Multiply 365 Day 147 - The unscheduled blog giveaway

There is talk of 90+ degree temps tomorrow. Of course that talk comes from weather people, and we all know how well they can be trusted. But I am thinking that I may have to bust out ye olde trusty camera just the same. It has been a few weeks since I had it out, and I would rather be ouitside if it is going to be that nice, rather than cooped up in the friendly confines of my apartment. Maybe I will make it a two fer, and bust out the bike as well, but honestly I am pretty tired of pedaling, 5 days of riding into work this past week and now I really don't want to get on the bike because it reminds me of work.

As I look I see that I did get a little bit of sun today, nothing great, but you can tell where the sleeves of my t shirt ended. Of course that could just be dirt as well, since I was a sweaty, grimy mess when I came home from work today. Not that it was a bad day, it was just a President of Mexico day, Manual Labor.

Ed wanted to get a smaller cooler put into Universal News, something to replace the Red Bull cooler, since we have given them the boot. Not that we have kicked out their product, just their placement in the store. This goes back to something I have talked about in the blog previously, that many of our vendors pay for space inside our location. Red Bull was one such vendor. For the sum of $600 per year, they had Red Bull coolers in all three of our locations, packed with their products (which sucks if you ask me, but other people like it). So the other day the sales rep comes in and Ed asks about the check for the coming year to retain the space they currently have. The rep says that Red Bull no longer pays to be in locations, so Ed says fine, pack up your cooler and get it out of my store, I will find someone else who will pay for that space. And it didn't take long, within an hour both Pepsi and Coke were there, making Ed offers and counter offers for the spot where the Red Bull cooler was located. Eventually Ed gave the spot to Pepsi (though for less money but more perks like extra Kennywood tickets), but by removing the Red Bull cooler at Universal News as well, that created a spot on the floor and Ed wanted to put one of his own coolers there, so enter my Saturday. Originally Ed wanted me to lug a cooler down the street from our store to Universal, but I make the foolish mistake of saying I thought we already had one in the stockroom above Universal. So part of my Saturday task was to fetch that cooler and set it up at Universal.

Saturday started off okay, I had asked Sammy on Friday if he wanted to come in Saturday, he didn't have to, usually the only thing he has been doing on Saturday is learning from Belinda how to do a dairy order, and with her busy with issues involving her son and the police and jail and SWAT teams and lawyers and what not, suffice it to say, she wasn't working today. So Sammy wasn't going to learn anything about doing a dairy order, but I suggested if he wanted to come in, I could find some things for him to do, since I had stuff to do at our other store. Besides, I had promised to take him to breakfast before the whole bullshit that occurred this week, so while I have no future plans of doing anything with fellow employees outside of work, I am not going to back out on a promise I had made prior either. So, bright and early I am on the bike, pedaling into downtown to meet up with him (he also biked in, I am a bad role model that way), we met up at our usual spot and then pedaled the 15 or so blocks over to Deluca's, where I got the country chicken w/sausage gravy, eggs, homefries and biscuits and he got another of my favorites, the cheeseburger omelet.

After breakfast we pedaled back into town to start work. Originally I had planned on having him look and see if anything needed stocked, since Ed had told Curtis to switch from a morning shift to an evening one for Saturday, meaning there would be no one around to even look at the coolers for 16 hours, but when we showed up there was Curtis, apparently oblivious to what Ed had asked him just the day before. I said nothing, I will leave Ed deal with that this week if he chooses to do so, instead I decided to let Sammy do our ordering for the floor at Smithfield, while I would head over to Universal and do an order for them, look upstairs for the cooler I thought was there and rid them of some severely out of date product I knew they had and just never found the common sense to rid themselves of. The thing is, most (but not all) vendors will take back product that is out of date, provided it is reasonably so. At that point they just assume that their rep had over ordered, so they write up a credit for it and take it away. But if the product is too old, then they assume that it was never properly rotated, or was completely forgotten about by the store. It is kind of like redeeming a winning lottery ticket, you have x amount of time to claim your credit then the offer goes away. Well, we had plenty of lottery tickets down there that were no longer valid. I wanted rid of them, because if I didn't do it no one would.

