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I am really just happy to put the last week behind me, lots of frustration involved and very little on the positive front to show for it. Hopefully the coming week will be better, but I have my doubts. Just seems like the more I do get accomplished the further behind I find myself.
Yesterday was a prime example. I usually work on Saturdays though for the most part all I need to do is put in a couple of orders, with two of our grocery providers, Sledd and GFS. While I am not required to, I also empty the money from and reload tickets into the lottery machines and I settle the credit cards from Friday, so we can get aren't waiting until Tuesday for all of the weekend sales to hit the bank account. I usually stop on the way into work at the store formerly known as Gus Miller's just to see if Esam needs anything for Monday morning, though now that the Sledd website is up and running I could do his order from home if I so choose. However that wasn't the case Saturday.
Pardon the interruption here, but this BBQ pulled pork omelet is delicious. It is making the wait for the bus worthwhile. But enough about me clogging my arteries, I was yammering about inconsequential stuff here.
Instead of a typical Saturday, I had to first deal with the ATM. This is something Brian usually does, but on Friday he didn't leaving said project squarely on my shoulders. And of course the ATM was completely out of $20 bills on Saturday morning, thankfully I had been setting money aside for this throughout the week, so I was able to pop another $6500 into it to keep it going for the next few days.
Then I start looking around the basement and I see a bunch of stuff that should have been put away Friday is still laying around. I actually noticed a problem on that front as early as Wednesday, when I had to do the 7 Up order because the rep arrived after Sammy had already left for the day. In a way that was just as well, the rep had our new pricing with him and it isn't like I haven't done 7 Up orders in the past, I used to do it every week before the big promotion to the office. The first thing I notice about the new pricing is that there are new items that I might be interested in, including .99 pre priced cans of Venom energy drink. Given the number of coolers 7 Up has in our store and the fact some of them double up on product, I knew I had space for it and other .99 energy drinks do very well for us, so it would be worth a shot to try these. As we continue our stroll through the basement I am ordering things because we are out of them only to later come across the same item because it wasn't put away, it was just thrown wherever. I don't know how any bit or realistic ordering can be done when the same product is thrown in two or three different places.
Okay I am back from a little status interruptus (thank you Wile E. Coyote), I finished breakfast which was delicious, then traipsed over to the book store where I picked up some much needed reading material and then made my way to Scratch N Dent to see what they had in the cheapie grocery department. All in all a productive trip and now I am standing here waiting for a bus to come take me back from whence I came. And I should get bonus points for using traipse, whence and a cartoon reference all in the same paragraph. Just saying.....
Back to our story, so I place the 7 Up order, when I see Sammy the next day I tell him there will be some new products coming in and we might need to make space for them. So of course Saturday, two days after the actual delivery those products were still in the basement, not even put away, just laying down by the bottom of the drop shoot, as was a good chunk of the Friday Pepsi delivery. Now not only am I doing my normal Saturday tasks but I am remerchandising two different coolers and putting away parts of two separate deliveries.
If that were all it still would be considered an easy day by my standards, but I also had an order from Pricemaster that Ed had placed that needed unpacked, checked in and the invoice faxed to Ed in Florida so he could give me the retail prices he wanted on all the items.
Okay, now I should be able to start my orders and begin the process of making my way home, right? Not so fast kemosabe? Speaking of which, where besides The Lone Ranger did the word kemosabe come from? Honestly it sounds like an Indian who is undergoing cancer treatments. Again, just saying........
I start by putting together a GFS order, the trick with GFS is that they will not deliver an order unless it is at least $350. That isn't unusual in retail, most vendors have set minimums before they will send a truck out, with Coke I have to order at least 10 cases, Sledd is a minimum of $1000 (since we get our cigarettes from them this is much easier than it sounds) but getting $350 from GFS is a bit of work, it usually involves me adding one or two items we do not necessarily need at that moment, but might need in another week or two. So after going ordering the things I knew I needed I ended up padding the bill with a couple of extras, like to cases of Pizza Puffs as opposed to one and an extra tub of sour cream. I think I got it to $356, just enough to get the truck to show up on Tuesday.
Now I am all set to knock off mine and Esam's Sledd orders. I start walking the floor with my little handheld unit so I can just scan the missing items in from the shelves, the easiest part of that order. Other items I have to put in either by Sledd's designated item number or the UPC code. As I am walking the floor I get to the section of the store where we keep the laundry detergents and cleaning supplies, and the section is mysteriously empty. Well, not so mysterious for someone like me who has been doing this long enough to know that far more items are missing than we could have possibly sold in the last two days. I don't need to run an items sold report on these things to see what time they left the store, I know in my bones that they were stolen.
