Work and Cats

 

Isn't Bonecrusher so cute??? And just so Atton doesn't feel left out, he managed to make a graceful, elegant jump to the top of the bookcase (probably to showoff to Bonecrusher who had been coming up behind him at the time) and didn't knock anything over at all and he was so cute up there I had to take his picture.

 

And this is how far along my tunic is. I'm going to bring the shoulders in a little. I have tiny shoulders. Also, you can see that I have stay stitching on one side of the front but not the other. I intend to remedy this.

I spent a lot of yesterday reading FOTR, I'm up around 200 pages now. It's gotten a lot better. Aragorn's so angsty. And he stopped describing every single step they take. I mean, a few days passed without us knowing when they stopped to eat or what trees they passed! Victor doesn't think Aragorn's angsty, he thinks he's silly. pfft, what do men know about angst. He even answered himself on the benefits of Aragorn's angst by saying, "All chicks love him."

Oh, Bronecrusher is adorable. He came up to me just now and meowed at me the cutest little mew. I think he was lonely so I played with him a little. It's fun to laser him around, he'll chase it up and down the hallway so many times. Atton will only run up and down the hallway once or twice before he spends the rest of his time stalking it and pawing at it. Sometimes you can get him going in a good circle, and sometimes he does this thing where he's laying and uses his front claws to pull himself halfway up the hallway chasing it. (at least that's how it looks, he does it so fast it's hard to say exactly how he does it) Boney went for a drink of water and now he's laying on the floor near me. As a long haired cat he needs lots of water to clean himself with.

So we have a Key Retailing Audit on Thursday. A part of me wondered today if maybe that's their cover for coming to investigate my report, but it's all my fancy that, I'm not that important you see. This is just our yearly Key Retailing Certification. Key Retailing is stupid. A big waste of money. I have to have specialized signs up over each pallet space, I believe I've said this before, though. I have a cleaning chart I have to check off on once a week. Which Bret caught me on that today, he asked if I clean the sections or just check them off, to which I neutrally weaseled out of by saying, "If it looks dirty I clean it." Honestly I rarely clean anything the chart tells me to. It has one whole week devoted to the 1% gallons of milk. 1% is clean. I only have to clean the 1% section once every other month or so. 2%, Whole, and Skim are dirty milks and I usually do a shelf or two of each of those sections once a week. And then it wants me to take all the yogurt off the shelves to clean those one week, which if I actually did do that it would take me two days straight without doing anything else. And that's if I went fast. And butter, I haven't cleaned the butter shelves since we got new racks over a year ago and they're just now to the point where a few of them need cleaning. And I like to hit a few juice shelves here and there while I'm doing the milk shelves. I mean, every store is different, and a standardized cleaning schedule just doesn't work. There's some juice sections I've never cleaned and they're shiny and spotless. And then there's other juice sections that I should actually be cleaning every other day (Kroger Value gallons are incredibly dirty). Some things I get away with because my doors get dirty so fast that if I skip washing them I can shrug and go, "I dunno, I washed them yesterday." And I rotate the milk shelves so randomly that their overall cleanliness is a passing score. And some of the cleaning chart is for Wall Deli, like "Pegged Cheese", and some things we just don't have. I don't have a coffin case. (center aisle display case I suppose is the proper term)

Anyway, I hope they get Dustin to get under the shelves tomorrow, I don't want to have to do it. I can't get the shelves back up on the stupid front liners. Ok, first, P&G wanted me to use these pads. One side was sorta plasticy the other was sorta soft papery (gauzey perhaps is a good way of putting it?) and I was supposed to put these liners under my milk shelves. First off, a lot of the guys couldn't figure out that plastic side went down, so I had to scrape the gauze stuff off the floor. Second, even if the plastic side went down it still glued to the floor. They got super nasty super fast, and I even gagged while trying to pull those things off and into garbage bags. And not only did they stink so bad, but they dribbled milk everywhere so it was impossible to get those off the floor without getting spoiled milk all over myself. Finally P&G changed their minds. We painted the floor white. Still not a good idea because milk dried and while scraping dried milk off the floor I'd chip the paint. So they changed their minds again and had us scrape all the paint off which really helped for a while cause I could blame milk spills on paint (them, "What's that white spot?" me, "Oh, that's paint..."). And now they have these plastic rectangular mats we have to put in front of all the shelves, not just the milk, but all the shelves. And they don't even match my shelves or walls. They're more of a creamy off-white. And unless the section is nearly empty I can not get the shelf back up on the mat. I  had to get the guys to put the mats down in the first place. And now there's no way for me to clean under the shelves because I can't roll my racks out of the way and they're too low to the ground for me to crawl under them. I have rolled the milk shelves away when I knew I could get someone to help me push it back into place. But it's still so much effort. And I can't get them clean with cleaners and paper towels. I'd have to move all the shelves away from the walls in order to get them into a sink or something, and then they're so large and unwieldly that I don't think I could wash them even in the big area where the janitors keep the scrubbers, unless they had both scrubbers out on the floor at the time. I can't scrape milk off them, because the scrapers just cut ridges in the plastic and make things worse. I wish they'd quit freaking out about it. I'd pet 99% of all customers don't even notice the mats are there and the 1% that do are the secret shoppers who look for these things. Oh, and btw, milk has traveled under these mats and I just know the day they decide to do away with the mats we will find a mold farm has started under them. I can't get under the mats to clean because of the other shelves holding the mat down. It's about 2 1/2 sections to a mat.

I had the grocery truck to offload first thing at 6AM. The driver was George. He's one of my favorite drivers. Didn't used to be but he is now.

Zhaun told me he saw I wasn't marking the Darigold milk half of cost plus a penny so I told him I am... a day or two before it expires and that I'm marking it kinda cheapish but not giving it away cheap when there's still four or five days on it. For example, today I marked October 1sts down to 2.70, but come Wednesday I'll go 2.00ish and come Friday I'll go 1.50. They'll sell. I know what I'm doing.

Bret came up to me to ask why I scanned out 282 dollars two weeks ago. I pulled it up and showed him. Corp said I scanned 282, my report showed 94. He said that when they were on the phone with him they said it was also Wall Deli on there, and we pulled it up. Sure enough, they had 200-something scanned out. He was surprised and took a look at it. Since he was so interested in it and where the money went I pulled up last week's report, which was 600-dollars. eek. It was mostly Julie and somewhat Zhaun, and 555 dollars of it went to DI. Data Integrity, which means BOH was off. Balance on Hand. That means the computer said we had 12, but we actually had 6, that kind of thing.

I was taking a wheeler to the back with boxes sticking out on either side and this guy was standing in the hallway to the backroom looking at markdown carts. He was sideways, facing me. I said excuse me as I moved towards him. He didn't budge. So I stood there, in front of him, and had to reappearance my boxes so I could get through without hitting him. It's the entranceway to the backroom, why are people so surprised when people need to get through it? They act all shocked, or like we're being rude, some get angry or irritated at having to move. And it's just mind boggling. That's the entranceway to the backroom, you don't expect employees and vendors need to get through it?