Detours

Can't say as I planned on my day ending up this way, but to a certain degree it has become expected, and I guess part of it is my own fault anyway.



As I said a few blogs back, I have been promoted at work. What that means is that I have taken on more responsibilities obviously, but it also means that it is pretty much a common occurrence that in any given pay period (two weeks), it is not uncommon for me to rack up in the ball park of 100-110 hours. So when I started in to Saturday with less than 40 hours, this week was almost like a vacation for me.


The thing about Saturday is that, because I am just basically doing a grocery order and nothing else, I do not really have to be in the store at any scheduled time, technically the grocery order doesn't even have to be sent in until Sunday at 1pm, but if I want a day off out of the week it is just easier to do it on Saturday and then take Sunday off. So my Saturday schedule is to just get out of bed, putter around a bit, get ready and leave for work. I first stop by Gus Millers just to check the instant ticket machines for the lottery, we keep all of the tickets at Smithfield News downtown, so I will just stop in, see which tickets we need, take the money out of the machines (less the bill acceptors jam, because yes we do sell that much in tickets), I go to Smithfield News and do a grocery order, then stop by Gus Millers on the way home and load the replacement tickets into the lottery machines.


This particular Saturday I decided to get a late start, I didn't even leave my apartment until after 12pm, I was at Gus Millers by 12:30pm and we had sold out of 6 books of lottery tickets. The thing was, it turned out we had some of them at the store already, a lottery ticket order was placed on Thursday, so of the 6 different tickets that were missing, 4 of their replacements were already on site. All I had to was check the order in, activate and load the tickets I had there, then take the remaining books to Smithfield with me, as well as the lottery machine money and all would be good.


I get my work done at Gus Millers and proceed to hop a bus downtown. I make a relatively quick detour once I get downtown and pay my phone/internet bill (after all, can't blog without the internet) and head over to Smithfield News. When I get there the first thing I do is check their instant ticket machine as well, it was missing two tickets, so I added those to the machine, took the tickets off of my inventory list and added the new Gus Miller tickets to their inventory list as well. I also count the money out of the machines, between three instant ticket machines it was a little over $3000 dollars for a days worth of sales. I sorted the money, bundling groups of $100 of $1 and $5 dollar bills in case the store needed to buy change, since the banks will be closed on Monday (Columbus Day). Next I start to go through the invoices that were collected through the week, before the invoices can be turned over to our accountant, they need to be broken down by department for tax and profit purposes, because we work on different profit margins depending on the item sold, we make a higher percentage on say, groceries, than we do on cigarettes. Likewise some items are taxable (such as cigarettes) and some are not (groceries).


I finished the invoices, but before I could do anything else, about a month's worth of filing had to be done. Any time we pay a bill, the bill gets posted, that is, a check is written and it gets filed in a filing cabinet. When the check for that bill is cashed, those invoices paid with that check are then stapled to the check stub and are filed in a different filing cabinet. Usually that is a job that I would not be doing, but because Brian hadn't done it in better than a month, a large pile of paperwork had accumulated and had to be dealt with before my day could continue.


Next up was the price changes, which are usually sent to us on Thursday and are to take effect on Monday, I will do them on Saturday just so they are out of the way. Also every week we are sent sets of shelf tags to replace existing tags on the floor, sometimes they are for price changes as well, other times it is because our grocery provider has changed the item number on the product, usually due to a change in the size of packaging or what not. In any event, I had a couple of envelopes of shelf tags that I needed to check to see if they needed changed.


At 3pm we have a shift change at work, the morning people leave and the next shift comes on, well before all of them could get settled in, one of our new hires was having problems logging into the register. Apparently her employee information never transferred from the back office computer to the floor, so I had to reboot her register, delete her information from the office computer and reload it upstairs before she could begin to start ringing customers out on her register.


After all of this, I thought I was ready to begin doing my grocery order, but no. It seemed much of what I had ordered for the store on Friday had in fact not been put on the floor, but was just sent directly to the basement, so before I could begin ordering just what we needed I had to ascertain just what we actually had, pulling stuff upstairs that we had but weren't stocked and making note of the things that were in fact not in house. While I am doing this I see that no none was put on the schedule for Saturday to stock any of the coolers, so now I am pulling product from the basement to stock coolers as well, less we have nothing to sell.


So by the time I have everything done it is 9pm. Too late to drop off the lottery tickets at Gus Millers (they close at 9pm), so I figure I will just take them home with me and drop them off on Sunday morning when I go for my walk. I get up late again on Sunday, after all this is going to be an easy trip, and I get to Gus Miller's around 1:30 pm and I go to load the lottery machine and while yesterday they only needed two tickets refilled, when I got there today they had sold out of four more tickets, so now I needed 6 books of tickets. Oh well, I had no plans today anyway, it would only take maybe an hour to get downtown, grab more tickets from our other store and bring them back here to reload the machine. Except as I was there, Kat asked me if I could do her a favor. She needed someone to cover part of her shift, without going into details it would be safe to say that her and I could have had a competition for who was in the most fucked up relationship but I am no longer in the running for that particular title (sorry Kat), and while she had called a couple of people no one had replied yet to say if they could help her out. A couple of months ago it would have been a coin flip if I would have helped, but I am management now, I go where I am needed, not where I want to go, so I said I was going to get the tickets and then come back, if nobody returns your calls or can't do it, I will cover the rest of your shift. Because I am writing about it, you can guess how things turned out, I ended up working until 7pm, and once again I find myself on pace for another 100+ hour pay period.


The day wasn't a complete loss however, I managed to finish the day with a nice phone call from my mom. Her and I haven't talked in probably a couple of months, and every time I think I will have time to call her, something else pops onto my plate instead. It was a good chat, we go to catch up on all of the things that had been going on in our respective corners of the world. I should warn you though, she did ask for my Christmas list, which means I will have to post this years edition to the blog in the very near future. Hmm, what could I want this year? Let me think about that.


Anyway, it is late, I should give this entry a quick nice over and call it a night, I still have a couple of things to do for work in the morning. The more I get done now, the less I have to do in the morning.


Nite everyone.