B365V2.92 - Timing

Okay, so I managed to get my ass up and meander over to the park. This is more of a challenge than it would seem, what with me being sans tablet and all. But tonight I opted for one of the picnic tables under the pavilion and my laptop. It is my first ever out of the apartment sojourn for the laptop, so lets all give it a great big round of applause, shall we?

But knowing I was going to be sans tablet, I didn't want to try typing with my laptop on my lap, that was how I dropped the tablet for goodness sake, so I wanted to wait until I knew the pavilion would be cleared out so I could use a table. The tablet hopefully will be fine, it was working when I dropped it off today, which is a story unto itself, but the glass was all kinds of spidery cracked and I didn't want to put a splinter into one of my fingers so I figured best get that issue cleared up now than leave it continue unabated.

Anyway, I was out after work yesterday sitting in the park downtown, as opposed to now when I am in Schenley (no wifi here, boo hiss) and I was looking at places to do replacement glass for an iPad and I stumbled across Ubreakifix, and they had a local store in Bloomfield. For those not in the know of the region, Bloomfield is Pittsburgh's Italian section, Yes, Pittsburgh is just like most other cities in that the populations back in the day segregated themselves. Bloomfield=Italians, Polish Hill=Polish, Squirrel Hill=Jewish, etc, etc.

Enough with the geography already, though I do wish someone would do a story about Pittsburgh's Chinatown at some point, it got lost in the annals of our history, all that is left is a few architectural remnants in downtown but unless you knew it was once there, you would never know. But anyway, I digress, I was telling a story here. So I find the company and I find their website. On the site it allows you to make appointments in advance, though you are also allowed to just drop things off. I see that they have an availability for 2:30 on Tuesday, and I think to myself, if I bust my ass I might be able to pull that off, so I go ahead and make the appointment.

Then today happened. I get two more orders thrown at me on top of the one I already have to do, no surprise there, they didn't slow me up all that much. But this secondary wholesaler that Ed wants me to deal with is a giant pain in my ass. There trucks are always late, they don't have half of the shit I need, their item book for what they do have is so mislabeled that you can't tell if you are ordering a single piece item or a case of them. Around 1pm have all of my orders done and all I have left to do is the sales numbers. Simple right? Well, no. The rep from the new wholesaler comes in and starts hogging Ed's time, so I can't give him the sales numbers to finish until this bitch shuts the fuck up. Bad enough her delivery driver still haasn't shown up yet, now they are making my day even worse by getting in my way of finishing things.

She does leave (finally) I give Ed the sales numbers to be reviewed and he gives them back to me with some adjustments he made and I start doing my math to complete the process and get out of Dodge so to speak. I have finished balancing everything and am just ready to put the money into the deposit bag for the bank when I get a message from upstairs, “Do you have any change we could by?', so I have to riup apart the one deposit that was done, pull the fives and ones out of it and sell those back to the store, replace the money and put the deposit back together. Then I make the trek to the bank, which is a few blocks, nothing major, but until I get there it is already 2pm.

Now I am familiar enough with the transit system here that I can get the right bus to go on to get from point A to point B, but I have not nor will I ever, internalize the bus schedules for each and every bus in town. I know I have to catch an 86 Liberty, I rode it before when Amanda and I went to Tessaro's (great burgers if you are in the area by the way, also awesome ribs) before a hockey game, and the next bus to leave downtown was at 2:15pm. Well till I got out of the bank and walked across town to get a bus stop for the 86, I had missed that one and they run every half hour, so I was going to miss my 2:30 appointment. Plus it has been a long time since I lived in Bloomfield, one day we should do an apartment tracker of all of the places I have lived in Pittsburgh, so while I know Liberty Avenue well enough, I don't know where the business is located on Liberty. Technically Liberty Avenue runs all the way into downtown and the bus runs along it for most of its route (thus the Liberty in 86 Liberty, us Pittsburghers are clever people like that) .

Uh oh, the drug truck just pulled up, don't know if he spotted me since I am not on my normal bench. But a person got out, I should start praying to my Tanuki God that this will not be my demise.

Anyway, I find the business okay and drop the tablet off, then catch another 86 back into town. All told the trip to and fro with the bak run thrown in was maybe an hour and a half. But I still have the bank deposit slips in my pocket, I need to file away the lottery deposit and finish my paperwork at the store. Except when I get back the Coke rep is waiting for me, no one thought to walk him through and do an order so they left him there for me to deal with. And the order I was waiting for arrived, again the number of people who bothered to check it in could be counted on zero fingers. I often wonder why the hell we pay these people to begin with.

