Hey, Kos. Been a while since my last entry, I know. I've been meaning to post this for a while, but it kinda slipped my mind when I got injured on the job. I won't say when, I won't say how, I'll just say that my steel-toed boots are the reason I still have a foot right now, and light duty sucks. (Answering the phone... kill me...)
How's the backstock problem been, you ask? The backstock problem has, at times, gotten so bad that I'm amazed the store could still function at all. We actually were placing backstock pallets on the salesfloor and making me feel really sorry for whoever desperately needed to buy a plunger and could no longer reach them. You don't wanna know how Christmas went, you just don't. I've mostly blacked it out of my memory, anyway.
It was after Christmas that really raised my eyebrows. That's the time of the year that, y'know, everybody's poor and nobody's really buying anything, even full-timers are seeing their hours cut, you know the drill. In all the years I've worked there, every year January and February were always teeny, tiny trucks; I remember one year, one day, I got all of that day's GM-side grocery on one pallet, sorted (as in one corner per aisle, with strays in the middle). Not this year, oh no. This year, we were getting pre-Christmas-sized trucks. We'd have two trucks three nights in a row, all of them over 2,000 pieces. There was one night where we only had enough room to throw down 20 pallets to unload those trucks and just had to keep miraculously finding room to change them out. Our skinniest people--who, let's face it, are not plentiful on truck crew--and our best box-stackers became our most valued employees. I started carrying snacks to keep my blood sugar under control because I knew I wasn't going to get to break on time. We go when the truck's done, even if they did only schedule five people, and one of them calls in, and another one is a guy I've been trying to get rid of ever since he started but despite a (growing) list of infractions longer than my arm, they still won't fire him. I could spend the whole diary just ranting about him, really I could. Don't tempt me. I call him Loudmouth, and he is That Guy.
The backstock has started to get back under control, slowly but surely. We seem to be holding steady at about 20 temp bins on GM-side, though grocery's starting to go to hell again. However, it is getting close to Inventory so I expect this to change soon and not in a good way.
We still turn off the GM-side doors at night, by the way.
Now, help me figure this out...
I had actually started composing this entry in my head quite a while ago, but it vanished in a puff of smoke when the incident happened the same night I was injured. I'm thinking it's time to revisit it, and it's more about food safety (or lack thereof).
If there's one part of the shipping process I will never understand, it's mixed pallets. Even though somehow the laws of shipping are different than the laws of storage and somehow it's okay to ship chemicals (which leak all the time) above food, mixed pallets take the cake. See, if something is wrapped in shrinkwrap, it only counts as one piece on the truck count, even if that mixed pallet is taller than I am and contains a little bit of every corner of the store. And they don't stack it, either. In fact, I'm sure that whoever builds the mixed pallets really, really, really hates society as a whole. Take a whole bunch of fragile glass things, like baby food or pasta sauce and some little squeeze-packets of applesauce just for fun, maybe put them on the pallet neatly if you're feeling generous but otherwise just chuck 'em, and then haphazardly dump gallons of paint and jugs of kitty litter and weights and car jacks on top of it, and then put any-fucking-thing you damn well please on top of that, shrinkwrap it, and call it a day. Seriously. We lost whole cases of baby food jars one day because there had been a bucket of aluminum roofing sealant thrown upside-down on top of it, and it leaked. Thankfully I've had personal experience with that sort of thing, so I was at least somewhat prepared for the mess and smell and why there's only certain paint thinners you use to get it off your hands, NOT XYLENE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.
(Unfortunately, due to my time at the pet store, whenever there's a case of wet dog food that's spent the entire truck ride, and probably a bit before that, cracked open and being infested with maggots and turning into this rancid black liquid shit, I am somewhat immune to that smell so I get to be the one to get rid of that, too, by tying it into four different garbage bags and making a mental note to send the Claims people a fruit basket. Everyone else is too busy trying not to make the smell worse, if you catch my drift.)
