Can You Type?

I applied for a job that asked the question on the application, "How many words per minute do you type?" I thought I could type about 30 words per minute, which is the minimum required for being qualified for that job.

So, after I sent in my application, I started having doubts about my actual typing ability. I mean, I had jobs in the past where I was required to type a certain number of words per minute, but not in recent years. And for all the writing I do now, for blog posts, emails, freelance articles, etc., I just type and don't worry about errors because of good old spellcheck. Get it typed, run spellcheck, all is good. Right? Unless you have typed "ass" instead of "add". Spellcheck won't find the error and you'll look like an add. hahahah.

Just to ease my mind that I had not fibbed on my application, I googled for an online typing test, And guess what? I did 50 words per minute! Yay!

So, tell me how well you did.

You Never Know What You Might See

While working at the gate this week I have seen some things....

I saw a very young guy, who was traveling with some friends of his, who was knitting a scarf! I found that to be quite interesting as 1. he was actually knitting in front of his friends, and 2. he said he learned how to knit so he would have something to do to pass the time while he was on this long road trip. When I asked him about it, all of the guys in the car were telling me how they loved to knit!

I saw a VERY COOL Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. It was very obviously loved by its owner. Yellow, convertible, and occupied by an old hippie. I didn't think there were any of them on the road anymore. (the car or the hippie, ha ha)

I saw a little girl, with blonde curly hair, sitting in the back seat of a car. She was watching everything I did, and when they pulled away from the gate, she smiled a big smile and waved at me.

There was a Japanese family, who when I asked how many people where in the vehicle, the father said 5, and a very cute little boy in the back seat shouted "Five! I'm five!"

I saw a raven land in a tree top across the road from my station. He was very vocal that day, and cawed in count (it seemed) for each car that came by during his stay there.

Then there was the lady who cried when she asked me where she could find a certain hotel, and I had to tell her it was 220 miles away on the other side of the world. I felt so bad, but there was nothing I could do. She really thought she was on the right side.

A little boy who showed me his Jr. Ranger badge with pride, asking me if it would get his family in for free. His dad had a pass, so I told him it would. He was grinning ear to ear.

And on the way home, a deer family, a doe and two fawns. It was dark, but lightening lit up the sky. It was raining, and smelled so good out there. I just love my job.

Who Says It Never Rains In The Desert?

On the road to St. George, Utah from North Rim, Arizona on Sunday, July 20, 2008.

Night Shift Supervisor

As summer gets closer, and school gets out around the country, more and more people are coming to Gettysburg, and to the campground. I am beginning to feel more like a resident of Gettysburg than a visitor. I can tell our guests where to find a good restaurant and give them directions how to get there. I can tell them how to get to the campground from the major highways, and I can tell them where they can go to see a movie. Jim thinks this is funny, because he thinks I am bad at giving directions, even though we have only gotten lost once in 15 years with me reading the maps.

If anyone out there wonders what it is really like to be a Night Shift Supervisor at a campground, here are a few things that went on at my job over the last week:

A little girl was bitten by a dog. She was with her parents at the shuffleboard court when the owner of the dog came up. All the adults chatted for a minute about the dog, which was a very nice dog. While the adults were chatting, the child was petting the dog. All of a sudden, the dog snapped at her, resulting in a gash on her face that required 12 stitches. Now the different part is that the father was calm, cool, collected. He did not yell and scream at the owner of the dog. He told me later that things happen, he just wished that it had not happened to his little girl. I thought that was amazing, how calm he could be about the whole thing. Most people would be talking about lawyers and suing and such. He just said, “I was standing right there and could not have prevented it myself.”

The second thing that happened was that an older man came in, registered, and drove his motorhome to the site. He came back all huffy and mad as a hornet because our rock on the site had damaged his motorhome. He was demanding to speak to the manger, and guess who was the senior management person on duty? Me, the Night Shift Supervisor. So, while I was thinking to myself that HE was the one driving the thing, I asked him what I could do for him. He said he wanted to be compensated for his loss. I told him that I could not do anything like that and that he would need to speak to the owner, who was not on the property at the moment. Finally got him calmed down and out of the office. Whew! It is at times like that that I do not like being a supervisor.

