Blogger 365 Day 19 - 48 hours in America

So, it has been a busy 48 hours or so, now I am just relaxing at IHOP having a late breakfast, I say late because it is almost 2:30 in the afternoon. I might have gotten here earlier, or maybe even not at all had it not been for my own stupidity, but one I got myself up and moving this morning I figured I might as well using my gift card from Christmas and put something in ye olde gullet as it were.



I know I all but practically bailed on the blog page yesterday, that was because of all  of the happenings of the last couple of days.  I say couple because everything happened in the last two days, days were I worked 13 and 12 hours respectively, but I supposed my problems began unknowingly on Tuesday.

I was doing whatever it is I do at work, I say whatever because I could be doing any of a number of things at any given time, when Sam, our Coke rep, stopped by with another person from Coke in tow.  Sam is a cute, thin, blonde female, maybe 5'10 or 5'11" and is one of those women that if I were 20 years younger I would be happy to be rejected by.  But I do have a cardinal rule when it comes to womenfolk, if they are young enough to be my daughter then they are off limits, regardless of how attractive they may be.  It is a good rule to have, because even if someone that young were interested in me, then chances are they would have daddy issues or some such nonsense, and I have reached my threshold in dealing with psychological issues with women.

As luck would have it, it turned out Sam brought with her Ron, who was going to be our new Coke rep, she was just going along the route with him, showing him the ropes.  I figured it would be best if I handled this order, because Sammy, who had taken over dealing with some of the reps when I was promoted, really hasn't grasped everything yet, as evidenced by the fact the last time he did a Coke order it ended up being over $5000.  Now a typical order from Coke on a very good week may get to one grand, so I have no idea just what he was thinking when he did that, other than as hard as he is trying, he just has no real clue on how to do the job I vacated, no matter how much advice and guidance I try to give him.  Plus with business being slow over the holidays, that much money spent on a beverage order did very little to appease Brian, who ultimately will be the one who pays for it.

So I decide to walk them through the basement, seeing what things we were actually out of, because as well as being overly large, our last order was also overly inaccurate, so I have no 12 packs of cans to sell, yet I have 12 cases of 20 oz Sprite bottles, which will take months to get rid of, if we even can before they go out of date.  I just order the things we are missing in the stockroom, including a product called Smartwater.  Why it is called that, I have no idea, anyone who would pay $1.79 for a bottle of water doesn't strike me as smart, but I just work there.  It comes in three sizes, a 20 oz bottle, a 1 liter bottle and a 700 ml sports cap bottle.  Brian and Dee will both sometimes take a case of the 20 oz bottles home, so I ordered 4 cases of those and two each of the other two sizes.

We now fast forward to Friday morning, I was gathering paperwork at our other store and making my way downtown, the Coke delivery arrives and Sammy starts checking it in.  Except it was wrong, instead of the two cases of sports cap bottles I ordered, there were 28 of them.  And the Monster energy drink, which is our most popular line of energy drinks and which we were completely out of, we got none and never once did any of this ring a bell as they were unloading the truck.  So now on top of my normal Friday workload I get to track down the Coke rep and tell him that he fucked up and this shit better find its way back to Coke, because I am not paying for it.

I already had a project on my agenda Friday, more work was being done on the register system, in this case we were going to be installing the hardware and software to allow for credit and debit cards to be swiped right at the terminal, rather than through a couple of separate units we have on the counter.  I just didn't know when this process was going to begin.  Just when I thought that we were going to be experiencing another delay, Art comes in a little after 2pm, mind you I usually leave and go back to Gus Millers at 3:30 or so.  Till we got finished with everything it ended up being somewhere around a 6 hour project.  While doing this, another vendor came in around 4pm, he had a suns cooler we signed up for, and that too needed to be installed.  I ended up leaving work around 9:30 at night after starting my day at 8:30 am.  I capped off the day by drinking, something I am doing more frequently the more shit that seems to get piled on my plate.  I know it isn't a healthy response, so no need to lecture me in that regard, just stating that it is happening, nothing more.  It is not like I am walking around in an inebriated state, I have only had one bottle out of the case of beer I got for Christmas.

