Compromises

So my Thanksgiving gets even worse. Even though I do not work on Thursdays, have not ever worked for the restaurant on Thursdays, and Thanksgiving is in fact on a Thursday (prior planning on my part? Perhaps), I will be working this Thursday. And even though I agreed to come in and was offered the choice of a morning or evening shift and chose the morning shift, I have been scheduled for the evening. 2-10.

Retail managers have no souls.

Upon discovering that I had been scheduled to work in the afternoon, effectively killing any plans I had left for the holiday, I told the manager on duty that I had agreed to work in the morning and that I wouldn’t have agreed to work at all if it meant the afternoon shift. I do, after all, have a child at home. We have no family in the area. We made plans to have dinner with friends in the evening. My working a 2-10 shift meant that my son would basically be spending the holiday alone (since he is, after all, a teenage boy, and it is unlikely he will even get out of bed before noon) or with friends who he still doesn’t know very well.

The manager said he would talk to the scheduling manager and take care of it.

He didn’t.

And yesterday when I arrived at work, I found that our GM was “no longer with the company” (don’t know what’s behind that) and that the scheduling manager is now our GM. And our new GM told me that he already had too many people on for the morning, so he couldn’t fit me in, but that he really needed me for the afternoon. He offered to take the hit and let me have the day off completely, but he already gave me last Sunday off in exchange for working the holiday and since I did not work Sunday (my money day), I now have no real choice about it. I have to work the shift because I am still too poor to miss out on the potential cash.

I feel like a horrible parent, like I am abandoning my son. But it is only a month until Christmas. And the kid’s birthday is just a few days after that. I was planning to travel to Iowa for the holidays, which my son is pretty excited about. We stayed in Virginia last year, and he wasn’t very happy about it, even though he understood why we couldn’t go. I wasn’t very happy either, but I haven’t been with my family for the holidays for some time, so I am used to it. Regardless, I want to go this year. I haven’t spent any time with my mother in a while and I have a new nephew who I have never met. And I really want to spend a couple weeks playing cards and drinking with my sisters. But mostly, I don't want the kid to miss out on the holidays with his family again.

So it’s a trade-off. A crappy Thanksgiving for a good Christmas break. I hope the kid understands this. And doesn’t hold it against me until he’s forty.