Could somebody please put me in a coma for the next two months?

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

As I mentioned some time ago, the clearance swamp is developing its own small-town store concept, which it used to have but spun off, and now wants again. One of the stores to be remodeled under this new concept happens to be 30 miles or so to the north of me, and several people from my store are going up there at various times from the last week in July to early in September to get it set up for its grand opening.

I volunteered to go up there and pitch in where needed. Yeah, it's a longer commute, but it's a steady schedule, I'd get paid mileage plus probably overtime since they do have to have all this done before the grand opening. And best of all, all the work is going to be done in a completely customer-free environment. The store is being shut down, except for the pharmacy, while it's being redone, and the pharmacy will be walled off from where the work is being done.

Well friends...guess who got told today he probably isn't going to be asked to work up there, because they think they have all the people they'll need, and "we need somebody to keep things running here."? Seriously, they take our entire freight team except for me? In my place they send somebody who I don't think has worked freight before, and thus isn't going to be much help?

Guess who's going to be unloading trucks at night and then coming back in early in the morning for stocking two times a week now, for over a month, and thus losing out on sleep? (Unless he can beg and plead with his manager not to schedule him like that all the time? The people going up to the new store aren't going be working short turnarounds like that for the time they're up there.)

Guess who's probably also going to be working at least half of every weekend because the people working in the new store won't be able to?

Guess who's also going to be busy with purging, rearranging, carryouts, customer service and other stuff we always do in the backroom and on the floor, except he's going to be doing it All By Himself?

Guess who's going to get called on the carpet if any of the above start slipping?

Guess who's going to be doing that all with no managerial help whatsoever, since the only competent manager in the store is going up to help set up the new store, leaving us with the completely hands-off SM and the Twit Twins?

Guess who's going to be losing out on all that extra money he could be making?

Guess who's going to have to keep facing the same SCs he tired of long ago, and during the big Back to School push and a Lowest Prices of the Season event?

Now I will admit, my reasons for wanting to work up there are largely selfish. I didn't want to be the one who has to stay behind, all alone, scrambling to keep things from imploding in the backroom and on the floor while everybody else is gone. But--story of my life--the curse of competence has struck once again (my manager's trying to make it seem like "You're so great, we know you're up to the challenge! *beam*") and I don't get what I want.

This sucks.

[Exaspera]

That's what you get for being good at what you do! :-P

[poofy_puff]

If someone "calls you on the carpet" just say right back to them "there's only one of me, deal with it".

[Whiskey]

That's what you get for being good at what you do! :-P

No good dead goes unpunished.

[cinema guy]

My suggestion: do not put in an ounce of extra effort. Do what you normally do, not an iota more.

[Berys]

Possible silver lining to this brooding cloud: you won't have quite as many people attempting to screw up the backroom for you during...

Ok, that was a rather pathetic silver lining...

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Manager told me yesterday they're kinda starting over on determining who's working at the new store and when. Apparently some people who originally planned to work there are now saying they can't. So I guess that's good news.

However, if I don't get a chance to go up there, I am definitely going to be hating life. Manager told me I will have to work these short turnarounds on truck because there are no hours for me to work elsewhere. At least if I got to work in the new store I wouldn't be doing that for weeks on end.

She also claims she's not going to let things get out of hand and make me scramble, but she can't predict call-outs, NCNSs, customer traffic, and other projects that may get unexpectedly dropped on our heads. So that's no consolation.

[poofy_puff]

All this is their problem, not yours. You cannot be in two places at once. What are they gonna do, FIRE you? and be left with NO ONE? It doesn't seem like any of these crises will get you fired or disciplined. Yes, they'll bitch at you about it, but you just laugh at them. Say something sarcastic about cloning technology not being up to the company's standards.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Today was my first taste of what's in store for me for the next month.

Came in at 5 and found 211 SKUs in the gun needing to be pulled. Yesterday was Sunday. Sundays are normally dead. What the hell happened?

It came to me eventually; Sunday was the beginning of our Back to School advertising, and people decided to kick off their Back to School shopping and rip the hearts out of their children and devour them. (The hearts I mean. Although I wouldn't mind if some of the children were devoured. )

School supplies had 39 SKUs needing to be pulled. Added up to about 1,000 pieces just for school supplies alone. And all of it filled on the floor. We didn't take any back for backstock.

If I didn't have a couple helping me with pulling and filling, the shit would either still be in the scanner not being pulled, or sitting in carts in the backroom.

And this is just a little dinky 4-day preview ad before our big mailer hits Thursday. And we will have trucks to unload or fill Thursday, Friday and Saturday, which are forecast to be the busiest days of the ad.

Oh, and the complaining about notebook-cover and folder colors has begun in earnest. I'm thinking this whole "different colors for different subjects" thing is just a conspiracy by the teachers to rain down heck upon the retail peons of the world.

