Blogger 365 Day 201 - A day late and......

     The good news is that this morning when I woke up I went pawing around looking for my wallet and keys, I was thinking of heading out to enjoy some of my day off when I happened upon the missing camera cable.  Apparently I didn't leave it at my mom's place after all, it was just buried under stuff on my table, so it looks like I will be able to do the blog I wanted o do yesterday after all, just a day late.   Let's see if I can erase some of the fog in my memory and jump into the Wayback Machine, circa 7/19/2014.

     It seems like just yesterday, perhaps because it was just yesterday that all of this happened.  I originally woke up around 4:30am, not that I had to be up that early, but I am a restless sleeper to begin with and when I woke up at 4:30 I was have a mental tug of war with myself about the idea of going to breakfast before going into work.   Of course any place that I might want to go (save for IHOP which is open 24 hours) would not open until at least 7am, so I would have time to decide where to go.  The only problem with this plan is that my first stop on Saturday is at the store formerly known as Gus Miller's, where I had to pick up a cigarette order to put in for Monday, and they too do not open until 7am, so my options would consist of 1) Go to the Strip District and have breakfast first, either at Kelly O's or Deluca's, then backtrack to Oakland to get the cigarette order and then go into work, 2) Get the cigarette order first, then go to the Strip, hope the waits aren't too long and from there walk into work or 3) Have breakfast at Pamela's in Oakland instead.  Since they do not open to 7:30am, I could get the cigarette order first, walk the two blocks to Pamela's, eat and then catch a bus into work.  The thing about all of these plans is that none of them really require me to be up at 4:30am, so after careful deliberation and a few games of Marvel Puzzle Quest on the iPad I decided to go back to bed for a couple of hours. 

     The problem with that plan was that I overslept, I didn't wake up until 9:30am and now plans 1 and 2 would be very time consuming, taking up far too much of the morning before I got into work.  Plan #3 also would be problematic because if there was a line at Pamela's it would be time consuming as well.  Plus for the vast majority of summer Pamela's has been running the same special, either blueberry pancakes or blueberry waffles.  If I didn't know better I would say Ed must have ordered blueberries for them and now they just can't get rid of all of them, because that is all that is on the sidewalk a-frame on weekends when I walk by.  I like blueberries, but I also like a little variation in the specials and I have yet to see gyro or cheesesteak omelets pop up on the special board, things that might draw me in because I can't get them every day.  So I came up with Plan #4, which sadly is my plan most Saturdays; go to the gas station on my corner, get a cup of coffee and try to attack the day with a caffeine buzz.   After getting showered and dressed I decided there was no time like the present and with as much motivation as I could muster, I headed out to attack the day.

    

      This is what I walked outside to, a grey, overcast, wet, dreary kind of day.    Not the most emotionally uplifting kind of day, that's for sure.  In fact it was one of those days where climbing back under the covers and going back to bed would be nice, if that were actually an option, but I had far too much that needed to get done so that was just out of the question.

      I successfully completed the first of my challenges, I made it all the way to the end of my street to the gas station.  I still had one punch left on my coffee card before I would get a free one (I used that one this morning) but ever since we sold the store formerly known as Gus Miller's I have went from making  5 or 6 trips a week here for coffee down to just one or two.  This doesn't mean I have cut back on my coffee consumption, quite the opposite has occurred recently, I just don't get as much coffee at this particular location as I used to is all.

      After getting my coffee and then walking down the street to pick up the cigarette order, I headed off to the bus stop to make my way into town and get this day officially started.  Once I am on the bus there really is no turning back, before then I guess there is still the remote possibility I will go home and back to bed or call in sick or something, but once I get on the bus and the wheels start turning then the die has been cast.

      One good thing about this bus stop is right there on top of the garbage can.  You see it, you know you do.  It's that green thing there in the right side of the can.  It's a Coke cap.  So no matter how bad today goes, I am at least three Coke points ahead of where I was when I woke up.  I need to start saving some caps again too, I just cashed in 1100 points a couple of weeks back for a movie package, two free movie tickets, a large popcorn and two large Cokes at a theater near me.  Now I just need a movie worth seeing and a person to go with.  I actually did ask someone a few weeks back but that was before I cashed in the points and I am not sure how serious she took the offer.  Don't get me wrong, it's not like I was suggesting a date or anything because that would be the most uncool date ever to say hey, how about we go out because I have a coupon.  Yikes, I am not even that socially inept.  As for movies worth seeing that is the other problem, I doubt the two movies that are on my radar for seeing (Sin City 2, Dracula Untold) are the same as most other people's movies.  I have no desire to see a Disney flick, or a romantic comedy and even the super hero movie coming out (Guardians of the Galaxy) seems lame by comic book movie standards.  Good thing I have upwards of a year to solve those problems before the coupon expires.

