Two Days In Clevedon

I ache EVERYWHERE!! I swear even my aches have aches. My ass is numb, which is kinda odd as I've barely had time to sit on it for the past 2 days. The reason for this being, that my store sent me and a colleague by the name of Jamie Pooley (think that's how his last name is spelt), to Clevedon store. Clevedon is about 35 mins drive away, and their store is one of the last in the country to be converting from a Safeway store into a Morrisons store.

This is a VERY labour intensive process, the store has been swarming with staff, labourers and people like me and Jamie, drafted from other stores in the region, to lend a hand. I barely saw him though, as I was sent to the Admin office and there put under the charge of Sian Lloyd. Sian, while quite lovely to look at and with a striking welsh accent, is a very efficient taskmistress and has ensured for the past couple days while I was there (working from about 8:30am-5pm), that I was kept very busy indeed.

I don't think I have ever done so much walking, in so short a time in my life before. The store is on two levels, with offices and warehouse upstairs, shop floor downstairs. Two sets of stairs link the two floors as well as a cargo elevator. Only one set of stairs was cordoned off, while the flooring was being relaid. So, to get to the admin office, I had to go across the store to the stairs, upstairs, and then back across the store.... followed by all that in reverse to get back to the aisle where I was working. I'm sure you can appreciate just how quickly that adds up to a lot of walking and going up and down stairs.

In our store, I mostly spend the day in the office and tap on order pads, stock sheets, and various other bits of paperwork into the computers. Not so there, for starters their admin office is tiny, and the air conditioning is non-existant, so it is really hot in there! They have a fan on maximum at all times pointed at the servers to stop them from melting. That's how hot that room is. I was glad not to be in there, as anytime I was in there for longer than a couple mins, I started feeling really sleepy.

Sian has had me walking the store, zapping this and that product, bringing the zap gun full of codes back to the office, where she will print off a load of tickets or advertising from the scans, and then little old me gets to go and put them all out... and then start all over again! A long, tiring and frankly, very boring job.

Yesterday, when I got home from work, I was so tired I just went straight to bed, 7pm and I was in the land of Zzzzzz. The shifts are hard enough work, but at the end of both days, our lift home has been late, very late, more than an hour late. It's November, and it is bloody cold outside. Thankfully both our lifts are people who appreciate the use of a heater in their car, and so I sorta didn't notice the trips back to Taunton. Not so tired today. Dunno why though, as I woke up at 3am this morning and couldn't get back to sleep.