ETA: And now that I have my copy of the ad, we're going to be doing loyalty coupons as well. People do spend enough to be able to use their coupons, so ponder that the next time a cashier starts bugging you about singing up for a store card. This also means we'll be giving people do-overs on their coupons if they later return anything they purchased using the coupon, because we're just spineless like that.

Looks like I'm in for five days of suck and blow in a row.

[SmivMoc]

You should immediately ask for a huge raise. If you're going to be doing the work of three people, you should at least get paid for two of them.

[EricKei]

No good dead goes unpunished.

Actually, that may be a good idea. I'm sure he could use some zombie assistance. Grab your copy of the Necronomicon, and I'll dig up some old friends to come by...

[DerangedHermit]

You should immediately ask for a huge raise. If you're going to be doing the work of three people, you should at least get paid for two of them.

I don't think he even gets paid enough for one person.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Well, it's started already. GM manager started her month-long stint at the new store today.

On our last truck we got in a metric fuckton of plastic storage totes in various sizes, shapes and colors. Since we're running a big back to school/campus sale and have a Super Duper Uber Mega Super Stupendous Lowest Prices of the Season sale coming, the DC is bulking us up on stuff like that.

GM manager told us to leave the totes (amounting to 8 pallets worth) downstairs for somebody to work into a bulk area on the floor so they don't have to be backstocked. With all the other housewares stuff that's been coming in like gangbusters, I have no room for these totes in backstock.

The weekend came and went and those totes are still sitting in the backroom. Since GM manager wasn't around to make sure those totes got put out, they didn't get put out. I told somebody about them this afternoon as I was leaving for the day and they told me they'd take a look at them. If nothing gets done with those totes, I don't know where we're going to put them, but we have to put them somewhere because there's another truck tomorrow.

I plan on having nothing to do with these totes. I'm training for receiving clerk this week.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

This is going to be a long fucking month.

Okay, the rule at the swamp is you do not trade shifts with somebody who doesn't know how to do your job. I can't take a cashier's shift, and a cashier can't take my shift. A floor person who's cashier trained could take a cashier's shift, but that cashier probably couldn't take the floor shift. The reasons for this should be obvious.

Second, when switching shifts with somebody, you must get the approval of YOUR manager--not just any manager in the store who'll just say yes because swapping those shifts won't make any difference in his/her department.

Yesterday Captain Jackass, because he just can't get up to be in to work at 7 am to work a four-hour shift after working until 8 the previous night , got somebody to take his autopull shift this morning. Somebody who's never done autopull before and is not really familiar with backroom either. When this person asked Captain Jackass how to do autopull, he told him "You'll pick it up."

So at 7 am this other game came in, and the opening manager asked where Captain Jackass was. We had to tell her he got this other person to take his shift. Now, Captain Jackass couldn't go to his own manager to get this swap approved, since she is gone for the month helping set up the new store, but he still could've told somebody else in this case.

Other guy had 220 SKUs in the gun needing to be pulled. He only got about half of them done. He also didn't seem to understand to pull everything first and then fill, because I saw him wandering around between the backroom and the floor with product. We had to ask some other kid to try and finish the autopull after we left at 1:30, because he was in until 3:30. Bet he doesn't get the autopull done either. So tomorrow those SKUs will be rolled over into tomorrow's pulls, which will already be bloated with bullshit pulls because we did a truck today. I will almost certainly be helping with autopull tomorrow whenever I have down time while checking in vendors and product solo for the first time.

And similar crap will keep happening because we'll be leaning more on kids who aren't motivated and don't care.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

And tonight I got something else that makes it suck hardcore for me to be staying behind at the swamp--I get the worst shifts.

I took two days of vacation next week. So Monday I am scheduled 7 to 4:15.

You're probably thinking I'm such a baby for complaining about a 9-hour shift when some people have to work 10 hours, 12 hours, or more in a day. Thing is, management wouldn't dream of asking anybody else to work those kinds of hours to make up for vacation they take. And I'm always dead tired when I get done with an 8-hour shift

Of course, this only happened because:

A). Corporate fucked us over by making us send a bunch of our people to help remodel this other store instead of having several different stores send a couple people--hence we don't have anybody to keep up with our daily tasks and customer service, so they "just needed a body" as Moon Unit told me, and

B). I'm only getting paid 7.5 hours per day for my two vacation days, instead of being allowed to put in I wanted to be paid for 8. This is fucking retarded. So what if I have a couple odd hours left over at the end of the year? I'll just bug out early one day if I can to use those hours, or just lose them. I've already used whatever vacation I'm going to anyway.

I took another day of vacation the week after next. Watch me get hit with another nine-hour shift.