Work rant

It may not compare to Catelli's, but I've had a couple of days that simply must be blogged lest I blow up.

We've had Black Diamond cheese bars on sale this past week for $4.44. Last time they were on, I sold more cheese bars than any other store in the chain, despite being briefly out of stock one day. That particular sale had just ended when I was required to order for the next one, i.e. this one. So I ordered heavy.

I had no way of knowing that every chain in the Tri-Cities area would have cheese on sale at roughly the same time, some of them cheaper than us. And so--ha-ha--I sold just a little more than half my stock, leaving me with enough cheese to constipate the world. 

Not too bad a problem--it's still on sale at that same price, and will be until I'm down to some manageable level of stock. 

I said all that to say this: a huge skid of Black Diamond cheese bars arrived our store yesterday, unordered, unexpected...and, as it turned out, unbilled. I got paged to receiving and damn near shit myself (good thing I've been eating lots of cheese, eh?) 

"What the ----'s that doing here?"

"No idea. Did you order that?"

"I didn't order that. Did you order that?"

"I didn't order that either. Why would I order that? I've got three of those skids already, for ----'s sake!"

(The language in recieving gets a bit spicy. It's where we can say all the things we want to say out on the sales floor.)

Upstairs I go to the computer, which is located as far from receiving as it's possible to get and still be in the same store. I start paging through Adobe documents, looking to see if we were charged for this cheese. There are at least twenty documents. My milk counter's emptying rapidly and I have displays to build and that driver's waiting for instructions and so far as I can see we weren't charged for this cheese. So somebody's screwed up and it wasn't me, for once. Whew. Send the ----ing cheese back. Problem solved. Go stock the milk and build the display and do all the other things you should have been doing while you were paging through billing documents.

Once that's done, start working the order that came in on that truck, which is long gone.

Wonder where my 40 cases of Imperial margarine (2/$3) are. Realize with sickening sense of dread that Imperial margarine came in the form of Black Diamond cheese bars.

Call for help. Office closed.

Call shipping. Explain situation three and a half times. Can you find my margarine and ship it out with our produce load tomorrow morning?

Sure, they say. 

Oh, and can you call us one way or another to let us know if it's coming or not?

Sure, they say. Whew. Problem solved.

And they did call back last night, after I'd gone home, letting us know they couldn't find the margarine anywhere. So that news was waiting for me this morning.

Call retail service. Explain situation five and a half times. Request courier. 

Sure, they say. We'll rush it right out to you.

Produce truck shows up. Three guesses what's on it.

Frantically call around and try to get that courier cancelled. Can't be done. Courier shows up an hour later with another 40 cases of margarine. So now I've got  margarine up the ying-yang. Maybe I can use it to grease everyone up and offset the cheese effect.

If only that was my crisis for the day.

I'm starting to wonder if I should ever go on holidays, or at least if I should call in every day to check up when I do. Because despite verbal and written instructions given to three different people, a very important piece of email was somehow missed. The response to that email would have allocated stock for the ad coming up next week; in the absense of a response, I'm getting set quantities spread out over every warehouse delivery starting Sunday (much too early). I tried rather valiantly to get them to adjust the delivery dates, only to hit a brick wall at every turn. "You're much too late", I was told. "What you're asking for is far too labour-intensive."

I wanted to teleport myself through the phone and commence the bitch-slapping. No, it isn't. See, here's what you do. Make the changes I'm requesting--you can do it with fewer than thirty keystrokes, I'm sure of it--and  they'll simply ship us the same quantities in two deliveries instead of ten. It's actually less labour, because they won't have to do anything at all on eight different d--

Solid, implacable wall of can't. I HATE that. I even tried bribing the guy with margarine and cheese, to no avail. 

I'm going to bed. Tomorrow's Saturday. What can possibly go wrong?