Pull my hair and beat me hard

I was going to write my blog on the subject of my uni boss, Howard Grossman, but instead I'm going to rail on about my other boss, Roseanne McMahon.

Just when I'm beginning to think its not such a bad place to work, I am essentially forced to work an ELEVEN hour shift because she wasn't organised enough to prepare in advance the equipment and staff required to prepare and wrap THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY roses individually. I was already scheduled to work a seven hour shift, but for reasons that I'll describe here the Florist, Cathy, and I ended up working fa-a-a-ar beyond what we were supposed to.

Being the day before Mother's Day, I fully expected being required to do some things beyond a normal shift, but being such a crucial day to flower sales, I also fully expected that Roseanne would be present to make our tasks clear and extra staff on to help prepare. Nup, other than Cathy. I also expected everything prepared. Nup. So after turning up at 9am, I arrived to find that we had no flowers, no water vials prepared, no *correct* ribbon, no cellophane cut up, and not even the number of patients in the hospital.

I found out the number of patients in the hospital (70 private, 260 public), counted out the respective number of vials and filled them all with water, handled all phone orders, and began cutting the cellophane...but twas all for naught because the flowers didnt arrive until nearly midday. 4 cartons worth of flowers and 3 cartons worth of flower arranging paraphernalia. So, precious time was spent looking for space to put everything away. After lunch breaks, I ended up starting on those 300+ roses by myself at 2:45pm. At 4pm, I realised I could not leave and let Tash (the girl after me) do them by herself. Cathy realised she couldnt either so we both voluntarily agreed to stay until 6pm.

By 6 we had only completed about 150 roses. While I was delivering 70 to the private wing, Cathy called Roseanne to tell her the situation and that we (me and her) were going to leave since we'd both completed 9 hour shifts. Roseanne said that SHE would not be let down by US. Excuse me? She didn't even bother to come in and help out her own business. And, from my discussions with the nursing co-ordinators of both wings of the hospital, the flowers were DONATIONS. Having been threatened with being fired, we three decided that we would stay until they were all done, but that at the rate we were going, we'd have to refuse to serve any customers, unless they were absolutely going to spend a minimum of $100.

Therefore having given up all pretense of serving customers or trying to make the roses look as nice as the first batch, we DID manage to get them all done by 8pm. Our thanks? We were told to take as many flowers as we wanted. I suggested we take the roses home and sell them ourselves, but Cathy and Tash said they didnt want to see anymore until their next shifts. So instead I took a bunch of gerberas and roses for my mum. But thats little comfort after all that.

And i didnt even talk about having a shelf fall on me!