The Saturday Epic2¶
Another Saturday another early morning. Looking across the car park at 5:55am I was surprised by two things. The first was that the store had been opened up and secondly that the only vehicle in sight belonged to Lee Owen. This puzzled me as Mr Owen isn’t usually vertical at that time in a Saturday morning.
After negotiating the back door I entered the store being greeted by the short little gimp. I spouted some garbage due to my inability to string a sentence together at that time of the morning. Eventually a communication got going between us and I was informed that this wasn’t going to be a normal Saturday. Oh bugger, I thought, this ain’t good.
The abnormal Saturday was based around an important visit. This would involve an individual exploring the store and conversing with the manager while at the same time finger pointing or back slapping as appropriate. These management types are so shallow at times.
I started off my day with bread. With the help of Raddish it began to fly onto the shelf. His anti-gravity object moving spell was impressive in this respect but it was showing off too much. I remarked in a humorous was that it would be sods law that on a day when we were expecting important guests the delivery would be late. This resulted in my belief that I’m psychic.
It usually arrives about 6:30 but today it appeared at the back door at 7:50. It was time for me to drag the cages off the lorry. Not the easiest thing with Mike watching you to make sure that there are two people to a cage. This approach is not usually followed to the letter in his absence and therefore goes more smoothly. The delivery driver chirped in a Mike like manor “Is he a good gaffer then?”. Myself and Lee were reduced to a brief outburst of laughter at which point the driver understood our opinion of said fellow.
Next on my chaotic round of tasks was to help put out the Dairy produce. A small army of helpers had accumulated. It was just a shame it had to be Rajiv and Phat Matt. That pairing is the last thing you want before 9am any morning. There insult based humour did not appeal to me. I ignored them.
Normal routine was restored briefly when a sausage and egg sandwich found itself in my stomach during a pause in my activity.
I was about to start on putting out choc & sweets when the nerve shattering call of my name uttered by Mike rang through the air. “Ok Super Matt put that away and go and help Tony for a bit. It should only be 15mins”. Fair enough, it was better than sweets I assumed. My hand was furnished with a pencil and I was directed to the price tickets. “Write the number of facings on each ticket”, little did I know that this would involve nearly every single ticket. After around 2.5 hrs my fingers had gone numb and my back and shoulders aching from excessive cold air exposure. The task hadn’t been completed but Mike can’t let me finish a job when i can get a bit of something else done instead.
Back to the warehouse it was. No sooner had I completed one wheeler worth of stock I was required in the cash office. The printer was buggered. Not buggered exactly it was just the paper jam light which was on. This caused panic for Sharon as an orange LED is not a Green LED and green is good. I promptly took the thing to bits and was not happy. There was no paper anywhere inside to jam. We had to have a printer though else things would go tits up over night when it couldn’t print off vital data.
*Light bulb moment* Why not use one of the other Kyocera laser printers. It might not be the same model but it might have a compatible driver. It did and I was glad to see it rattle off a clean sheet of readable text. The service engineer was contacted about the printer. It was not a vital task a paper jam. After playing about with all the easily removable bits I finally got it working again, I rule :mrgreen:. More printer swapping later everything was back in its place and working nicely.
The next couple of hours up until lunch went as well as could be expected.
Lunch consisted of a takeout style curry, a coke and an aero (Yes I know I’m supposed to be on a diet). I didn’t get quite as much coke as I had bargained for as no sooner had I purchased it Emma, who had done the transaction, swiped it dashed into the warehouse and consumed a bit.
Advisory to anybody else who is thinking about swiping my lunch, DON’T.
Lunch time was unfortunate in that Hollie wasn’t in today. However Andy P, Gaz and Jenna were. Could I ask for better company? Well yes actually but this was Somerfield and it was the best I was going to get. Andy P had something to show me, out it came onto the table where I admired its size. The Orange SPV phone is nice indeed. I might get one could I afford it.
Lunch passed without many major events. Then again is lunch ever that eventful? Answer, no. In my final hour i killed as much time as I could. Myself and Andy had just finished pulling the bins in from outside when a family appeared outside. Had the bins still been out there I got the impression they would have flung a few small children in to search for dinner. What’s the world coming to? Cos I sure don’t know.
I then went home :)
Many of you will now be wondering, “Why haven’t you moaned about Rajiv yet?” Well I decided I would go into that in a section all of its own.
Multiple times during today he plodded about the store trying to do as much of as little as possible as he could get away with. Working the warehouse consisted of moving a high percentage of the boxes round to make it look like work had been done. How little he had done became apparent when Gaz looked at low/nil stocks. I would expect everybody at Somerfield to pull their own weight; Rajiv seems to be having difficulty with this. If he did a good job I wouldn’t be forced to complain. I heard today that he is trying to get 8 weeks off work for revision. A slim chance indeed. If he applied himself on a regular basis he wouldn’t need to have time off. I think that’s enough ranting about him for one Saturday. I believe I got the point across last week.
Thoughts for today: