Multiply Redux

     Saturday afternoon and once again I find myself taking up a perch here at the Squirrel Cage.  I am not here so much for the food today as I am just because this is a comfortable place for me to go when I want to be at home, but yet out of my apartment.  And right now, I really don’t want to be in my apartment.   

     See, I know what will happen if I am in my apartment, I will plop my bag down and plug in my laptop and hop online, even if I don’t want to.  It is just ingrained in me at this point, that the first thing I do when I get home is get online.  Here that isn’t an issue, there is no WiFi at The Cage, so even if I wanted to be online, I really couldn’t be. 

      Not that I don’t have my laptop with me, I do.  As evidenced by the fact that I am here typing up a blog entry, but this is something that I will just type up in Microsoft Word and save and then publish later.  No need to be online for that, is there?

     I started this blog page a couple of months ago, in hopes that this page would be what my old page on Multiply had not been recently, a place to just relax and be me, without all of the nonsense that was permeating through Multiply.  But that isn’t becoming the case, much of what I was hoping to get away from is trickling in here in dribs and drabs and I fear it will not be long before I come to hate writing on this page almost as much as I came to loathe writing on the other one. 

     Excuse me if I seem a tad bit distracted, my lunch/dinner has already arrived, incredibly fast service by Cage standards, which are usually pretty good to begin with.  I did not even get to finish one cigarette before my plate of a sloppy joe and French fries had arrived.  Of course the iced tea was here within a couple of minutes of me sitting down, but that is just par for the course here.  And the sandwich is of the particularly sloppy variety, one where it will be far better to attack it with a knife and fork then to even attempt using my hands, unless of course I would like ground beef all over the keyboard. 

     On a typical Saturday I might come here simply to have a good lunch after a hard day at work, but I can’t say that was all that hard.   I know in a previous blog entry I had referred to myself as the purchasing manager for Smithfield News/Weiss Enterprises.  I guess while I am eating now I could take a few minutes and elaborate on that minimalist definition of my job. 

     Weiss Enterprises is a small chain of newsstand/convenience stores in Pittsburgh consisting of three stores, two in downtown Pittsburgh (Smithfield News, Universal News) and one in the Oakland section of town (Gus Miller’s).  My job consists of doing a large portion of the ordering for our two downtown locations, including all of our groceries, cigarettes, tobacco products and soda.  So in a given week, I place upwards of 12 orders, dealing with probably a half a dozen different vendors or more.  But that is not my whole job, not by a long shot.  I am also responsible for processing all invoices from all three locations, breaking them down my department before they head off to our accountant to be paid.  It would not be an understatement to say a couple million dollars in invoices cross my desk over the course of a year.   I am also responsible for making sure the register systems in both of our downtown stores are updated with any price changes that a result in increases in what we pay from our vendors.  Yes boys and girls, if we get charged more for an item, there is a very good chance that that increase is being passed on to you at the register.  I am also responsible for making sure that the coolers and shelves are stocked in the store I spend most of my time in (Smithfield News).  Plus there are numerous other duties that can be handed to me at a moment’s notice, anything from going out and searching for new vendors, or working on keeping costs down in all of the stores, to writing memos and letters for management in the office.  In short, I am their bitch.

     Not that there aren’t perks to the job.  The pay is okay, but there are plenty of freebies that make their way across my desk, anything from t shirts and hats, to bicycles and tickets to concerts and sporting events.  I try to dole those gifts out amongst the staff as fairly as I can, as long as the people that are receiving the perks are people that I know come in and actually work, which means some people are more likely to receive perks from me than others.  In just the last couple of months I was able to get an Ipod, concert tickets, and a waffle iron for different people that work for us.   Yes, I do get some of the perks as well, I managed to get tickets to two different Pittsburgh Pirate games this year, as well as Pittsburgh Penguin tickets last season.  And the pluses to the job far outweigh the minuses, even if it does mean that I work 6 day weeks most weeks.

     Sorry, took a break there, I can only hog a booth at The Cage for so long, not that they were awash in patrons, but I just feel guilty if I am doing nothing but sitting in a booth typing and drinking iced tea.  So I packed up my things and walked to the bus stop across the street and headed home.  Yes, I did say bus stop, being in a city and all, I use public transportation to get from Point A to Point B.  It has nothing to do with being environmentally conscious or anything like that, it is just cheaper.  And cheaper is always a good thing in my book.  It is why I opt not to have cable TV, most anything I would want to watch there I can just as easily watch online, with the bonus being I can watch it when I want to as opposed to when the TV  schedule says I can.

     Today was a pretty easy day by work standards, I just had to go in and do a grocery order for Monday, do 6 pages of price changes and process about a week’s worth of invoices.  Like I said, an easy day for me.  In fact, I even started working on a new project, one that hopefully will make things better in the long run, but until then it is just going to be a pain in my backside to get done.  Basically I am trying to get our register system to recognize all of the specials we are currently running.  And since we are not a large scale grocery store, where that stuff happens on a weekly occurrence, I have to do that all myself and create a key on the register for the cashiers to access them.  No one technically asked me to do this, it is just a project that I came up with on my own, because I don’t have enough work after all.

     Well, I am starting to be all whiny and stuff, that is usually a good point for me to stop writing, so stop I shall.  Laters.