Guess what? I'm not drunk. That is a good thing. I am not necessarily all pleasant and things, but I am getting there. In order to get there though it took some of me being a dick, a process I am not sure I am completely through with.
Let us revisit history, shall we? I mentioned that I expected to get an ass reaming at work on Monday and that is what happened. The way events unfolded were like this. A few weeks ago, Fred, our 7 Up rep, asked us if we would be interested in getting a free floor cooler for the store. While the idea seemed okay to me, that is a decision that I can not make arbitrarily, so I went to Brian and asked him. I also asked Jon regarding our other two stores, as they were willing to offer a cooler for each location. Brian said yes, but issues of space kept us from getting any more than one cooler. Shortly after this discussion, Ed makes it back from Florida, the cooler hasn't shown up yet, but other than that all things are going swimmingly. As luck would have it, the cooler showed up last Thurdsay morning, shortly after Ed had left Pittsburgh to go to a show being done in West Virginia by our grocery vendor, a two day event, so Ed wouldn't be coming back until Saturday. I temporarily placed the cooler in our first aisle, the one row in the store where we could put it and still have people get by, though I realized that it probably wasn't going to be a permanent placement. Well Ed comes back on Saturday and by Saturday night he is in the store and he sees the cooler and goes ballistic. I get a phone from Dee at 10pm Saturday night telling me Ed is upset and wondering who authorized this. It basically laid the groundwork for what I knew would be an ever so shitty Monday morning. I was not wrong in that assessment.
When Ed first came in the door he says that he wants to see me. So off to the office we go. I am again asked who authorized getting the cooler, who decided where to put it, etc. I said that I had cleared getting the cooler with Brian, and that if need be I could move the cooler, that wasn't an issue. Then I get told that all decisions have to go through Ed, he doesn't care if Brian owns the store, he doesn't want anything done without his approval. Fine, I screwed up. I think we are done. That was until later in the day.
Ed is going through the store and he looks in the front Pepsi cooler and sees two rows of Seattle's Best Coffee, one vanilla and one mocha. Here we go again. I get quizzed on who's product it is (it is Pepsi's, I would not be stupid enough to put someone else's product in the Pepsi cooler), what are we paying for it (we are paying $1.01 a can, retailing at $1.79 thereby hitting Ed's margin on beverages and Pepsi kicked in a bunch of $1 off coupons, so worst case scenario, even if it doesn't move Ed could still redeem the coupons for cash, plus return the unused product for credit, a literal no risk proposition). Didn't matter, I got the lecture on how any new product that comes in from here on out has to be approved by Ed. Fine, you have now officially pissed me off. It isn't like I was out there just buying stuff for the sake of buying stuff, pretty much anything I did was with the store's interest in mind, what are we getting out of the deal. In some cases it was using getting literally cases of free product, in others it was like the coffee fiasco, I had our back covered where we couldn't lose money. Yet I am being treated like I don't know what the fuck I am doing.
So I am getting ready to leave the store yesterday and I decide I will stop by the lottery machine and buy a couple of tickets. I am pissed off enough that I go for the $20 ones and the second one hits for $200. Great I think, drinking money. And that is exactly what I did. What made it even better was Ed usually buys those very same tickets, in fact Saturday after throwing his fit in the store, he bought some of those very same tickets and won nothing, and before he could buy more the machine ran out of them, it wasn't restocked until Monday morning. Otherwise Ed probably would have bought it.
I end up tying on a rather good bender, as evidenced by my lack of an entry yesterday, but that wasn't the end of it for me, not by a long shot. I was and still am pissed. So there was plenty of snark when I went to place the grocery order today and I said "Let's see how bad I can fuck this up" and telling some of the managers that I wanted nothing to do with the vendors anymore, besides putting in their basic order. Any meetings involving new products or ideas for sales or anything, I wanted nothing to do with, Ed can deal with it all. Many of those very same managers were on eggshells around me, Brian even came in and told me not to take it personally, I don't know if that is because they truly believe Ed was a little over the top with me, or the fact that if they lose me, then they lose probably the only person who can actually operate their register system properly. I am sort of indispensable in that regard. The agent form Ultimate Retailer has gone to talking to me almost exclusively as far as fixing previous screwups that others did. He just emailed me the other day a three page list of things that were done wrong that I am the only guy who can fix, unless they wish to pay the Ultimate Retailer people themselves to do those fixes. Not that they couldn't, but it would be a much longer process because they don't know our inventory like I do, or how the fuck ups originally happened so that the proper back tracking could be done to undo them.
While everyone is on the proverbial eggshells around me at work, upon leaving the store today I went ahead and bought another one of those tickets that Ed likes so much, another $20 ticket and it hit for $50 which meant I went out after work again today, but not to get drunk this time. Rather I have been needing a new pair of shoes because while I love my mom, the shoes she got me for Christmas really suck. I am sure she got them at WalMart or something, and I tend to blow through cheap shoes pretty quickly, but these were espcially bad. Not because they came apart, but because whenever I wore them after about 5 minutes it felt like every time I took a step someone was driving a nail right into the bottom of my foot. It was a pain that I have been tolerating for about two months now but finally I had enough and made the trip to DSW to get a new pair of shoes. After walking around the store for a bit, checking out some shoes here and there and everywhere, I settled on a pair of Avias for about $40, throw in some new socks and there went the $50.
This was when I realized that retail clerks don't pay attention to the weather. Now I am not a big paper or plastic kind of guy, I will take whatever is available. I don't lie awake at night wonder if a tree screams when it falls in the forest, or if by getting a plastic bag I may someday trap Flipper in an ocean full of nonbiodegradable garbage. But one would think that when it is pouring rain outside that the clerk wouldn't be handing out paper bags, unless they were requested. See, news flash bulletin, they don't hold up well when they are wet. I know, you're shocked. Hell I was shocked when I got out of the store, I just expected the bag to come with a built in umbrella to fend off the elements, but it didn't. And since I had to wait around for a bus I had plenty of time to test that hypothesis.
The opnly plus to all of this was that I decided I would pick up a couple more scratch off tickets while I waited. Since I didn't know how long it would take for the bus to arrive, I spent $20 but spread it out over 8 tickets, 4 $2 and 4 $3 tickets. Yeah, I won again, another $106 total. So I guess if I get fired from my job I can always eke out a living with lottery tickets.
Okay, I have rambled on enough for one night. Maybe this makes up for yesterday's drunken babbling. But I doubt it.
No comments:
Post a Comment