Next in was a lady (and I use that term loosely) who was shopping in the store with her four year old child. I watched and listened (I was FORCED to listen as she was screaming at the child the whole time) as they walked through the store. The kid was holding two candy bars and a sucker in one hand, and a Kool-Aid drink in a plastic bottle in the other hand. He had the unopened drink in his mouth, chewing on the top of it. The mother was saying, “You need to decide it you want the candy or the drink, hurry up, make a decision, we have to go, decide!” I was thinking to myself, a four year old doesn’t even know what “decide” means! So, I said to her, “You will have to buy the drink because he has had it in his mouth already.” She looked at ME like I was crazy, and said “I KNOW THAT!” and I am thinking, then why are you making this kid think he has a choice about it? She wound buying all that sweet sugary stuff for him. Well, she is the one who has to live with the kid.

A while later, four teenage boys came in to register. They had made a reservation for two campsites next to each other, for a total of 8 people. When I told them the total due they wanted to argue about the amount, because our published rates are $175 for a week. I explained that it is $175 plus 10% tax for two people, and $8 plus 10% tax for each additional person per site. So, for a week on each site, with 4 people per site, that came to $315.70 per site for the week. The boy who had made the reservation claimed he was not told about the extra charges for the additional people, and therefore he should not have to pay it. I asked him how he found out about the campground. He said he saw the webpage on the internet. I told him our rates are published on the internet, and they state the charges for extra people and tax. They were not very happy, and even came back later and wanted a refund of a couple hundred dollars, because they did not think “it was fair for them to be charged when they did not know about it”. What? NO, I did not refund any money to them.

The next day, the four girls arrived. While one of my co-workers was checking them in, I overheard a converstion the girls were having amongst themselves:

1^st girl “Why didn’t we just come up with the guys yesterday?”
2^nd girl “Because Joe did’nt want me to ride up here with him.”

Excuse me, he wants you to sleep with his little teenage self in a tent for six nights, but he does not want you to ride to the campground with him in the same car? And you went for it? Where is your pride, girl? Oh, yeah, that stuff is none of my business.

So, on Monday night, all the work campers met at Linda’s site and shared some gluten-free pasta salad, some cheese, and some wine. Lots of wine.

Workcamping On The Holiday Weekend

My weekend started on Thursday, which is actually my "Monday", because I work in a campground. We had forty checkins on Thursday, which was a slow pace, but the phone rang off the hook with people calling to either verify their reservations or to ask if we had camping spaces available for the weekend. We have been completely booked for this weekend since February. Get your reservations in EARLY if you want to camp on Memorial Day Weekend next year. And when you do make reservations, write down your confirmation number, and the name of the campground where you made them. You would not believe how many people called to ask if we had a reservation for them because they "could not remember if they reserved here or at the other campground in town".

On Friday, my shift started at 2:00 p.m. At the end of the day we had checked in more than 250 campers. Most of the day we did not even try to answer the phone, which was STILL ringing off the hook. On the few times that we did have a second to answer the phone, the question of the day was for directions to the campground. Now, people, why do you wait until the very last minute to figure out how to get where you are going? Did you not look to see where it was before you made your reservation? Do you not know how to google a map? OH, and we still had people wanting to make reservations for the weekend. On Friday. I finally got to clock out and go home at midnight.

By Saturday, everyone who was coming to camp was here, but all their friends started coming in to "visit". So they walk up to the counter and say they need a car pass so they can go in to visit. When they are told there will be a day visitor's fee, they are universally shocked by it. Then they don't know how to spell their friends last name, or better yet, don't even know it, but if I would give them a car pass they can go in and find them. You would be surprized how many people think I am supposed to just let them in to use the campground faciltiies without a charge because they are not staying overnight.

Then we have the loverly children who are camping with us. Little children who can't count money come in to the store, alone, with a fifty dollar bill to buy some candy. They can barely be seen over the counter, they are so small. I wonder sometimes if the parents even know they have that money. Then there was the brother and sister, who looked like they were about eleven and twelve years old. She was waiting in line to pay for something at the front desk. He was standing right beside her, yelling at her at the tops of his lungs, "Come on, Mom says we have to go, NOW!" The whole time he is yelling at her, he is hitting her, on the arm, on the back, on the head. I finally told him he could not fight in the store. He just looked at me like I was from the moon.

Oh, yeah, then there was the little band of teeny bopper girls, who prissed in and proceeded to tell me how "asinine" it was to have the dance indoors instead of outside by the pool, where more people could "just listen to the concert". What? Concert? It was a DJ playing oldies music. I should have asked them if they could spell asinine.

The last one was a little girl about four year old and her brother who looked about five years old. She was laying on the floor by the toys, whining and kicking her feet. He was standing over her, with a toy in his hands, saying, "I can have this, but I don't have enough money for you to get anything." They had strewn toys all over the floor. I went over and started picking them up and putting them back on the shelf, and said to her, "Honey, you can't lay on the floor in here. If you are tired, you have to go back to your camper." She stopped her little fit and sat up, looked at me like I was the crazy one. Then she got up and went outside. Oh, I just LOVE working at the campground.

