The Great Cleanup

[PhotoTech]

When I think about the things I have been forced to clean up at this company, the first things that come to mind are vomit worthy material, but then i think of this not so little situation. It took three people almost three hours to clean up. During a normal shift there will be someone at the front register, a photo tech, a cosmetician and the on duty manager. Four people...

If this had happened during a night shift, we would have been screwed. Fortunately it was during the day shift during the week so we happened to have more people. There were two managers on duty (the SM and an AM) and our inventory control/3rd key was working that day. I was working the 8-4 shift. It was around 11:30 and i had just finished the task I was on (I forget what i was working on, this was a few years ago.) I was on my way back to the photo lab to see if there were any orders that needed to be printed when I hear *crash**crash**crash**crash**crash**crash*

It came from the photo corner. I stepped up my pace and rushed over there to see what happened. I smelled it before I saw the small lake that had overtaken the photo corner. Alcohol. White wine. A shelf had come down and SIX GALLONS hit the floor.

The noise caught the attention of everyone in the store. Seconds after I arrived so did both managers, the 3rd key, the cosmetician and even the Pharmacist. I turned to the front cashier and asked what happened?! She turns to me and says that a child had been bouncing one of the large bouncy balls and it had hit the shelf with wine on it. Now, these things are probably 2 feet in diameter, and easily capable of causing some damage. The shelf was at least 5 feet in the air and the impact had spread glass easily outside the lake of alcohol. And where was this child and the parent who was supposed to be accompanying him? As soon as the wine started to fall, the mother grabs her son by the arm and hauls ass...

I audibly sighed and simply said "I'll go get the spill magic..." Spill magic is this super absorbent white powder used to clean up spills. We only had 3/4 of a box left. It just was not going to be enough. I started spreading the spill magic at the edges of the mess to stop it from spreading further. The 3rd key came back with a broom and started sweeping the glass that was not surrounded by alcohol. The AM started at it with a mop and bucket. After the 3rd key swept up the dry glass, he got paper towel. When we started lunch breaks the SM even jumped in and helped, so we had three people working on it almost constantly. We didn't finish until 2:20. We only had 2 returns that whole time. In many ways this could have been worse. This is the largest mess i have ever had to deal with. And thus ended The Great Cleanup.

P.S. I was a bit light-headed by the end of this, not exactly tipsy.

[sms001]

It's amazing how many square feet a busted coffee pot can spread over; I can't even imagine six gallons of liquid! Sounds like this would be a good time to have management invest in a Wet-Vac for future use....

[barainga]

If I had been the kid, my mom would have beat my ass while making me clean it up. But then, my mom would never have allowed me to do anything so stupid in the first place. Good thing I had parents who actually parented.

[blas]

There was a story on here a few years ago where a kid was fooling around in a music store and broke several shelves of guitars. Naturally, the mother grabbed her kid and ran in that story as well.

[emax4]

If I had been the kid, my mom would have beat my ass while making me clean it up. But then, my mom would never have allowed me to do anything so stupid in the first place. Good thing I had parents who actually parented.

Too bad there's not a "Like" button here like there is on Facebook. I would click that. ^_^

[Gaki]

And I get upset when someone drops a bottle of Snapple and tiny slivers of glass go EVERYWHERE. I couldn't imagine cleaning something like that up.

It doesn't help that my store does NOT have a "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service" policy and people will walk right in without any shoes. You should see their faces when this exchange occurs:

Me: You may want to put shoes on.
SC: WHY? You don't have a POLICY, I can do what I want!
Me: There are slivers of glass all over the floor that our broom missed. In your best interest, you might want to put shoes on.
SC:

[Merriweather]

P.S. I was a bit light-headed by the end of this, not exactly tipsy.

My grandfather never drank a drop of alcohol in his life, yet he was totally intoxicated once. Way back when, he was a deputy sheriff in the North Carolina mountains. One of their jobs was to find illegal stills. One night he put a bottle of "evidence" in his pocket to take back to the office, and at some point during the evening the bottle in his pocket broke, and he was breathing fumes from some powerful white lightening all evening. Drunker than a skunk, or so I've been told.

[Kristev]

I've seen a lot of broken glass in my job.

[NateTheChops]

I cut my teeth on alcohol spills during my first days at the Chopper many years back. Ah, memories.

Welcome to the fold btw.

[starsinthesky]

My mom would have killed me.

[Kirkygirl]

My mom would have killed me.

Mine too. And then she would have made me make a card to apologize to the entire store staff for working on it, and would have probably started to clean up the mess herself.

[Clover]

She took her kid and took off after probably causing over a hundred dollars in damage? How irresponsible! I swear, some people should undergo rigorous testing before being allowed to reproduce, and if they fail they get clipped permanently, and one of the tests should be a situation like this!

[Yarnil]

My mom would have made me clean uo the entire mess, except for the glass itself.

[Pojodan]

During my stay as bag-boy for a major retail chain I had two major cleanups that this reminds me of:

1) The back-end of the store was poorly designed, in that it was too small for a store that size, and too narrow. This led to boxes of goods being perched precariously high on the narrow shelving.

One day, I came in and was immediately routed to the back, where a large box of cheep wine had tumbled from the top shelf. 8 out of 12 of the bottles in the box were destroyed. Thankfully, the glass stayed mostly contained in the box, but the lake of cheep wine was quite large, and there was enough glass shards to make it hazardous. That took most of the day to clean up.

2) Got called back to the deli to clean up an oil spill.

I expected a quart of canola oil, instead I got greeted with the sight of what happens when the frier malfunctions and overflows.
3 large bags of cat litter, and most of the day later, me and the deli worker managed to get everything but the greasy sheen cleaned up.

I smelled so strongly of french fries that I got strange looks from everyone and my dog spent the rest of the evening sniffing at me.

[WinterWolf]

Back in the dark ages, about 20 years ago, when I worked in a department store for 5 years (until they went out of business), manglement decided for some reason to stack inventory as high as possible. We were stacking things double high on top shelves. This was bad enough in other parts of the store where a customer could run into a shelf and bring the sky down upon them, but then they got to automotive. The only thing we had large enough and in enough quantity was antifreeze. Gallon jugs of antifreeze probably weigh 5 pounds each. So on a shelf 7 feet off the ground we put 2 rows of four bottles (front and back) and then laid a board across them and put another row of 4 jugs on that. I don't remember what kind of weight these shelves were good for but I knew we were on the edge. When the inevitable happened I think we had 2 or 3 shelves come down. We had a green pond an inch deep and probably 6 by 20 feet across. We had to clean it up with mops and buckets and were told to dump it down the sink in the maintenance closet. I knew antifreeze in the sewer system was Bad and Wrong, but I wasn't high enough on the food chain to do anything about it.

Anybody remember Jamesway? Store #1 in Chautauqua Mall, Lakewood NY. And we were a 'test store' which meant any stupid idea home office came up with we had to try it first. If it caused enough damage/chaos/confusion then it would be mandated to all the others. If it actually made things better it was quickly covered up and forgotten.