Mattress Man & Wal Mart Woes

Yesterday was Layne's first big day at his new job as a materials planner for Select Comfort! Everyone knows what the first day at a new job is like. You get to bond with the HR person over W2's and benefits forms and get your security badges etc. Then she ships you off to the IT guy for a phone number and an email address. After that its off to the races starting with a tour of the facility (which you'll surely get lost in more than once), meeting all the people you're going to be working with (whose names you can't possible remember) and getting a crash course in systems and processes along the way (which take some people YEARS to master). Lets just say it, the first day at a new job (probably more like month depending on the field) is just plain exhausting! You have to concentrate a lot harder to remember and absorb things, and of course, you want to make a good first impression, so there is a lot more pressure to be your best self and be on your A-game. What Select Comfort doesn't yet realize (to steal a phrase from Layne's sports banter) is that they just acquired an MVP for a late round draft pick and a bag of balls. I'm proud of my mattress man! Good luck getting adjusted to your new job.

Things at my job have been utterly frantic lately. We've been under some heavy duty grant deadlines over the past few weeks. Several animals were slated for surgery last week, which meant we had to have arrays ready to implant. The tricky thing about surgery is that you can't just postpone it if something isn't ready. Animals are prepped for months in advance of their implantation date and a whole team has to be assembled on the day of the surgery to ensure that the implant goes as planned and that the chip is alive inside the animal and can both stimulate and record data as well as transmit and receive information from an outside source. Of course, having an array ready for all this isn't as easy as it sounds, especially since nearly my entire team decided to take their 2 week vacations at the same time, leaving me with only one other person who is about as flaky as a Greek pastry. I worked some long days trying to get all the work done practically by myself.

So this little guy has been the source of all my stress at work over the past several weeks. This is the back side of the most recent version of the wireless electrode array with a wire wound power coil and chip. I took this picture under the optical microscope to show in a meeting so it's a close up, but this little guy is only about 1 square mm. I know it looks like a hot mess, but this little guy is fully functional and to the right people is probably worth about half what I make in a year.

I feel like ranting a little today so please indulge me. Layne went with me to Wal Mart to do the grocery shopping yesterday evening. I love it when Layne comes with me because we are like a well oiled machine. We get through the shopping in no time at all...and then comes the check out line. It's always bad, but can be made MUCH MUCH worse depending on who is in front of you. I consider myself a pretty tolerant person, but yesterday, the lady in front of us had Layne and I so worked up that I could've kicked a kitten through an electric fan. I'm sure you've all been in line behind "her" before. She had 2 carts, each cart had a child in it and a few groceries. I picked that line because she only had 15 or so items in each cart. The little girl's name was Princess (if you think that is just a nickname, think again), and I could be wrong, but the boy's name was either "PUT THAT DOWN!" or "STOP IT!" She was the only person ahead of us in line, but as Layne and I would come to find out during the solid HALF AN HOUR it took her to check out (no exaggeration for dramatic emphasis) we had chosen our line poorly, though I'm pretty sure time is irrelevant once you've entered the 7th circle of hell.
Now, I have a lot of sympathy and patience when I see a mom with kids in a store struggling to keep it together. In fact, I often offer help to such. But sympathy only comes when I see a woman (or man) who is actually TRYING. This lady was making no attempt at all to control her children and even less of an effort to "hustle". Quite the contrary actually, the boy was opening bags of candy and throwing the contents on the floor (which she didn't notice or pick up) and she was taking her sweet time loading her items onto the scanner (which she waited to do until she got up to the front). Once all the items did make it onto the scanner, she made things even more fun by buying the items in chunks. The first chunk was scanned, bagged, and paid for in cash, which of course she took her sweet time spreading on the counter and counting out. The next chunk was scanned, bagged and paid for with a check which of course she hadn't even begun to fill out, which needed to be accompanied by her ID which of course was lost somewhere in her handbag/diaperbag/trashcan/black hole. It wasn't until AFTER she had paid that she went back into the abyss for the 500 coupons she hunted down, retrieved and uncrumpled one-by-one from this same outter darkness of a purse. The third chunk was scanned, bagged and purchased using yet ANOTHER check!! HOLY CANNOLI LADY!! (Side note: I'm not aware of any bank that now lets you open a checking account without giving you a free debit card. Why do people refuse to use debit cards? Can someone explain that to me?) Of course this whole process is slowed down each time she looks up from her check writing to yell something at Princess or the boy child. By now we have been waiting 20 minutes and there are 50 people in line behind us. Does this woman ever look back and apologize for taking so much time? Nope. Does she try to speed things up at all? Nope. In fact, even once she finally had her 3rd receipt in hand and her groceries in the cart(s) she decided that instead of moving out of the way for the next person, that she would stay right there while she put her "cash back" neatly in her wallet, re-organized the unused coupons, entered the details of her transactions into the ledger of her checkbook, and opened some of the bagged food for her and her kids to munch on. All of this was done with her burly bare leg up on the bag wheel so the check out lady couldn't scan our groceries and put them in the bags because she couldn't turn the wheel!!! I guess I just don't understand certain things. It doesn't take a college education to have a grasp of common courtesy. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to make it through a grocery store checkout in under 10 minutes. Or does it? I'm pretty sure if she could have taken her 2 IQ points and rubbed them together to get a little fire going, she would have managed to realize that other people were WAITING!! If had had my own kids with me, I think I would have given up and gone home. Am I being too harsh?