Making Meals Ahead

Jim and I are working the evening shift at our job this season. This means that on Sunday, Monday, and Thursday, we get off at eight o'clock. On Friday and Saturday we don't get off until ten o'clock, and that will change soon to eleven o'clock. It also means that we are not eating the way we should, mostly because I don't feel like cooking anything when I get off work so late. This is made even harder since I am a diabetic and also recently changed to a gluten free diet.

Today I took a couple of hours to do some things in the kitchen so that we can have a light meal when we get home, or that we can grab on the run when we get a slow minute on the job.

First, I cooked three days worth of meats, packed them in plastic containers, and put them in the fridge. I made our favorite "Chicken and Salsa", then just cooked some ground beef and some italian sausage. Making "Chicken and Salsa" is easy. You just skin your chicken pieces, brown them in some olive oil, add a jar of your favorite salsa, cover, and simmer for about 25 minutes. Served over rice, it is a delicious and filling meal. It is really quick to make, but even this is too much to attempt when you don't get off work til ten o'clock. It keeps well in the fridge, then just microwave for a couple of minutes at meal time.

Next, I cooked up a batch of rice. I have found that when I store cooked rice in a ziplock bag in the refrigerator, it keeps well and heats up fast. I made enough rice to last four or five days. I can serve it with anything and it is gluten free.

After that, I chopped up tomatos, mushrooms, red onions, green onions, and lettuce. I made a big salad with some of it, then put the rest of each item in plastic containers in the refrigerator, so that we can make a salad quickly when we need one. I also boiled a dozen eggs, peeled them, and put them in a ziplock bag in the fridge. They'll be gone way before they have a chance to go bad.

Now that all that is done, I can make a quick batch of chili or ghoulash with the ground beef, and spaghetti with the italian sausage (gluten free noodles, of course). I can have a side salad with a meal, or I can make us a chef salad with boiled eggs, turkey or ham on top. It only took a little time to do this, and it will help us eat better this week.

I'm Working With Teens, Ya'll!

In my working career, the only time I have had the pleasure of working with teenagers is when I was one, it seems like a hundred years ago. Until now, that is. The job I have this summer at the campground is offically called Night Shift Supervisor. All that means is that I am the only adult working until closing time.

I have been on this job for a little over a month now. Until Friday night, all was going well. The young people who have been on the job with me have all been very mature and concientious about their work, and very pleasant to be around. But, as we all know, there is always that one person in every bunch who will try our patience, no matter what age they are. So, let me introduce my PITA for this season.

Let's call her, oh, Kelly, just for the sake of giving her a name. She is seventeen years old. She was hired to run the register at the candy counter, which we have in an attempt to keep the flood of sugar hungry kids away from the front desk during check-in time on Friday nights. This was her first week on the job here.

She is a friendly girl, but she probably told me sixty times how "cute" my accent is. I am a fifty four year old grandma from Georgia, working in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Yes, I do have a very accute southern accent, with a long drawl, which I can not help because I spent fifty years living in the south. But I do not like to be singled out for the way I sound. I find it rather embarassing when people point it out. And it could have possibly been the way she said what she said that offended me. And, it might possibly be because of the fact that this is the first time in my life that I have been north of the Mason-Dixon line, and in a place where the Union Army won a major battle in the Civil War. I kind of stand out here ANYWAY. It's not that I am trying to hide the fact that I am from the south, but I am not so sure I want it pointed out to everyone.

The first time Kelly made a comment about my accent, I very graciously thanked her, and told her I liked HER accent, too. The second time, I told her, "Oh, honey, I don't have an accent--YOU do." Which usually works with other people. Usually, other people get it when I say that, but this girl kept up with the remarks about my accent all night long. Every time I had a customer at the front desk and had to speak to them in the course of the transaction, she would say something about the way I sound when I talk. It was very distracting, because I had to go through all the baloney about the southern thing with every person who came in that night. After a while, I just ignored her, but it did not stop her from doing it.

I am trying to think of a nice and proper response to give this young lady next week when she comes to work and starts this up again. I personally think it is rude to point out peoples differences, even if it is such an obvious one such as my dripping sugar accent, maybe especially if it is. I have tried to NOT sound the way I sound, but why should I have to? And, if I were Kelly, and my Night Shift Supervisor had asked me very kindly several times to knock it off, I would have.