White Christmas

Our story starts not tonight, even though tonight is New Years Eve and it would be a good place for reflections of the past and thoughts of the future, but rather a couple of weeks back, before the whole holiday season got underway in earnest. It was during that time that I had realized that the two holidays that would be approaching, Christmas and New Years Day, would both be occurring on a Wednesday, smack dab in the middle of a week. Normally that would mean very little to me, I have usually accrued enough time from work that taking a few days off would not affect my schedule or my wallet one way or the other. The time off would be paid time for me, and whatever I missed out on at work would be somewhat tempered by the fact that the holiday season is usually pretty slow for us, both Point Park University and The Art Institute of Pittsburgh are on break and with them goes a significant amount of our business.

But that was the past, since last Christmas I received a promotion at work and I did fritter away a week of my paid vacation on what can be called in retrospect a fool's errand, trying to have a relationship with someone who idea of commitment lasts about as long as you are in the room with them, before they go chasing after someone else for attention. As a result, what could have been 9 paid days off instead became 4 days off instead. The time wasn't the issue though, at least not in my eyes, instead it was the promotion. I don't know the thought processes that went through management before my promotion, but I am wary of leaving the store completely unattended for extensive blocks of time, I wasn't going to take a week off even during the holidays when I believe my presence was required. Last year I may have been one of the people with the most seniority at work, only 4 people have been there longer than me, but the promotion moved me from the tops of that totem pole to the lowest, the other managers would constitute 3 of the 4 people that have been there longer, so they should and do get precedence in my eyes when it comes to time off. Not that I had much say in it, Ed takes half of the year and spends it in Florida, so he was already gone, Brian owns the place and was taking his kids down to Florida to see their grandfather over their school break. That leaves just Dee and I, and followers of this blog know that Dee has been there longer, she was the one that hired me almost 5 years ago. So she of course gets first pick if she wants Christmas off, which she did. That leaves me, and with us being short staffed over the holiday (many of our employees also travel home for the holiday) it becomes my responsibility (at least I think so) to make sure everything runs smoothly.

I do not want the last paragraph to come off as a complaint, because it isn't. It is just my own rationale for why I ended up working 16 hours on Christmas day. Once I had determined that I would be working, it was easy to pick up a second shift that day, I was already going to be there, if someone else could go home because of that, all the better. Not that I was happy about working, I went into the day thinking that it would suck, it was the first Christmas that I can even remember where I didn't spend the holiday with my family, but the best way to describe my feelings going into it would be a sense of resignation, I didn't like it, but it had to be done. Like eating brussel sprouts. And I don't want any comments about how good brussel sprouts are, take that to somebody else's blog. Here they are all that is wrong with vegetables, got it? Good, I was telling a story here.

Funny thing about working Christmas though, Christmas actually happened. My day began early, I had to be in at 7am because we had two people scheduled to work the 7am-3pm shift, and while both of them have been with the company for a few years now, they work mostly at Gus Millers and because we just installed a new register system at Smithfield, neither one of them had actually worked on our cash registers, so my first 8 hour shift was going to be catching up on paperwork, training two people on the new registers, trying to get some items added into the new register system and just doing some routine stuff like making sure we always had coffee ready and hot dogs on the roller in the back.

I get up early enough, make it out the door and the day is just grey and cold and bleary. It would be one of those days that if you were a kid opening presents at home, you would have hated to get any presents that you had to play with outdoors, too cold to ride a bike, no snow to ride a sled and too sloppy and wet for anything like a football or a basketball. It looked more like a shitty November day than actually Christmas.

I get my coffee at the gas station, like I do every day, roll up to the bus stop and catch a bus into work. I get off the bus and downtown is pretty much a ghost town, nobody is down there. I always here these rumors about how there are all of these apartments and condos and people are moving downtown, yet I never see these people. Despite working at a business that is open 24/7/365, these “residents” are like Bigfoot, only a rumor to me. I am sure someone has some grainy photographs somewhere of someone entering an apartment building down there, but it will be too blurry to make out the features of who that person actually is.

I get into work, Bobby and Steve are already on the registers, so I just do a quick tutorial with them, they pick up on things pretty quick as it is and any issues can be dealt with easily enough, it isn't like we are swamped with customers on Christmas morning. I spend the first part of my day on the floor, taking care of the coffee bar and what not, then I run downstairs to the office and grab the keyboard off of the old back office computer and bring it upstairs and begin putting items into the system that either were missing from the old system or were lost when the old inventory was transferred into the new system.

This may be the too technical description of what happened, but I will give it a stab anyway. In our old register system you could pull items up either by scanning their bar code (UPC) or by inputting the 4 digit number assigned to them by the system (SKU). With the old system, an SKU could have more than one barcode. This was helpful if you were doing multiple price changes. For example, we carry maybe 20 varieties of Edy ice cream in the 1.5 qt container. The price on all of the flavors was the same, so I could either do twenty different SKUs, one for each variety, or I could do one SKU with 20 barcodes, then if a price change did occur I could just change the price on one SKU and get all 20 items at the same time rather than change the price on 20 different SKUs. This became a time saver for me, because when you get into things like cigarettes, most of our better selling brands (Marlboro, Newport, Camel, Pall Mall, Maverick, Wave) have at least 10 different varieties and you are guaranteed at least two price increases per year, usually in June and again in December.