Now I have to go back to the office and fire up the camera system, I know I didn't order any of the missing items on Thursday, the last time I placed an order with Sledd, so my field of focus is sometime between 12pm Thursday and 5pm Saturday, and now it becomes something like the Clock Game on The Price is Right, I need to find the camera focused on that aisle (camera 4 for those playing the home game) and then start picking times to search, if I pick a time and the items are on the shelf then I need to go later, if I pick one and the items are gone I need to go earlier. It wasn't long before I had the time pinned down to 10:20 pm on Thursday night and sure enough thee is a black man stooped down in the aisle shoving all kinds of stuff into his bag, even though we have told all of our employees that all bags and backpacks need to be checked in at the front counter. Rules get followed so infrequently that I am just about ready to fire the entire crew and start from scratch. Ed would never go for that, but my tolerance for this level of bullshit and incompetence is pretty much gone. Trust me, nobody has a problem asking for favors, whether that be loans or requesting specific days off, but when it comes to doing what is asked, then certain employees just can't be bothered.
Okay, another status interruptus, I caught my bus and was blogging on there until I reached my stop, then it was a quick run into CVS, followed by coming home, and after a minute or so I decided to take a nap. Naps are fun. I fell asleep listening to something on the computer, next thing I knew it was 5 pm. I better get back to my story before something else gets in the way.
So I found our resident thief on the cameras, little good that will do me. It's not like I can call the police two days after the fact, hell we have had cops in the store while someone was stealing and they still didn't do anything. So when I see stories like what took place in NYC, where the cops turned their backs on the mayor as he was speaking at a fallen officers funeral and afterward proceeded to arbitrarily decide to not do their jobs, we'll all I can say is that most experiences I have had with the police give me the impression that they are just as much worthless pieces of shit as the criminals they are supposed to be protecting us from.
I go back to working on my order and as I am scanning things in and looking up other item numbers I see someone I had previously thrown out of the store. He was another person that I caught stealing in the store, I told him to not ever come back yet here he was. Thing is, during our last encounter he made the mistake of blurting out that he was at the Renewal center across the street. Renewal is basically a criminal halfway house, it is a place where fuckups can go rather than jail and provided that they keep their nose clean they can go out and get a job and what not, they just have to check in by a certain time and there are rules for staying there. If you fuck up, you go back to jail. So here is this guy, buying cigarettes in our store, then taking them out of the pack and wrapping them in the plastic bag he was given so he could stuff them down his pants and smuggle them into Renewal. One of their rules is that you can't have cigarettes on the premises. So if you want to guess who contacted Renewal after he left the store, don't bother. It was me. If they throw him back in jail, well, I don't care.
Finally I get our order done, I notice that Brian had put some hot dogs on the roller but it wasn't turning, so I took a look at it. The problem with our hot dog roller, well with our employees not the roller, is that it should be cleaned every day, I am lucky if it gets done once a week. So now I am going to see if I can get the roller turning again, I have to disconnect the cover which is screwed on it, then turn the roller on its side to get at the innards of the machine, but when I do I just have puddles of grease dripping out of it. I cleaned it a little bit, I didn't want to tear it apart to the point where I couldn't get it back together, I am not great on mechanical things by my own admission and parts laying everywhere is just a jigsaw puzzle I would have no chance in solving. Still, just by basically draining a portion of grease out of the machine I was able to get it functional, albeit briefly. About a half hour later it was back to stopping again. It is going to require more attention to detail than I allotted it on Saturday, but I was already 10 hours in and I still had Esam's order to do yet.
I get back to my desk and start working on his order. Because he is buying through us I have to not only place the order but price it out as well. That would be easy if it were simply the prices in the book but some items we get bud owns on, like snuff and cigarettes, so I have to find what category each of those goes in and price it out accordingly. And given his bill worked out to over $4400, there was a lot of pricing and figuring out involved. His order alone was damn near an hour long process.
Finally around 11pm I finish up, all of the orders are done and my day was done and all I wanted to do was come home and eat and just veg out for a while. So of course my neighbors were partying and the only way I would have been able to sleep would have been to bite a poison apple. On the plus side, I have no desire for a Prince Charming or otherwise to kiss me, so that would be a mighty long sleep, but apples are scarcer than blacks at a Klan rally in my apartment, so I just suffered in silence and no sleep. Finally about 4am I was able to close my eyes for a bit, before getting up and starting my Sunday adventure and this blog entry. And now with Sunday almost over, it is probably time for this entry to be over as well. Good night, hopefully it will be better than last night.
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