Sunday, December 6, 2015

B365V2.163 - Work related issues

     Just sitting in Crazy Mocha on the South Side, trying to process the sat week or so in my brain.  Have to admit, mentally I am not in a good place.  But really, when am I ever.

     Our story goes back to before Ed left for his winter sojourn to Florida, so we are saying maybe late August.  Before he left he had meetings with all of our reps, nothing unusual about that there, since he would under not be seeing anyone for 6 months or so.  One of those meetings was with 7Up, and through the course of that meeting we were Ted that we hadn't used our allotment of tickets yet.  We get roughly $2000 worth of tickets to Consol Energy Center every year as part of our contract, so Ed had asked me if there was anything I might want to go to.  Of course my thinking was hockey, as it always is when it comes to events at Consol.  But tickets to see hockey are not cheap, especially while sitting in 7up's box.  Those seats run about $225 a piece.  And Ed asked me if I wanted to take someone, so I am being offered $450 worth of merchandise simply because I am a kick ass employee.  So I go through my mental Rolodex of friends and acquaintances that 1) enjoy hockey as much as I do and 2) I hadn't offered stuff like to before.  I know if I asked someone at work everyone else will think I am playing favorites, so I didn't want to go down that road.  Instead I thought of someone you blog Anders should know, that is if you read this blog, that being Erin.  The thing with her is we really aren't friends so much as acquaintances, we know of each other's existence and that is about it.  We had coffee once, and that has been our interaction to this point.  But I did learn that there are some days where she works late, so I shot her a message saying I may be able to get hockey tickets if she wanted to go to a game.  She said to keep her posted, so I put in a request for a game that would work around her schedule, Dec 14th against the Washington Capitals.  Other than that, we hadn't had much back and forth about the game, because I am loathe to promise a game without the tickets in my grubby little paws.

     So we fast forward to last week, Ed and I are have one of our conversations about store related issues (more on that forthcoming) and I mention the game again and that I hadn't heard from anyone at 7up regarding our tickets yet.  A few months out I didn't want to bother anyone, heck I made my ticket request before individual game tickets went on sale to the general public, so there is no saying 7up had their tickets yet but now we are a little more than a week out and there is me, sans tickets.  So I let Ed rattle some cages with the regional manager at 7up and he got word to me earlier this week that the tickets are going to be brought to our store in the coming days.  I send a message to Erin as to what is happening, the keeping her posted she requested.  Then I get the message she can't go, why I couldn't be told this anytime in the prevailing months leading up to this I don't have a fucking clue.  Yes, you can tell I am getting pissed off because my nice guy language is deteriorating.  It is one of those moments when I wish people would just be fucking honest with me rather than leave me twisting in the wind, if someone doesn't want to go, just fucking say so.  I will make other arrangements.  My boss does me a $450 favor and now I am the one who is going to look like an ass.  Excuses aren't going to matter, it is simply going to be you asked for these tickets and now you aren't using them.  Truth be told, I will use at least one of them, and try to find someone else who has Monday night free, but I should have had months to do this, not fucking days.

      If that were the only work thing that happened this week, then I would rack the entire episode up to my own fucking stupidity and move on, but alas it wasn't, not by a long shot.  I am sitting at my desk one day balancing the books when I see I have a message on Facebook.  That is an odd occurrence but not so odd that it never happens, more likely the frequency would coincide with a lunar eclipse.  So I check my message and it is from my half sister, Heather someone who I rarely mention in my blog.  That would be because we rarely speak, since I tend to distance myself from all things related to my father, that includes my half sister as well.  I don't have anything against her or for my fathers side of the family for that matter, just the way circumstances have unfolded in my life.  So I was curious as to what she wanted to get in touch with me about.  Turns out she is somewhat worried, she was wondering if it was safe to send her son to spend time with his grandparents (her mom, my dad) based on some things she had heard our shared father may have done, including threatening her mom.  I said if she should send her son, it should be a supper used visit, then proceeded to recall how one of my first memories of my father was of him choking my mom out in the living room floor when I was 3.  If he has not corrected that type of behavior (and I have no reason to believe he has, though I haven't spoken to him in 23 years so who knows) then what she was worried about could in fact be what has actually taken place.  Save for talking about our dad (turns out she has similar feelings about him) the conversation went fairly well.  It was good to catch up with her, just wish it could have been under better circumstances.

     Lastly I had a hand in letting someone go at work this past week. Brian (not owner Brian, obviously) hD started working for us shortly after I did, in fact I had trained him on some things.   When we got our new register system a couple of years ago, we implemented a new policy regarding over rings.  For those not in the retail world, an over ring occurs when a customer changes their mind regarding a purchase, they don't want something, or they are short on cash, anything that would cause us to void a transaction.  Only a handful of people have cards which allow you to take a transaction off the screen (to keep employees from cancelling transactions after the fact, and then pocketing the money themselves), for everyone else we have created over ring slips, where after cashing out a transaction that was cancelled, you print the receipt and staple it to the slip, right the reason for the over ring and then have a second person on duty sign it as well as the person who is submitting it.  It isn't perfect, but it is the best we can do with the tools we have.  So I am breaking down the paperwork for a day of sales and I get to Brian's paperwork.  In it he has a number of over ring slips, but nothing is filled out on them, no reasons for why they occurred, nor did he sign any of them.  The second person signed them (an issue unto itself, people signing blank slips), but just dropping slips with nothing filled out sets off alarm bells.  So Brian (the owner) had me check the cameras, cross referencing the time on the receipt with what was taking place on the cameras at that time.  The second one I checked wasn't an over ring at all, the customer bought the merchandise and it was cashed out through the register.  That was enough that Brian (owner) and Ed decided to let Brian (non owner) go.  It sucks because I like Brian ( non owner) but nobody said everyday at work would be a pleasant one, and while I didn't see any money being stolen, it doesn't look good from a visual perspective.

      So, anybody want my week?  Anyone

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