Work is crap

Yeah, in this economy, I'm thankful to at least HAVE a job...even though it only pays $10.75 per week and there's so many deductions that my take home is about half of that...

Every Wednesday I have to place an order. Orders are due by 2pm. I get to work at 8am...then have to spend several hours just trying to find an order gun. The store has 7 guns, one is permanently kept in grocery receiving, the others are supposed to be split, 3 to Osco, and 3 to Jewel...it never happens that way. There were a lot of complaints about not having available guns so when the company got new guns, some brilliant buffoon made the decision to keep them all at the service desk and have people check them out. That's fine...however NOBODY CHECKS THEM OUT! I go to check, there are 2 out of 6 guns checked out, but none available. Now, I think I'm pretty decent at math....unless the "new" math has changed things....6 guns minus 2 checked out...there should have been hmmmm 4? available. Hmmmm nope. No guns. Walk around the store asking everybody "Do you have a gun?" "Hmmm nope" (while hiding one behind their backs) Normally, I don't get an order gun until about 10 or 11am. My department takes at least 2 hours for a decent order. I take a 30 minute lunch at noon...so getting a gun at 11, I only get an hour to order before lunch, and an hour after. Not really enough time for a very good order. OTC is not a department that can survive a half-assed order, however when the equipment is not available, what is somebody to do?

Also...a few weeks ago (actually almost a month now) I took a vacation week to try to help save payroll. I was assured that while I was gone that my department would be taken care of. It wasn't. A month later I'm STILL trying to catch up. Here's the scoop: All our overstock is programmed into the ordering guns, so that if we order something that we have overstock, we're alerted. After our order is transmitted, we get a printout (a pull sheet) of items to be taken from overstock and filled to the sales floor. We get 2 of these a week. During vacation, my pull sheets were given to one of our night shift high school kids. Instead of taking the product from overstock and filling the sales floor, she marked off and initialed the pull sheet and filed it. The product was still in overstock. Meaning that when I came back, I had to reprogram everything. That normally could be done in a couple days...but not in the retail world. It's taken a month because every time I tried, I got called away to help somebody else with their job...but getting no help at all with mine....except for the high school kid who messed it all up in the first place.

So today...2 hours to get a gun, I'm trying to order, getting paged every 10 minutes for some stupid thing and I have people all over trying to take my gun. I get my order done (half-assed), take a break, then start re-programming my overstock. Apparently the boss isn't happy because this means that I'm actually utilizing the space in my bay, and he can't store his overstock liquor there. I'm in the middle of re-programming (with a department the size of mine, this could be an all day project, between re-stacking, organizing, and condensing boxes) the boss says that my department is a mess and I need to face it up before I go home. Hmmm OK, but the guy who does date codes was in today and he faced it while doing date codes. SO...I decided that I'd do what I could today, and do the rest tomorrow...but I finish MY work FIRST before doing anybody else's. Thursday is ad audit day...the gal who does our audits complained about the amount of work she has to do, so they decide that since I have nothing to do on Thursdays that I could take half her audits. Anybody else in that store can get all the audits done in one 8 hour shift, but for some reason she can't....why? Very poor time management skills...and she spends about 2-3 hours snooping to see what everybody has in their desks and overstock areas.

Such is the world of retail.