Our grocery chain is going through some very big changes--a complete overhaul of the electronic side of our business--and I have been selected to serve as an in-store trainer and facilitator.
They think I'm computer literate. Ssssshhhhh!
There are three kinds of things in my world: the things I care about and have no problem doing; the things I care about but struggle to do; and the things I don't care about at all. Modern computing falls firmly into that second category.
I used to be, well, not a crackerjack hacker by any means, but pretty comfortable with computers. That was back in the days when you had to learn their language. For many years, of course, computers have forgotten they ever had a language, but they've come no closer to learning Human. It's all gooey--or is that GUI?--to me. As I have said many times before, I don't speak Picture.
As with all second-category stuff, I have coping strategies to make me seem more competent than I am. I tend to learn just enough to get by, and then five or six nifty-neat-o shortcuts and tricks that most people don't know about. Exhibit those at just the right time and presto: computer literacy is assumed.
By October, I just might be as savvy as they think I am now.
My first training session was held at Orangeville Price Chopper this past Tuesday. This store is a revelation. It's recently converted from a different banner. The sales floor is twice the size of ours, and their back room is positively cavernous: you could fit our back room into one corner. I never got a look into the coolers, which was probably a good thing...I might have snapped, thrown their dairy manager into the compactor, and taken his job.
On this day, I was forcibly and repeatedly reminded of why I dropped out of university in such disgust. We were handed out a booklet that consisted of about 150 pages of slides. Then they put the same slides up on to the projector and proceeded to read them out loud to us. All of them. Pretty much word for word. Hey, I said to myself, at least I didn't have to shell out $100 or more for this booklet. They took questions at intervals, almost all of which were answered four or five slides down the line. Five hours later, we finished going through the book which had taken me about half an hour to read and digest.
I'm sorry, that probably came out a little smartass-y. I didn't mean for it to. I'm just--again--different, is all. Here's an illustration:
One of the slides we saw (and read) was titled We tend to remember at our level of involvement. It noted that most people remember
- 10% of what they READ
- 20% of what they HEAR
- 30% of what they SEE
- thus, 50% of what they HEAR AND SEE
- but, 70% of what they SAY and
- 90% of what they SAY AND DO
In my case, those figures are quite wrong...and I can prove it.
We were supposed to train each other on how to make paper airplanes. The training exercise went out the window pretty quickly: almost everybody simply put their hands together a few times, crinkle fold fold crinkle abracadabra! paper airplanes. Not me.
I've never made a paper airplane in my life. Not once. Never even tried. I was one of those brown-nosers who actually listened when the teacher was talking. So I had no frame of experiential reference. I looked at the pictured instructions and yecch! I don't speak picture. I looked at the written instructions and thought I understood what it was I needed to do. So I put my hands together a few dozen times, crinkle fold spindle mutilate crinkle fold fold crinkle abracathunk! paper...thingy.
I clearly remember those written instructions, because I remember a hell of a lot more than ten percent of what I read. But even after my training partner corrected what errors were correctable and guided me through the procedure of making a paper airplane, I tell you I couldn't replicate that thing with a paper gun to my paper head. How to make a paper airplane: third category thing. Okay?
This reminds me of the time I tried out for a summer job at CAMI, the joint GM-Suzuki plant where my stepdad worked (he still does). I didn't really want the job, but I sure wanted the $17.00 an hour (1989 dollars) it paid. There were several steps--written tests, interviews and so on--and I jigged and reeled my way right through them, until I got to the physical aptitude test.
There were actually two tests here. The first one involved putting discs on axles. There were five or six steps, and we were graded on speed and accuracy. I didn't have any problems. I wasn't the fastest kid in the room, but I was probably a shade above average.
