Free Will Astrology: Virgo Horoscope for the week of June 9th, 2005

Virgo:: In early April, Star Wars devotees began camping out in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. That was where several Star Wars films had debuted, and the fans were sure it would host the May 19th opening of Revenge of the Sith. Soon, however, authoritative sources informed them that there were no plans for the movie to be shown at Grauman's. Refusing to believe it, they dug in for an extended vigil. As it turned out, they were deluded: Seven weeks later, the final installment in the long-running series opened at the ArcLight theater a mile away. Let their actions be a guide for what not to do this week, Virgo. Don't you dare sit and wait for a supposedly glorious event that is in fact never going to happen. Instead, turn your attention to a more modest success, which will occur only if you're not distracted by grandiose visions.

Oh dear. I don't want this to mean what I think may mean. Though I wouldn't say it's a 'grandiose vision,' so maybe I'm exempt.

My weekly public update post, as things have come to be recently. Life has been draining. Work is draining. There was drama today, and there's a major shakeup in the works.

I don't think I've quite described what I do. I work for Cory Holdings, which is a delivery service that runs accounts for large corporations like Circuit City and Best Buy, etc. The account I work with services the RoomStore, which means most of what we do is schedule and complete furniture delivery. It's certainly not glamourous, but it pays well. It's a job, not a career, and that's what I keep telling myself.

My first two weeks, I learned how to do almost everything that has to do with monetary issues-- how to bill for each driver's daily run, how to handle customer damage claims, how to correctly charge drivers for expenses like fuel, damages, or supplies that they buy through Cory. This week, I began to dispatch, which has been so much more hectic. I'm on a 2-way Nextel from 8am - 4:30pm every day after arriving at 6:30am to set up all of the paperwork. It gets extremely busy from 11am to about 2pm. At any given point in time, I could be fielding up to 4 phone calls-- directing drivers, giving customers call-aheads, doing confirmations for damages or not-at-home situations. It's giving my Virgoan talents a serious test, I'll say that. One has to be meticulously detail-oriented to do the job, because it's a lot about entering notes in various places to both cover the drivers and all billing queries. If a note is missing from the system, that's an automatic $50 (at least) that the company has just lost. I personally handle 8 drivers per day, and at an average of 12 stops per driver, that's a lot of potential notes, not to mention we tend to get cursed out by customers for errors made on the RoomStore's part.

We work FOR the RoomStore, but their dispatch manager is not our boss, per se. Cory handles independent contractors, and so we're a seperate entity altogether from RoomStore delivery service. Basically, the RoomStore doesn't have enough drivers to handle their deliveries, so they hired us to handle the rest. While we work with RoomStore dispatch, we don't work FOR them. We do a lot of their required paperwork as a courtesy so procedure is more uniform, but it's not necessarily our job to do so.

That said, RoomStore's dispatch manager (we'll call her K) does not understand that we are not her employees. Furthermore, K is adequate at her job as far as handling paperwork and technicalities goes, but she's absolutely miserable at people-management, which is the bulk of her job. Today, she decided to go off on Adrian, my stepfather and boss, over something small and easily resolvable. She spoke down to him as though she were his superior (which, even if she was, would have been completely unprofessional) in front of his whole team. Adrian, to his credit, kept a cool head while telling her in no uncertain terms that if she had a problem with anything Cory is handling, she is to go to her superior (who is essentially at the same management level as Adrian), and they'd handle it in a meeting. This is the professional thing to do, especially when K was proving herself to be a raving loony.

K, the idiot that she is, instead pulled Adrian's boss (our regional manager) out of a meeting in New Jersey to bemoan her grievance at being put in her place so succinctly. The boss, Kevin, told her that he was in an important meeting and this shit was not important enough to warrant his attention. Email it and he'd get to it later. So that's actively strike two against K.

So K's boss, Mike, who runs the RoomStore account at our facility, got involved. His solution is for his RoomStore dispatchers to take over all Cory dispatch effective on Tuesday. Let me just say how much of a stupid idea this is. The RoomStore employs 9 dispatchers at the moment. There would be more, but K has such horrible turnover rate due to her mouth that they're short-staffed as it is. They dispatch about 16 trucks every day. That's 9 dispatchers to 16 trucks.

Cory employs 3 dispatchers to our 16 trucks. We start every day with 2 dispatchers: 8 drivers per dispatcher. Lou comes in during our peak time to help us field any overflow calls, but other than that, he works on the docks, organizing the next day's deliveries.

I can tell you under no uncertain terms that the three of us can handle just as many drivers as the 9 of them with over double the accuracy. Our notes are in the system. Our drivers are in contact. RoomStore has to come to *us* constantly because they lose handwritten paperwork. If they can't file handwritten paperwork correctly, how in the hell are they supposed to manage 16 additional trucks in a complicated computer system?!

I give them a week. One week. Point blank, they can't do the job. They know it and we know it-- it's only K who doesn't seem to know it. One week, and they'll be begging us to take dispatch back over-- already, they've started to backpedal and call it a trial period. In the meantime, I'll do billing and learn how to run a dock. K will most likely be fired or relocated in the next 2 weeks for a) being unprofessional and inadequate at management, b) ignoring a chain of command, and c) being caught in a lie to her boss, Mike. Arrivaderci, darling. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Ugh. Early morning tomorrow, though. The president of the company, Joseph Cory, will be in tomorrow. I don't want to disappoint him-- mostly because his birth name is Joesph Corleone. Yes, those Corleones. Yes, I work for someone with er, strong family ties, as a strange side-note.

However? I am ecstatic to note that my bills are caught up and I will have over $400 in my bank account as of tomorrow afternoon for the first time in four years.

(I may cave and buy an air conditioner. It's 85 degrees in my bedroom. Even my damn snake is curled up in her waterbowl trying to cool off.)

Despite all of this hectic mess, I've been feeling more spiritually centered as of late. I'm starting to keep a handwritten spiritual journal as well as actively beginning work on a book of correspondences and my compendium. I plan to use the time I'm alone at Skyler's to perch on his roof and work on things-- it's so serene up there, shrouded in the greenery of trees and soothed by the chirping of wood thrushes. It's an ideal meditation spot-- high up and beautiful. I'll probably update here from time to time about my progress.



Also, congrats to my little brother, Matt, who graduated from high school yesterday evening. Everything went well, except that his principal can't count, and then she called them the Class of 'O4 (she was subsequently booed until she cut her speech short and sat down). I'd heard she was a moron, but damn. Even I didn't expect her to sound drunk.

Also? Mr. and Mrs. Smith this weekend! WOOOOO. 'Scuse me, I'll be in my bunk.

It's not quite DC PRIDE, which I'm so sad that I'll have to miss. Liquid Ladies Night at APEX, I yearn for you, but alas, I am to have no lesbionic joy this weekend save Angelina on the big screen and my right hand. Mostly, I'm sad to miss the parade. Baltimore Pride is next weekend, but I have to work on Saturday AND on Monday. Maybe Sunday, I'll make it to an event. Anna? You up for it?

PS-- Hyp-- hopefully I'll have time to get back to you tomorrow. I hope you're feeling better!