Fred Flintstone day

That's how one of my employees described it, and that fits so many of my days perfectly. I was busy all day, but feel like I accomplished so little. Like I was running in place all day. Suddenly it's March, and our busy season is upon me. One of my employees is out of town for a family emergency, one is scheduled for surgery later this month and will be out for 5 weeks, and another went into the hospital suddenly this weekend. And so, once again, I am short staffed as we go into our busiest 10 weeks of the year. This happened last year, too: half of my guides had sudden illnesses, or deaths in the family, or other emergencies that kept them out of work. And then i'm stuck redoing and redoing the schedule and doing tours myself and basically doing 3 or 4 jobs at a time. And then my boss will come in and suddenly take away some of the things I'm doing and delegate them on my behalf. I compared it the other day to a juggling act. I'm juggling 3 or 4 balls, doing fine, then some throws in another 3 balls for me to juggle. Then just as I get the gang of it and am getting comfortable with my new act, someone comes in and takes away 2 of the balls and messes me all up again. It gets a little frustrating.

Well, now that I got all that bitching out of my system, let me end with an amusing little story from today. We sell these little wooden pop guns in our store. They are both incredibly obnoxious and incredibly popular. This afternoon we had a group shop and as usual, many kids bought pop guns, opened them, and popped them like crazy both inside and outside the store. Well, apparently someone aimed one at a passing car with a paranoid driver, and the driver called the police. So a cop came to check out what kind of guns we sell and to give us a friendly warning about kids "shooting" at innocent cars. Those corks can be pretty dangerous, after all. Especially when they're attached to the gun with a string.