Friday the 13th

[Ree]

I don't believe in the superstition, but man, did this day suck!!!

Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.

Some highlights:

• This afternoon, I got a frantic call from the front service desk. There had been a paint spill and they needed some of my guys to clean it up.
  
  I assumed it was inside. Right at that moment, things were insane in the warehouse, with people tearing my staff in all directions looking for stuff.
  
  I only had one guy. I called him and said, "Come with me." I sent him to get cleaning rags and some sawdust to soak up the paint.
  
  When I got to the front, I found out it was outside the front of the store on the brand new sidewalk.
  
  A customer had been returning about eight 5 gallon pails, and he hit the curb with the trolley. The can on top bounced and hit the concrete, cracking the bottom.
  It wasn't a huge spill, but enough to make a mess. Luckily, it was water based paint.
  
  I didn't think the garden hose would reach, so I sent the guy for pails of water. My student worker had finished his job and came to help, so I sent him for water too.
  
  Customers just kept walking through the paint, tracking it all over the sidewalk and into the lobby of the store.
  
  One of the paint clerks finally came with a mop bucket and started scrubbing the lobby floor.
  My second in command guy had joined me by that time, and he asked why I hadn't just run the hose over. I said I didn't think it would reach.
  He assured me it would, so, between the two of us, we were able to get the hose to reach.
  
  I don't know how this happened, but all of my help suddenly disappeared, except for my assistant, so I ended up standing in the cold, wearing only my sweater, running ice cold water onto a sidewalk, while he scrubbed with an old broom.
  
  My hands were throbbing to the point that they were almost numb.
  I couldn't leave the job to go track one of the other guys down, because every second wasted, the paint was drying.
  It's still a mess, because we couldn't get it all.
  I went to the lumberyard and asked if we could borrow their high pressure washer. When the guy finally came over with it, my second in command had already put the hose away, and insisted it didn't need to come out, because everything was as good as it was going to get.
  I wasn't about to order him.
  In the first place, I don't even know how it became part of my job description.

• All I did from the moment I came in the door, was spend my time running around trying to troubleshoot screwups.
  
  We had one customer that had an order for a barn door track. He had bought one several weeks ago, and he retruned one with a huge dent in it.
  We ordered him a new one. I wrote up the claim for the damaged one.
  Two weeks ago, the credit came through, and there was no sign of the track in my storage area. My assistant and I looked all over, but it had vanished.
  I was still keeping an eye out for it, just in case someone had moved it.
  
  Today, one of my crew called the customer to tell him his replacement part was here, and had been sitting there for over 2 weeks.
  The guy said, "Oh, I got my old one to work."
  So, I ran around trying to find someone who knew what was going on.
  
  Turns out, the guy came in, and they gave him his old one back, but didn't tell me, and didn't cancel his order for the replacement.
  
  So that meant I had to do a whole crap load of behind the scenes stuff to make the inventory right, since we had received credit for something that was never actually returned. (Well, it was, but they gave it back to him.)

So, those were a couple of highlights. There is, oh so much more along the same line. Equipment malfunctions, inventory errors, customer stupidity, and staff annoyances.

Yeah, I was glad to see 4:00 come. I am out of there for 2 days.

[Department stores *sigh*]

hah im not superstitiouse either but today was one of those days for me as well. highight being the depot fiasco i just wrote about >.<

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

A couple years ago, we had a couple mishaps on Halloween night.

First, one of our truck unloaders went to change the bottle on the water cooler in the backroom, and in doing so managed to slice his hand wide open on an eletrical box next to the cooler. There was blood everywhere.

Then, we had to fix one of the pegboards in one of the gondolas up front by cosmetics, because it had fallen out of its track. So a bunch of us took out all the shelves and attempted to wrestle it back into place. In doing this we knocked over a large displayer of cosmetics on the endcap, spilling various colors of nail polish on the floor.

We attacked it with mops and lots of nail polish remover but couldn't get it all off the floor. There's still a stain on the floor tile where this happened.

[Ljt09863]

our friday the 13th was odd. i had a customer whose total was exactly $10.13....

we were also still putting away warehouse. when we get warehouse, most of it comes in totes, similar to the plastic storage things you can buy. in each one, they have these labels with four letters on them. sometimes, they make words, sometimes they don't. i don't know what they have them. our EXA came up to me and said he wanted to show me something. so i went with him. he took me over to a tote and said,"i opened this tote, and this is what i saw.." in the tote, there were two labels. in this exact order, it said, " GORY MESS" we were kinda like....hmmm. thats an odd one. i told him i was sick and going home cause whatever was about to happen, i didn't want to stick around for. but nothing happened.

then our Loss Prevention lady came in, and then our DM came in. what a day...