Poor Sick Me, Miserable Work, Cave Crawling, and Vitamin Water from a Swiss Lady

I am sick :( I've gotten a few colds in Maui, but this seems to be the worst. And what makes it even more unpleasant is that I'm totally alone--no mom, no roommates, no boyfriend. I revert to childhood when I'm sick--I want to be taken care of, I want to be needy and lounge in bed and whine about how unfair life is. Instead, I have to make my own tea, shop for my own soup and fruit, wash my own dishes, scare the rats away on my own.... Poor, poor me. Ha ha, pitying myself just makes me laugh. Which makes me cough, and that makes me ache.

One more thing I want to complain about: Borders/Seattle's Best. I am SO over that job. It has become a joke among the cafe workers that every time we come in, we get scolded for something, whether we actually did it or not, everything from not getting enough Borders Rewards sign-ups (btw, if you ever shop at Borders, let someone sign you up for a rewards card. It's free, you never have to use it, and you might save someone's job.), to offering a medium instead of a large, to taking more than two minutes to make a drink. And it's completely arbitrary: our supervisor yells at us for doing things she's told us do in the past, and some people bear more pressure than others, even if they're trying harder. It's not a joke at all, in reality. It's totally discouraging, and no one is happy, including the customers. We've had customers freak out on us for trying to use pressure-sales tactics on them ("If I wanted a muffin, I would have asked for one! Stop manipulating the situation!"), and ironically, if we had any say, we never would have used them in the first place. The whole experience has turned me completely off to sales, as well as working for huge businesses (though I'm sure small businesses feel even more pressure to increase sales). In just a few months, I've gone from taking pride in our store to hating it.

And one bit of funness (which I realize isn't a word): Before I got sick, I went on this awesome exploration with some people from Ke Aha (Josh and a few others I'd never hung out with before). We went to this huge evergreen forest upcountry and crawled around in a bunch of caves that someone built into the side of a cliff, including one long tunnel that got me thoroughly claustrophobic and scared. We also found some forts and pushed some MASSIVE boulders down steep hills (SO satisfying). I'm going to take Jeanie there when she gets back and take some pictures to post.

So I'm at the Lodge right now to get internet, and of COURSE there would be issues I have to deal with, when I'm least functional. This one lady locked herself out of her room and kind of freaked out about it (she's WEIRD) and another lady who's been traveling for two days from Switzerland had reservations through Rick, who's a terrible communicator and totally dropped the ball. She, at least, is really nice and bought me "defense" (C and zinc) vitamin water for letting her use my phone. So at least some random stranger is looking out for me ;)