Make sense so far? Good because now it gets more confusing. When we decided to switch register systems because of multiple issues that were occurring (price changes not crossing, system reporting errors, etc.) the tech peeps from the people who designed our old software and the people who sold us our new system and software put their heads together on how to pull the existing items from the old system on an excel spreadsheet and just install that information into the new system. A huge timesaver, because our old system have over 5000 entries in it and I had no desire to start from scratch reloading each and every item we sell. For the most part the transfer was a success, save for the SKU/UPC problem. Any SKU that had multiple bar codes in the old system kept the first barcode and dumped the rest, so between the items that never worked in the old system and going back and redoing the ones that were lost in the transfer from one register system to the next, I have jokingly called my latest project to get this new system up and functional as “The Winter of My Discontent”.

Okay, where was I? Yes, now I remember, I was working on the register system. Anyway, because it is so slow I find myself running outside and having a cigarette on more than one occasion. Okay, on quite a few occasions actually. Business is still pretty slow, though we do have people coming in the door, so we aren't completely dead, just not very busy.

It was during one of those forays outside that my day changed. I went out for a cigarette, must have been around 10 or 11 in the morning and when I get outside a lady is standing against the building, eating one of our deli sides of potato salad. It was one of those perspective moments for me, I mean as bad as my day may have been or could be, I am working on Christmas day but I have a roof over my head, my belly is usually full and if the worst thing that could happen to me is I have to put off spending time with my family for a few days, well it is better than spending Christmas day eating potato salad in the cold on a sidewalk. What can I say, maybe I am shallow and just lose focus that as bad as things may be for me, there are always going to be people that are in a far worse place than I am.

I don't want this to be construed the wrong way, but my attitude changed after seeing that. I wasn't happy with what I saw, but the miasma that I had been experiencing was lifted because a little light was shed on the “suffering” that I was enduring, which wasn't really suffering at all.

The rest of the first shift was uneventful, I managed to get a bunch of items added to the system, got caught up on my invoices for accounting, reset the lottery machine, kept us in coffee and hot dogs (which we sold quite a few of on Christmas, don't ask me, I don't know) and got ready for the second half of the day which was actually running a register for 8 hours. Technically I could have run the store, but the person I was with, Amanda, usually runs the store on weekdays on the 3pm-11pm shift, I saw no need to bump her from that spot, plus as long as she was running the store, it did free me up to do other things, like pull stock from the basement as needed, put out the trash and recycling, and just doing some more manual labor like tasks. Another of my quirks as a manager, I will not ask the employees to do anything that they haven't seen me do myself at some point, so when I can I still catch trucks, run register, take out trash, clean and restock things. I would like to think it is leading by example, don't know if it actually rubs off on anyone, but it is just who I am I guess.

Around 9pm I started to feel it. My attitude hadn't changed, I was still pleasant with everyone, usually if customers were close to the amount of money they needed, I just covered the remainder myself rather than have them did through their purses or pockets. I violated our credit card minimum for purchases for people ($10) and let people pay with credit regardless of amount, and payed for a couple of customers orders out of my own pocket, complete with a Merry Christmas afterward. But 14 hours on your feet, regardless of what day it is, can be tiring nonetheless, so I was getting to that point where I was just about out of my first and second wind, relying on the merits of caffeine and nicotine to keep me functional.

10:30pm and a guy comes into the store, he's wearing a security guard uniform so he probably drew the short straw at his job, being stuck working security at one of the office buildings downtown when obviously there would be no one coming or going from any buildings downtown, let alone at 10:30pm on Christmas night. But that wasn't what struck me, what struck me was that when he came in he had snow on his jacket. Yes, at some point it started snowing on Christmas. Of course that meant I had to go outside and throw salt on the sidewalk around the store, lest anyone slip and fall and we get sued. At least it gave me something to do during the last half hour of my shift.

Finally 11pm rolls around and my 16 hour day ends, I go down to the office, grab my laptop and backpack, make sure I have all of my goodies, grab a couple of things to eat from the store and head home. I walk back to the bus stop and catch a bus back to Oakland, all the while the snow continues to fall, the roads are now starting to be covered in snow, and my bus makes its way carefully and thankfully uneventfully to my destination.

I get off the bus, and the cool thing about Oakland during the holidays is that all of the students leave and go home, so for that brief amount of time it is almost peaceful here. No college keg parties, no people yelling in their yards or on their porches, no loud music blaring. Instead for a change it was just me, walking down the middle of my street, foregoing the sidewalk entirely, just watching the snow fall. In those three blocks between the bus stop and my apartment it was Christmas, not in the traditional sense of exchanging gifts and big family gatherings, but in the sense that it allowed for quiet reflection and appreciation of everything thing I have and everyone I love. That moment might have been the best present I got this year.