putting money in a cash register for beer and wine and the aforementioned and taking change out of a cash register. The second hardest part is dealing with difficult customers who don't have IDs or refuse to understand the easy rules: 1) There is a five dollar minimum for debit and credit cards. 2) I will not break the law so you can have alcohol or tobacco. 3) Things have prices that do not change at your whim. 4) Things have prices that do change because laws concerning taxes keep changing all the time and there's nothing I can really do about it.
I know this is going to piss some people off, but the hardest part of my job is figuring out what to do with all the downtime. Internet radio is only mildly distracting. I can only read for so many hours while sitting in an uncomfortable chair. I can only screw around on the internet for so long.
It's the same with my second job. The second hardest part is dealing with customers, which is my only responsibility. The hardest is figuring out what to do when no one is ordering pizza and no one is standing at the counter trying to communicate with me. My coworkers are: 1) Totally chill Egyptian owner. 2) Totally rad Syrian employee. 3) Mexican teenager who knows almost no English. 4) Mexican teenager who knows literally no English. 5) Same as the last one.
And despite the obvious language barriers (all of which I can crack to an extent), we all joke around and generally have a great time.
Given that reading downtime is probably the best between-college-and-grad-school job ever, I get awfully bored.
And the truth is, reading and writing become a chore when you're being interrupted every few minutes. You can't become absorbed, you lose where you finished off, and you lose your train of thought. For example, a slew of customers just came in, and I didn't even remember I was writing this until I was wondering which song by Lush this is (it's Olympia).
Totally getting a beer when I get off at 11.
