Today was as bad as I thought it would be...and then some

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

I guess I should consider myself very lucky that the worst thing I did today was mutter "F you" under my breath toward my supervisor.

So as I mentioned before, we had a truck today. We were supposed to have it yesterday morning, but it was pushed back due to the little bitch of a snowstorm we had earlier in the week. This meant scraping the bottom of the barrel to find people to unload the 1900-piece truck last night, us losing a person to fill and backstock it, and trying to do all this during the biggest one-day sale of the year.

There was a metric fuckton of transitional merchandise that came in. It all had green stickers on the boxes identifying it as such. The truck unloaders were specifically instructed to keep it all separate. What do those helmet-wearing, drool cup-needing, mouth-breathing imbeciles do with it all? Put it on the floor along with all the normal stuff needing to be filled. So I had to go separate it all onto its own pallets to go upstairs to the bulk area.

I'd say the truck must've been done by a bunch of monkeys, but monkeys are actually fairly intelligent animals, and I don't want to insult them by comparing them to the truck crew.

Then, as we're busting ass trying to get off the floor with our freight, I find I'm being paged to do carryouts. If we hadn't had the truck today, I would've been working carryouts 8:15 to 4:45. My manager promised me she'd find somebody to replace me so I could focus on the truck. She tried to get Captain Jackass to come in earlier. He told her no.

Thanks, dickface. Funny how you complain about your hours, and how you want more of them, and then when more hours are offered to you, you turn them down. God forbid we cut into your party time.

And then after he came at 11:00 (actually 11:15 before he was down on the floor), he still wasn't getting his calls in a timely manner. So guess who called to help him out?

And then--trying to get our freight upstairs for backstock! I was on the forklift lifting the pallets upstairs. I had pallets of domestics with boxes and loose blankets and sheet sets stacked haphazardly. I hate when the pallets are stacked like this. It's damn near impossible to get them upstairs without everything falling off.

So I lifted the pallet up--and the whole shit fell onto the floor. Time to get off the forklift and try to re-stack it. I told my supervisor "From now on, could we maybe not stack the loose stuff and the boxed stuff together? I mean, put the loose stuff on top of the boxed stuff or something? It would be easier to lift upstairs that way."

Her response: "Well you guys don't stack your housewares all that great either."

"I can at least get housewares upstairs without dropping it all over the place."

"Oh, cry me a river."

(under my breath) "F you." As far as I know, she didn't hear this. Seriously, I make one helpful suggestion and she takes it as an insult against the rest of the crew? I guess from now on I'll be keeping my big yap shut anytime I have an idea on how to make things easier, safer or better.

And then Stuart's Mom was driving us nuts again! Jesus Christ, she won't do anything on her own! She paged four different people to do--something. And then when nobody answered or they told her they were on break, she called the break room phone again!

The thing she was asked to do, that she was trying to pawn off on somebody else? Get a holding form for a furniture item from the service desk, and put it on the item. In the time she wasted trying to get somebody else to do that for her, she could've went up, gotten that form, went to the backroom, and put it on the item. TWICE.

And finally, they ain't making the customers any cheerier. There was one guy grumbling and growling at the poor cashier as she rang up his merchandise. Then, as she offered him a free blown-glass ornament for his purchase, he yelled "NO!" at her and then "I HATE THIS PLACE!" as he was leaving

And then another lady tried to return an opened DVD, and as we all know, no place will do that. So she decided to hum the DVD at the service desk lady and stomp out the door. Geez people, who pissed in your eggnog.

Let's just say I cannot wait for Christmas to be over. And Mother Nature can go eat a dick. Several, in fact.

[Food Lady]

Sorry, Irv. If you didn't have to go behind your co-irkers and clean up after them, you'd have time to do your job and them some. At least your day's over. I am in the middle of mine. At least I can say one coworker asked if she should do the bathroom. Just because she offered, I excused her from that fate. But, yeah, customers are sooo cranky.

[infinitemonkies]

Just curious: I note in a lot of stories a customer tries to return an open game/dvd/etc and is denied. SC throws it at the employee, and storms off....

If the customer doesn't come back for it, does the employee generally get to keep it, or does management shrinkwrap it and put it back on the floor?

[EricKei]

At GameStore, I would think that it would most likely be set aside for a few days in case the person came back -- if unclaimed, it would probably be sent to Corporate.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

And then today--me and two other guys had to do the following:

• help set ad--me and one of the guys
• The other guy had to pull all the autopulls-over 500 SKUs
• get all the pulled items filled--in a store swarming with needy, pestering customers
• clean up the backroom--take bales out, collapse one of the Christmas tree display tables and take it out to the storage container outside.
• start purging toys

Of course we had no help from anybody last night. That's why the autopulls were so high today. Somebody could've just gone around requesting one department at a time last night. That would've helped us a lot.

Oh, and you're going to love this: Yesterday, after we left, Captain Jackass just vanished while cashiers were paging with carryouts. After all the available floor people attended to them, Captain Jackass finally re-materialized again--to tell them he was going on his 15-minute break.

So where was he before that, you ask? Going down the mall to Dollar Tree to pick up food for his break.

EDIT: Oh, also yesterday, one of the seasonal cashiers, who's about as fast as a terminally depressed glacier, was found having a stimulating conversation with a customer in her line on the topic of eye boogers.

[CrazedClerkthe2nd]

Just curious: I note in a lot of stories a customer tries to return an open game/dvd/etc and is denied. SC throws it at the employee, and storms off....

If the customer doesn't come back for it, does the employee generally get to keep it, or does management shrinkwrap it and put it back on the floor?

Usually they get held for a few days and, if not claimed, added in as used inventory. In certain cases we're allowed to take stuff home with us, but not often.