Today I had a 9:30am to 6:30pm shift, which I found a little odd as the store closes at 4pm on a Sunday, owning to Britains archaic trading laws. Anyway, not only was I on Admin today, but also my colleague Ben Harvey, which was doubly odd, as well, frankly there isn't really enough work for one person on a Sunday in the office, let alone the pair of us.
And it has just been one thing after another all frikking day long. The main computer program we use to place orders and input stock counts crashed company wide (it wouldn't allow anyone to log into it). We normally have something like 6 windows of this running. We managed to keep open the 1 window that we had signed in when the crash happened, so eveything had to be inputted via that.
It was crazy busy in the store, meaning that every phone call that came in that wanted to speak to such and such dept, ended up getting routed back to us in the office, because no-one in the dept was free to pick up the phone. So a lot of messages were taken down, (which of course we then have to either phone the dept to pass on, or run around the store playing messenger). So just as I'm about to go to lunch, the Duty Manager of the day comes into the office and says that the Pie Shop dept could use a hand. Having nothing to do, I said I'd go and help them out after lunch.
Only it wasn't Pie Shop that needed a hand, noooo.... it was the Oven Fresh dept next to it! The dept that sells hot roast chickens, the dept that had nobody to clean the ovens that day (despite having a guy there who clearly could have done just that, and would have had a much better idea of what he was doing than I did). So for 2.5 hours today I was stuck in the small room behind the ovens, sweltering in the heat in there, leaning over a vast sink of hot chemical-filled water, scrubbing the VERY heavy and awkward pieces of the Rotisserie ovens.
And they were disgusting!! Thick in brown, burnt on grease, fat and lumps of chicken meat, skin and blood. I felt (and still feel as I write this) physically sick doing this chore. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that it is the worst job in the store. The water would turn brown, so I'd empty the sink, rinse it and refill it (which took ages), and the water would be brown again in no time at all. I got splashed in the water, I was sweating, it was not nice.
And what was worse, was that once I was done on the dept and headed back to the office, I then still had nearly 2 hours of my shift left. So I spent most of that helping out the EPOS team with placing promotional signs on shelf edges. This would have been an easy job, if the signs were in any kind of order. Instead, I spent most of the time walking from aisle to aisle looking for whewre the adverts went, and a good half of them had been printed out for products we don't even stock. Only because I don't work on the shopfloor, I didn't know we didn't stock them, so ended up wating a goodly chunk of time on that as well.
I can honestly say, that I think that today is the worst shift I have had in quite some time, and I am now very much looking forward, to having Tuesday and Wednesday off work!
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