Then the sub-assembly. This was a mishmash of pipes, thingamabobs, whatzits and so-and-so's: it looked like a 3-D Rorschach blot. A completed model sat on the desk at the front. The instructor demonstrated, first slowly and then quickly, how to create an exact replica. It was quite a bit more complex--probably twenty or twenty five steps. We then had 45 minutes to create as many exact replicas as we could. It was about fifteen seconds into that 45 minutes when I realized I'd come as far as I was going to get. There was no hope of my getting that job no matter how high my previous scores had been. Because I had absolutely no idea what the fuck I was doing. I stared at pieces until I was seeing triple and willed them to fit together. They refused. I tried screwing this into that and those into the other. No dice. At seventeen years old, I felt like crying. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched busy little beavers assembling perfect replicas with one eye tied behind their backs. I think the best score was 27. I hadn't even managed one.
But I can tell you a concise summary of everything I learned on Tuesday--through my half an hour's reading, the redundant presentation nothwithstanding--and I doubt I'd miss anything important. My mind seems to be suited to abstraction. It rebels whenever it has to instruct my hands to do something more complicated than hitting a few keys on a keyboard.
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About six weeks ago, I pre-booked the lead item for this week's sale: Danone Silhouette and Creamy yogurt 8-packs for $2.00. That's a pretty amazing price, considering the 16-packs retail for $6.47 at our store and up to $7.49 elsewhere.
Earlier in the week, I got to looking at the flyer and thinking. It looked pretty hot. And the more I looked at the yogurt, the hotter it got. I called up Danone and asked them to bump me up to four skids of product instead of three. No problem, they said.
They lied.
My yogurt showed up Thursday...39% of it. The rest of it was nowhere to be found. It took repeated calls all over the place to find out that I wouldn't be getting any more until at least Tuesday. As a chain, we had booked far beyond their capacity to produce.
And this is my fault how?
Our head office swung into action and the next day I found myself with the remainder of my order. Except it wasn't Silhouette and Creamy 8-packs: it was Activia and Cardivia 8-packs instead, including a couple of flavours we don't normally stock.
For those customers who don't mind, they're getting an even better deal: Cardivia and Activia retail at 8 for $4.99. You'll never see them at $2.00. If you like them, or if you think you might, get thee out to a Price Chopper and save save save!
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Our dining room set arrived today, the one we purchased nearly two months ago at the Brick's Boxing Day Blowout. I was just getting home from work as they were leaving. I came in to find....a box.
Shit, I thought. If I had known it was going to come in a box, I would have gone to IKEA and saved a hundred bucks.
I mean, come on. We had originally asked that it be delivered last Friday. (Actually, it was supposed to be delivered with our couch, three weeks ago. ) Last Friday morning, they called me and said it would be here sometime between noon and 2:00. "I'm sorry, " I said. "I've got to leave for work no later than 1:20...is there any way you can make sure it's here before that?"
He'd try.
He didn't try hard enough.
Eva called up the Brick that afternoon and gave them seven shades of holy shit, the end result being that we'd have it delivered the following Saturday (today) at no extra charge.
And so it was.
In a box.
More stuff to put together. Subassemblies, anyone?
Eva did most of the work on that as I moved furniture around. I took our old set out to the curb, fully expecting it to be gone by tomorrow: this is a student area, and there must be thirty sets of eyes trained on everybody's trash, hoping for treasure. What I didn't expect was to put four chairs out to the curb, come back in for the table, get that to the door, look out and find the chairs gone.
Where they went didn't remain a mystery for long. As I carted the table down to the curb, my next-door neighbour--handyman and Doberman-neglector--appeared and asked me
"Are you throwing those out?"
No, I thought. I'm setting up a picnic at curbside. Here's your sign.
"Yes."
"Well, they're in pretty good shape", he said as he took the table up to his own front door. "What, did you get a new set?"
No, I thought. We've decided we're now going to eat every meal off the floor. Here's another sign, dumbass.
"Yeah. A smaller one."
The table and chairs disappeared into his house. Eva echoed my thoughts precisely when I got back into mine. "All that money for a new deck, hot tub, door, fence, furnace, and he doesn't have a dinette set?"
Apparently not.
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Made a Costco run today. God, I love that store. There's no cheaper place in the world to buy new books. I picked up Stephen King's latest, Cell. Also Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed Or Fail by Jared Diamond. Both of these things are dystopian. I'm in a real dystopian mood lately.
Anyway, g'night, all.
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