S there is a pile of work waiting for me when I get back, first I take the Coke rep through and do his order with him. Sammy deals with most of the beverage ordering when he took over my old job, but ever since the great Coke mishap which he was party to, I now handle that particular vendor. See, Ed likes to get his way and if he doesn't get his way he will shut a vendor off entirely. Well many moons ago after I got promoted there was an issue with Coke pricing, certain items were changing in price, we weren't granted access to other particular items which we believed would sell in our store. I don't know what went into that particular contract, I haven't negotiated very many of them for the store but apparently it goes into the classification of the store and tiered pricing structures and elemenst that aren't part of tiers and yada, yada, yada. Add to the fact that Ed was once again led astray by a female who helped create the clusterfuck, and Ed got pissed off enough that he said fine, no more Coke orders. After a bit cooler heads prevailed and we were once again allowed to order Coke products. Mind you there coolers at this point were practically empty and the issue of getting us an order so we could go back to being where we need to be fell to Sammy. In retrospect I should have done it and saved us all a lot of aggravation, but there was a lot of shit on my plate at that time, I was running our Oakland store (Gus Millers for those of you who have no recall) and helping Dee run Smithfield, so I let Sammy handle it. After the Coke rep came in and left Sammy came into the office and proclaimed that placed a really big order, 300 cases of product. My first thought was this is going to end very badly, and it did.

At the time Pepsi was our biggest supplier and we would get anywhere between 150 and 200 cases a week from them, most of which would be .99 1 liter bottles of Brisk teas (our clientele goes for the cheap stuff I have learned) so to order 300 cases from a secondary vendor seemed to be a little much. And it was. Which started the second great Coke fight, when they would take back all of the out of date stuff we had when we never sold all of the giant order Sammy made. He blamed the rep for it, and she should share some of the blame, she had a history on her handheld unit for what a typical order for us would consist of, so 300 cases should have set off alarm bells in her head and when the product didn't move for weeks on end they should have made an effort to take it back and possibly resell it elsewhere. But to this day Sammy thinks he did nothing wrong and hates dealing with Coke, so that falls on my plate till the end of time.

So when I get back from Bloomfield, there is the Coke rep sitting, waiting to have someone walk through an order with him. So I do that, then I deal with the order from the wholesaler, which nobody even bothered to check in. If they would have shorted us on any item there would be no way to fix it, because someone signed off on it without even checking to see if we got everything. So after finishing with the Coke vendor I put the truck away that came in in my absence.

Next up was something Ed wanted me to look into regarding the new smart cards that banks are issuing. I guess they are putting micro chips in debit and credit cards and I had to contact our register people and see if these new cards would be a problem with our registers, since our car swipers (Swiper, no swiping) are on the terminals themselves. And Ed wanted me to look into getting text to pop up on some of the cameras, so that when a person was run up at the register, the text of the transaction would appear as well. Why he want me to do this I don't know, his computer in Florida can't watch the store. Mind you I can, I can even do it on my tablet, but Ed has no computer skills, His knowledge of how to operate a computer would be on par with my knowledge of thermonuclear dynamics. But if he says he wants something, then I should at least make a feeble attempt to make it happen, so I fire off an email to Art over at Roth cash register and he is apparently still in the office because he gets right back to me via the phone and we start talking and what not, he starts working on his camera issue as well as a reporting question I had. So I have ll of my ducks in a row, I finish my paperwork and I get out of work around 5:30, a good 3.5 hours after when I wanted to be done for the day. Ah, the joys of management.

I go outside to catch my bus to go home, it is only 15 minutes late just to add to the fun of my day. I get home, eat a sandwich and watch DOOL on the computer and fall asleep listening to Spotify (The Alarm to be precise, more proof that I am old). To think there was a time when it was curious which band would be bigger coming out of the UK, U2 or The Alarm. But I closed my eyes, put a fan next to me and climbed under a blanket right there on my apartment floor. So getting up and trudging to the park with the laptop in tow was a bit of an exercise for me because usually once I lay down I am off duty for the rest of the day or night.

Anyway I should have the tablet back either Wednesday or Thursday and I ave lunch with Debbie and the kids to look forward to this week, which is good, because I need things to look forward to, because this week is off to a shitty start.