So I set up Sammy to start our order, grabbed a dolly and head down to Universal. I open up the store (I have the keys and the alarm code, so maybe I am a manager) and set about going upstairs to see if we have a cooler. Sure enough, packed away way in the back is a 3' cooler. But before I can get it out of there I have to remove a bunch of shit that no one bothered to get rid of. Lots of empty card board boxes and what not that should have went out with the trash many moons ago was instead strewn about the place, apparently waiting for someone like me to pick up. And people wonder why part of my training for new employees involves having them remember a simple adage. "Expect nothing and you will never be disappointed." If I had expected people to do their jobs, then there would have been a world of disappointment for me, instead there was none. I just gathered up the trash and put it out with the other trash that hadn't been picked up yet. Then I gathered up the empty soda racks and tried to get them put away in a semi organized fashion. Finally I was able to navigate the cooler to a point where I could get it to the stairwell to be brought downstairs. I grabbed a dolly, slid it under the cooler and gently nudged it toward the edge of the steps. I gently lowered it down the first step when I realized that I am lucky I carry some extra fat on me, because my weight was pretty much the only thing anchoring the cooler and dolly from crashing down the steps into a giant heap of a mess below. And because of my place behind the cooler holding up the dolly, I couldn't realistically change my ill thought out plan of getting this thing out of the stock room, instead I literally had to navigate the entire flight of steps by dropping down a step at a time and hanging on for dear life.

Somehow my plan worked and I managed to get the cooler downstairs without dropping it or the dolly (or both) and got it situated in the store, where John now was. Apparently he had come down to pick up some paperwork. Had I known he was going to be there I could have used the assist, but que sera, que sera. I get the cooler into the store, put it in its rightful place on the floor (I left the cleaning of it to the people who actually work there, so I doubt it will get done, expectations and all that jazz), went and threw together a quickie order for them and then ended up pulling 16 cases of severely out of date product out of the stock room, some stuff was better than two years out of date and brought it up to our store to be dispatched of. Included in it was about two cases of Coke product, which was fine with me, more free Coke caps to add to my rewards account. I am starting to get a decent amount in there again (over 800 pts right now), so I might have to do a blog giveaway at some point. I just haven't checked their catalog recently to see what prizes they have.

Okay, I just looked and I am thinking that I may just do that. Now just to figure out how I want to do the giveaway. Hmmm? Any suggestions? It doesn't help that my Pandora station is playing The Hollies right now and I am more focused on the song (The Air That I Breathe) than on a good giveaway idea.

Wait, I think I got it, just have to do a little research and I will be right back.

And I am back. The contest rules are simple, the contest is open to anyone who reads this blog (either here or on Facebook) and provided Coke will ship the prize to them (I don't know if Coke will ship to foreign contries or not so you may or may not be eligible). Once I have a winner I will announce it in the comments section of this blog and/or Facebook to say that we have a winner. The contest is a relatively simple one, the Multiply 365 project began on January 1st, my attempt at blogging at least one original thing a day, every day, for an entire year. And for the most part I have been very loyal in that regard. But there was a day that I missed, so technically this will end up being the 364 project, unless of course I miss another day somewhere along the line. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, give me the date I missed this year. The first person to come up with that specific date gets a mini web camera. How's that for the shizznit?

Well I didn't plan on doing that in this blog, my inner Santa Claus took over for a moment or three. But it is all good, I needed to change things up around here a little, it was getting stale. And to steal from the Greek philosopher Barack Obama, this is change I can believe in. So rather than me prattle on more about my day, how about I do some proofing and posting and let you go about the business of winning. What say you all? I say thee yea, yea, yea I say.