This paint by numbers life is fucking with my head

Big Boss has taken to telling me to "Smile!" every time he sees me at work, whilst gesticulating and pulling a face in the manner of a childless uncle attempting to get a toddler to look happy in a birthday photo. It's almost enough to make me wish he was refusing to speak to me again. But I have to admit, I may well be walking around with a bit of a face on. When it comes to [cinema], I have of late, wherefore I know exactly, lost all my mirth. To be honest, I think this job is sending me loopy.

Case in point, at [cinema] whenever someone buys a ticket they get given a voucher which gets them an amount of money off the next time they come to see a film. When we are handed these vouchers we have to void them, tear off half of the customer's ticket and staple that to them. I must fold the vouchers a certain way and staple the ticket vertically on the left side. If by some appalling oversight I manage to do this the wrong way, I have been known to unpick the staple and do it again. And if someone offers to do my stapling for me while they have custody of the company stapler I refuse in no uncertain terms to let them. After all, they might do it wrong and I just couldn't live with that. See, loopy.

Worse is the ridiculous situation I've got myself into with the straws. If someone orders a fanta I can only give them a yellow or a red straw. With coke, coke zero, and diet coke, it can be a blue or a red straw. I prefer a red for coke and a blue for diet coke, coke zero is still a bit of an unknown quantity. Sprite is the easiest as it can have a blue, green, or yellow straw. Even more ludicrously, if a customer annoys me I give them the wrong colour straw for their drink, green for coke for example, as if that would affect their mental equilibrium in the same way it does mine. Fucking nuts.

I'm not entirely surprised that this job is sending me a few jelly sweets short of a kids' combo. Through the gossip mill I've found out that a couple of people on management consider me to have an attitude problem. Fair enough, I'm not a mindless retail drone and I am a bit (read very) mouthy. Plus when it comes to Big Boss, it's all a bit attitude problem/personality, tomayto/tomahto. However, despite appearances, I don't actually enjoy being hated and this has lead to me doing some things in the name of getting on at work that are more insane than my popcorn-addled brain could conjure on its own.

Last week the dreaded call came over the radio, "Usher on the radio, someone's had a very nasty accident in t'downstairs disabled toilet. Needs someone with a good gut to clear that up immediately". And what did I do? I volunteered to deal with it. To be fair, the other Guest Assistant turned white at the mere thought of it, and I do possess a strong stomach. Plus I'm hoping to work in social care and need to get used to dealing with this sort of shit. So, yes, shit. I found myself cleaning up a sizeable amount of it armed only with a sick kit. I'll leave that to your imaginations. What never ceases to amaze me about [cinema], though, is that there is always something worse. As Nice Manager thanked me he told me about the time he opened the cinema in the morning to find that the drains had backed up and flooded the entirety of the bottom floor with liquid human waste. Head office helpfully had him wading about in it trying to stem the flow with blue roll.

The final indignity was thrust upon me at the weekend in the form of a woolly hat and some sun glasses. "Just put your Hancock stuff on", said Team Leader, "it's in the office". There sat Big Boss surrounded by the instruments of my humiliation and there was no way I could refuse. I'm loathe to admit that I've almost got used to my baseball cap but this was something else. The combination of an oversized beanie hat and sunglasses on my round head left me looking like someone whose carer had let them get dressed by themselves for the first time. Add to this that it was a very warm day and our tills are directly in front of the hotdog grill and you have an itchy, hot and definitely cruel and unusual punishment. Give me excrement but not this.

So I'm handing in my notice. I have well and truly had enough and need to leave before I find myself up to my neck in raw sewage. Literally and metaphorically.