Saturday I wake up, not too early and not too late, rather it was just the motivation that was lacking.  I hopped on the laptop and went over to Youtube and watched some old clips of The West Wing, which I imagine helped influence the title of this entry somewhat.  I really miss smartly written television, where characters were developed and a smart script was written, as opposed to what we are stuck with today, where anyone with a disorder or an occupation is one documentary camera away from having a TV show.  One of the fallacies that gets peddled, that more channels means more good quality shows.  More channels just means more companies competing for the same size audience, so programming is done as cheaply as possible.  Anyway, I am getting sidetracked here, and probably a little too soap boxy as well.

I leave my place and get to Gus Millers at 11:30 am.  As I am arriving, I see a truck getting ready to leave with one of our old coolers on it.  Our Arizona cooler stopped working, it would no longer keep anything cold, when we called them to have it fixed it turned out that the cooler was one we owned and was not owned by the vendor, so we could either pay to have it fixed or ask the vendor to supply a new one, since theirs was the only product in it anyway.  Turns out the delivered the cooler Saturday morning.  Okay, fine, as long as it is installed it doesn't phase me in any way, or so I thought.  I go in the store, I have three books of lottery tickets to load into the machines, another lottery ticket order that needs checked in, and I need to empty the machines of money, in case we need extra 5s and 1s this weekend.   I go to get started and the store has a few customers in it, one employee is ringing customers out, the other is reloading the new cooler that they unloaded from the old one.   So I decide to help out, I hop on the second register and take a customer, the first time I try to scan an item the entire register crashes.  Turns out when they brought the new cooler in, they moved the counter and proceeded to damage the internet and network connections in some way, killing not just one register, but the back office computer and the laptop computer we use for phone card sales as well.  I put in a service call, but being the weekend I doubt we will see anyone until Monday at least.

I did get my work there done eventually, then it was downtown to do my ordering and catch up on invoices and the like.  I get there, do the lottery machine and sell the store back a couple of hundred dollars in 1s, then start my invoices.  More problems, Pepsi once again decided to over bill us on product, so now I have to email Pepsi about the problem (which occurred on three different invoices), then before I can break the invoices down by category to be turned into accounting, I have to figure out how much we were over billed by and take that amount off of what we actually owe.  I then had to fax Ed the price changes I got from 7Up on Friday.  Ideally I would like to just email him this information, but he can't open an email.  When I tried faxing him the numbers from the sheet 7Up gave us, it came out too dark on his fax machine, so he couldn't read those either.  I was left with the task of going through all of the 7 Up products we carry, figuring out the new cost per unit, then retyping that list and faxing the new list I created down to Ed, then wait for his return fax with the new prices he wanted to charge.

The Pepsi order we received on Friday showed up late, around 2 pm or so and of course that wasn't put away either, instead it was sitting right at the bottom of the drop chute we use to put stuff in the basement from street level.  Of course we now have those extra 26 cases of Smartwater that have to go out Monday, as well as 40 cases of cigarette tubes that Ed mistakenly ordered, so the chute can't be blocked, meaning I got to do someone else's job.  Yay me!  As I am putting the Pepsi order away, I see that some products are just thrown in two and three different spots in the basement, so now I get to spend time putting other stuff away properly.   It would seem my promotion just means other shit doesn't get done right, imagine that.  Of course I still have my grocery order to do on top of all of this, so by the time I actually get done with all of this work, it has turned into another 12 day for me.  By the time I got home, all I wanted to do was eat and relax, secure in the knowledge that I wasn't going in on Sunday.

I unpacked my bag and set up my laptop and then I realized I left the mouse for my laptop on my desk at work, so I ended up making another trip in today.  Of course when I got there I couldn't just get my stuff and go, there was a sign on the cappuccino machine on the back counter that said "Out of Order".  And why was it out of order?  Because apparently nobody cleans it.  One of the dispensers was so clogged with dried up mix that liquid couldn't pass through it.  Now mind you, the weather is not warm here, so of course the smart thing for us to do is shut off a machine that sells hot beverages rather than clean it.  Just saying.

While I was there I also did a couple of other things, pulled kielbasa for the hot dog roller, grab more sexual enhancement pills from the office and did and answered some questions the crew had on the new credit card terminals.

All of that brings us to now, and now I am home, resting because if this week is anything like the last one, it will be no fun whatsoever.