You Have To Go Through Hell To Get To Heaven

...and I'm neck deep in the hell right now, treading molten brimstone and snorting sulphur.

Work has been...interesting of late. Each day brings fresh impossibilities. Last Tuesday it was "Ken, we need you to strip 400+ lineal feet of shelving and put it in your [ridiculously tiny] dairy cooler. That took eight hours to accomplish and required eight stacks of meat totes, 45 milk crates, and four shopping carts, as well as four bunkers and an endcap. I had previously asked--twice--if it wasn't a good idea to run the counter down. "No," I was told, "we'll have lots of people to help move the product." Lots turned out to be...two. See, when I heard "lots of people to help move", I quite naturally assumed that the phalanx of vendors and merchandisers would be doing the job, moving everything directly from the old dairy counter to the new one. That's not what happened. The old dairy counter, for reasons never explained to me, had to come out before the new one could go in. Or something. Of course, when I went in the next morning, the old dairy counter was still there. Turned off...but there. Eight hours, wasted.

The new dairy counter was set up without incident...unless you consider a 600-case dairy order an incident. I, for one, do.

This week, it's frozen time. We had to condense some five hundred lineal feet of assorted frozen dinners, pizzas and fries into eleven doors. That couldn't quite be done, so I've had to use one bunker for a very limited selection of French fries, cut out a few lines of pizza, and forget about several lines of dinners. I could tell you about all the re-arranging that's had to happen since, and will continue to happen over the next few days, but (a) I'd lose you because (b) I'm lost, myself. Suffice it to say that I never have any idea, day to day, how many bunkers I have at my disposal. Whatever number it turns out to be, it's invariably three less than I need.

Things are progressing, though. My new dairy cooler is easily three times the size of my old one: it should be up and running in the next two days. The shelves hold what in some cases is way too much product. Put it this way: if it's going to be that busy, I'm a dead man. Once everything is in place, my job should get a whole lot easier. Until then...