      Okay, I am off the bus at the corner of 6th Ave and Smithfield Street and work is just 5 blocks that a way.  Two things about this picture, one being that in the front is a Yellow Cab, which in Pittsburgh isn't the same as most cities.  In most places you can just hail a cab while you are on the street and they will stop and pick you up.  Here you have to call their number and they dispatch a cab to your location, or that is at least how they claim to operate.  Usually you call and about 45 minutes later you call back and ask about the status of your cab and 30 minutes after that you call again, wondering where your cab is meanwhile most of the people out driving cabs are parked either at the airport or outside one of the local hotels waiting for the elusive airport run, where they can make $30-$50 a trip.  If you want to be picked up just to go from one section of town to another, well, good luck with that plan.  You will have a better chance of sprouting wings and flying to your destination first.    The second thing is the second building down on the right hand side of the street, the shorter, black building is what used to be Saks 5th Avenue in Pittsburgh before they, like most of retail in downtown Pittsburgh, packed up and left.  A week or so ago that building was being used as a stand in for the entrance of Madison Square Garden for a movie that was being shot here featuring Will Smith.  Just useless trivia that you probably didn't need to know.

     I got to work and cracked open the office door.  Time to make the donuts as it were.  First thing I had to do was grab the lottery keys out of my desk and go upstairs and take the money out of the lottery machines. Not that we need the money right away, I can't do any bank deposits on Saturday, but usually there is a decent amount of 1s and 5s in the machines and there is a chance that the store may need that change, so I go ahead and run a report on both machines on Saturday anyway and balance them.  Plus it gives me a chance to reload any missing tickets and fix any jams that may be in the bill acceptors rather than leave the machines either empty or unusable until Monday morning.

      
     Next I took over Brian's desk and started doing a number of things in the office.  I settled the credit cards from Friday so that money would be in the account Monday morning.  If I leave that go for the entire weekend then the entire amount will not be available until Tuesday.  I also had to check the balance in the ATM upstairs, if it is too low I had money put away in the safe that I could have used to reload it, but it was fine so there were no issues there either.  Instead I got to jump into doing all of the invoices that had accumulated on my desk over the course of the last 5 days.  Each invoice has to be check to make sure we are not being overcharged on pricing and after that, they all need broken down into categories for our accountant, because our profit margins are different based on the items being bought and sold.  IT isn't hard per se, it is just a time consuming process.

      By time consuming this is what I mean, after I finish I put the invoices in a bag for the accountant to pick up Monday morning.  This bag represents just 5 days of invoices.  After a while staring at numbers starts to suck.

     The fun isn't even remotely done yet though.  Up next is the joy of changing prices.  On Saturday there were only 6 pages of price changes that needed done plus I had to add a handful of products to the system that we had just gotten in in the last week or so that were new and if I don't put them in the system then they do not scan at the register.  I had 8 different varieties of Everfresh juice to add, a new Monster drink (Red Ultra), and three different varieties of Bugles that were missing, probably because they were items that didn't switch over when the information went from our old register system to the new one.  I also had to add a new hire to the system so that he could log into the registers upstairs under his own name rather than run the register under someone else's name.

      Next was straightening up the shelves in the basement.  There were a handful of different items that needed to go from the stock room to the shelves upstairs and the the stuff downstairs needed to be reorganized in such a manner that people could actually find it if they came looking for it.  I would like it if this was the only shelf I had to do (though even on this shelf there were plenty of boxes that needed to be opened and then placed on the shelf) but there were three other sets of shelves just like this that also needed fixed.

     
      Next was the cigarette room, where I had to do an inventory of how many cartons of cigarettes we had on hand prior to placing my orders later on.  Usually this room had roughly 400 cartons in it, Saturday was a little bit of a lower amount, there were only 379, but I had to make sure that the number I came up with was the same as the number on the dry erase board on the door to the room, if the numbers are different then I have to find out why we are missing cigarettes, did someone take something out and forget to mark it, did I miscount when adding cartons to the room or did something far more nefarious take place.  Lucky for me I didn't have to go all Inspector Clouseau, the numbers matched and everything was cool.