Back to the mixed pallets: when I say "any-fucking-thing you damn well please," I mean it. I have multiple pictures on my phone of food sitting underneath things that should be nowhere near food. As in, "Honey, does this jam taste a little pesticidey to you?" "Oh my god, the oil pollution in the ocean is so bad it's gotten into my artesian spring water in the fancy glass bottle!" If I didn't hate Tabasco so much I'd honestly wonder what it tastes like when mixed with Coppertone, and would anyone who eats Tabasco notice?
Don't get me wrong, the whole truck is like this, but that's because one single guy loads the truck by hand. (Before we learned this, my money was on a trebuchet, though the most popular theory was that the trucks were loaded by somebody with a t-shirt cannon.) The mixed pallets, there is no way under the bright-burning sun that this shit can be anything other than deliberate.
The night I was injured, before the incident I was taking out a mixed pallet and delivering its contents. And I stopped almost as soon as I started, because at the top of a towering column of food held up only by the shrinkwrap, there were two bags of a lawn treatment chemical, one of which had actual bird shit on it and was leaking. (The tear was small, and it looks like pinhead-sized Styrofoam bits.) So after I snapped a quick picture I stopped, folded my arms, and stood there unmoving and unworking until a manager came and looked at it.
The Cheerleader** didn't want me to Claims out the whole pallet. She didn't want me to even Claims out the whole column, which had little white specks running all down it, and did I mentioned how close it was to bird shit? She only wanted me to Claims out the case directly under the bag because "the plastic will protect everything else." Uh, when the plastic doesn't cover the whole product, just holds it against the cardboard...
I waited until she walked away, grabbed a shopping cart, and built an exact diorama of the scene before me, and took it into the back and left it there with a note saying that it had come in like that. I also left it in a highly visible area, so if someone tries to sell the stuff on the bottom, they're gonna have to go through my "accidental" mess first and hope nobody notices.
Now, I like to think I am an ethical person. But the next truck crew member might not be. Or they might be lazy, or stupid, or all of the above; no shortage of those on truck crew either, since the backroom is the place they send new hires who might not work out very well on the floor. In addition to lazy, grumpy morons, we also get the Easter Seals work contracts, or that autistic kid (who did fairly well once I was able to explain what we wanted from him in a way he could understand, though God help you if you were between him and the time clock if it was time for something because he would mow your ass down), or even the guy who has problems converting short-term to long-term memory and is given a job sorting things, I shit you not, and if they don't work out with us then their next stop is Overnight Maintenance before sadly being let go. And since I'm on light duty until my doctor says otherwise, I can't be back there to watch out for dangerous shit or make sure Loudmouth isn't training them wrong on purpose because he thinks it's funny. (Yes, this is a thing he does.) It worries me.
**I really, genuinely hate The Cheerleader. [Valley Girl up-talk][perky smile] "Because, ya know, like, the plastic will protect it. And like, surely it's not that bad, and I'm not a doctor and I know you've got broken bones but you can still, like, stand up just a little. I mean, you can be on crutches and sweep at the same time, right? Do you really need the crutches? Surely you don't use them all the time, right, getting in the shower or something? And I just think that, like, you suck at life and you should die in a fire. Thaaanks." [/perky smile][/Valley Girl up-talk]
I may have made up the last bit of that conversation, but it really wouldn't sound out of place coming from her. The real head-exploder is the knowledge that this imbecile is a fucking co-manager. Yeah.
And now, it's time for one of those doctor-prescribed things where you don't need to take it if you need to be able to move in a straight line sometime in the next four hours, because ow.
(Oh, while it's on my mind, I have a little thought exercise for you as it occurred to me just the other day: next time you gird your loins and march into your local Great Satan, count how many black cashiers you see, and then count how many black people are in the deli cooking fried chicken. I've asked mine, and I've been told that at least half of them did not hire in for deli but were sent there anyway. It's something that pisses me off.)