     I put the next two pictures together only because I took them at the same time, while I was on a cigarette break, I just decided to play with one of the crazy features on my digital camera that makes pictures look like drawings.  As you can see, it does a pretty good job.  Besides, my pictures to this point have been pretty bland, I had to mix things up a bit.

      Back to work, I start looking at the coolers and while my job no longer requires me to stock coolers (which I miss doing actually) I did see some problems that needed addressed, like the fact that we had products sitting in the basement that were unopened and were not even on the floor yet, so I had to remerchandise this cooler, cutting back on some of the items that don't sell that well yet were taking up way too much space in the cooler.  So I had to pull literally cases of products and make room for the new stuff.

     More of the same, this time it was that Monster Red Ultra I talked about earlier.  This cooler was missing that, as well as Monster Absolute Zero, yet there were 4 rows of Monster Low Carb.  I see stuff like this and I wonder if there are enough hours in the day to do all of the things that need done, because I am one of those people that would just rather do something myself, that way I know it is done properly.
 

      Since I was busy rearranging things, I went ahead and straightened up the Little Debbie snack section, then brought up another 4 cases of milkshakes from the basement to top off the Freal station.  The Freal station is cool because not only is there a freezer but there is a mixer attached to it as well, so you actually get your milkshake blended right there in the store.  It was an expensive piece of machinery that Ed bought, in fact it took the first year of milkshake sales just to pay for the machine itself.  And let's not talk about how much of a pain in the ass it was to get that machine on the counter, first the counter had to be recut to accommodate it, then it still took three people to lift it into place, partially because it was very heavy but also because it was very bulky.

     
       With my work on the floor done, I headed back into the office and fired up Pandora on my laptop to commence with the beginning of the ordering.  Much like when I blog, usually if I am doing work in the office and no one else is there I will be blasting my Pandora stuff.  I am getting my station to the point where I can listen to it most days with minimal skips.  Not sure if it is just because of the amount of time I am on the site or if it has something to do with their Music Genome Project.  Chances are it is probably a little bit of both.  All I know is I have the coolest Pandora station ever.  And if you're not down with that I've got two words for you.


    

  
      With my music playing I go ahead and start the ordering.  Before I can do anything for my store I have three other orders that have to be done first, I have the order from the store formerly known as Gus Millers that I picked up on the way into work, I have an order from Brett who run Mini Mitch, a very small store about two blocks from us on Ross Street.  He had sent me his order via text message (did I ever say how much I hate my cell phone?) and a third order for Williams Vending, who has accounts for cigarette vending machines in a number of bars in the area. Only after I have these three orders squared away and created invoices for them can I then go about the business of doing the order for the store that actually employs me. 

    
      I get those three orders done, then get the tobacco order done Belinda left me for our store on Friday  and then revisit the cigarette room so I can do our cigarette order and finally I make my way back upstairs where I get to tackle the grocery order for this place as well.  The only plus (and it really isn't a plus, I am sure I will hear about it Monday morning) was that the deli did not leave me an order to put in, so I didn't order them anything.  There are only so many hours in the day though and I can only do so much before mentally I just say enough already.  In fact one of the things that I did that I didn't mention yet but this picture reminded me of is I also put that cooler in that is in the center of the screen.  When Saturday started there was a rack in that spot, the cooler that we got to go there had been sitting in the same spot for better than a week when finally I had just had enough and moved it myself to where it was supposed to go and took the rack that was there and moved it downstairs to the stock room for the time being. 

     Finally, after being at work for about 10 1/2 hours I decided to call it a day and head home.  I got outside and it was still all wet and dreary, the only real difference since I started was that it was now dark outside as well.  I would find out as I walked back down Smithfield Street and made my way home that my bus stop was closed for some reason, they had detoured my bus so I had to catch my bus a couple of blocks from where I normally would.  In the grand scheme it wasn't that big a deal, I only mention it because it happened, not that it was all that much of an issue.

      And back to McKee Place and the two block walk from my bus stop to my apartment.  I think we know how this goes from here, I get home, roughly 10pm or so, and settle in only to lose my camera cable and not be able to do last night what I am doing right now.  So instead of celebrating entry number 200 with this story it is relegated to entry 201 and tomorrow will beget another day and another entry.  202 for those of you keeping score at home.  Anyway, it's time for me to go, I have to think about making dinner at some point.  I did get to go to breakfast today and afterward made a trip to Scratch N Dent grocery, so I have the fixins for making a few meals in my humble abode, now comes the fun part of figuring out just what I will make for tonight.