I got up at 3:00 and made it into work at 3:39. It wasn't too bad actually. Corporate kept freaking out about me getting some wheelers of eggs and juice ready to put on the back aisle for the free giveaway. I knew we reopened at 8:00 so I knew I had time. Around 6:30 they did it themselves. Around 7:00 they were fidgety and double checking and I almost had to remind them not to roll them onto the floor yet.
Anita has four wheelers of product in the cooler and it's just awful. I don't have room for that.
So anyway, around 7:30 Bret paged everyone to the front. We gathered and Halsey, our company president was there. They sure patch him up for the videos they torture us with. He looked very, very old and decrepit. I kept wondering if he would be able to stand for the entirety of Bret's speech. In the videos you can't see his veins or anything. Anyway, as I went towards the front I saw one of the corporate guys with a guitar and a santa hat doing christmas songs. And with every step I took I felt the life leaving my eyes. A deader version of myself stood in the group dreading what kind of stupidness we'd have to endure. Visions of us caroling the first of the customers came to mind, but it was not to be. Bret spoke and said blah blah, thank corp (everyone claps, I clapped lightly), thank remodel team (everyone claps, I clapped decently), thank the employees (everyone claps, I clap hard). Then someone said we should thank Bret (everyone claps, I clap lightly). We'll shut down a competitor (most people clap, I didn't). Rhonda was her super annoying self again. The way she acts I wouldn't be surprised to see her searching his coat for a stray hair to add to a life-size doll of him.
Anyway, they let us wander back to what we were doing. I went and hid with Bonnie out back while the first of the customers had to suffer through corp being over bearing at them. The compactor was full. So full that people had kept piling stuff on top till it was practically falling out of it. Now, let me describe our compactor. There is a door in the wall, and then a ledge, a kind of shelf, that's a few feet long. Then it drops off into the dumpster-bin thing. So that tells you how full it was. Bonnie called in to have it picked up today, and we had to clear room for the people to get down to it so they could empty it. And then Zhaun came back and got the stuff pulled out that people had piled up and me and Bonnie picked it up. After a bit of messing with it we found that there was a metal rack display that had jammed it. Blaine from produce (whom I can't stand) jumped in and fixed that for us. But you'd think, wouldn't you, that people would stop throwing in garbage after it was full? It's always amazing to find the compactor so full people are setting things on the ledge and walking off. No one can push a button and crush the compactor? Me and Bonnie are the only ones who are capable of spending 15 minutes unjamming it after people neglect to crush their garbage?
Service deli and bakery brought back their garbage and Bonnie had them take it out back behind the store. One of the bags must have dropped a soda can cause I saw the bakery lady kick it under the bread racks. I looked at her. She looked at me. I stared at her expectantly. She knelt down and retrieved it. Bonnie was proud of me.
Zhaun had me call Dustin and ask him to come in at noon so I could go home. Yay!
We gave away a fair amount of eggs and orange juice before I left. We might run out of orange juice, and I don't know how. I didn't see any of the calcium that I'd ordered and I ordered a good 15 cases. I need to check into that.
All the corporate people left by 9:00. We were really super slow. Our re-grand opening was a miss. We didn't really advertise. We had it announced in our ad.... which came out today. We scared a lot of them away, especially yesterday. Yesterday I saw a lot of upset customers. And there was no suspense. We should have been closed during the remodel, or at least all of yesterday. It was sooooooo nice this morning, working for 4 1/2 hours without any customers around. You can't imagine how soothing it was.
So the creameries place had a table set up and they were offering samples and telling people how great their local milk is. They claimed that since it was not homogenized that it was better for digestion, that the particles weren't broken up and that's why. That ringed wrong for me so I called Victor to ask him and he said that the moment you shook the container (and they do say "cream on top please shake before using" on them) the particles would break up. And later when Fred came in I asked him. He knows more about milk than anyone else I know. He says they're wrong. He also gave me some dirt on them. They've actually been kicked out of places before for having a too high bacteria count in their milk. Basically they use unclean milk, lowest quality, and pasteurize it hoping that'll kill everything. Fred says if pasteurizing alone kills all the bacteria then milk could last forever. He's just waiting for someone to get sick and sue them. They were also kicked out of some state dairy organization for not playing by the rules, so they can set their pricing to anything without following any state standard, which is why they're so incredibly cheap (for a name brand). Also, their samples were not kept in my cooler so I don't know how they kept them cold all day long unless there was a cooler and I just didn't see it, which is entirely possible since I hadn't really looked well.
Just as I was about to leave we got a delivery of shelving and I got Julie's keys to let the delivery guy in. And then I took them back to her, she was in the office. I tried the door handle, it was locked. I knocked. No answer. I tried the handle again. Suddenly laughter and "Hi, Barb!" came from within. I was confused until they opened the door and showed me that they have a security camera pointed down the hallway now and could see who was in front of their door. Proud and boastful, as well as amused by my surprise, they showed me the rest of the cameras in all the backrooms. I will restrain from saying where they are specifically, but there is one in my cooler. Eek!!! They can watch me! I'll need to start acting better. I thought over the last several days and I can't think of anything right off that I did that was embarrassing. But you know how there's the you you act when you're amongst others and then there's the you you are at home and alone where no one sees you? I act like I'm at home alone when I'm in my cooler. I'll inform Bonnie where all the cameras are tomorrow. There's one in an area I often used for things like clipping an annoyingly long nail or during the summer I'd use it to wipe sweat from under my shirt, so no one would see me. So I am sad to see I can't use that spot anymore. Without a bathroom in the back it's hard to find places to do personal things like that. And you can't fix your nails in the bathroom because it echoes. I figure I break enough nails that I can always claim it was broken and I was fixing it so it wasn't sharp anymore. I don't do it often, but occasionally one will kinda creep up on me and start rubbing wrong in my glove from being too long. I try to keep them a little past the tips of my fingers. You guys have seen pictures of my hands so you know. But I am shy.
They were handing out coupons for the free food (muffins, eggs, orange juice, and sausage) and maps of the store so I got them so I could get the free stuff. And the map's interesting too. It's wrong though. It shows sea food as being where wall deli is and beverages as being where the beer is. As if beer and wine are the only type of beverage in existence. I think they made a poor choice of using the remodel schematic for the map as it clearly shows a map of the safe room and the pharmacy backrooms/offices. Hey! I just noticed, pharmacy has their own bathroom!!! No fair. Anyway, another of our "for being such a great store we're ripping off other people's ideas" things is the special lighting over produce.
It's weird. It's only 6:16. I feel I should be in bed. But I don't have to for two more hours. I wonder what I should do. From lack of sleep a lot of video games are out. Naughty Bear would be fun but it's camera isn't the greatest if you get dizzy easy. And I don't know what other games I'd want to play. I really should finish Force Unleashed II but I am totally not motivated. I don't know why, I loved the first one. The story of the first one was great, I even bought and read both the novel and the comic book. I liked the Dagobah levels of II, but otherwise... eh. It's kinda slapped together. And now I'm chasing Boba Fett around and I fear I'll have to fight him. Canon says I can't kill him. But it's always hard for me to fight Boba in a video game because he's so special to me. I do it, though. There's not a lot of games that you fight him in, though. There's Shadows of the Empire for N64. There's Demolitions for PS1. I believe he's in Masters of Teras Kasi for PS1(?) but I never owned that.
I could make something warm to drink, either tea or hot chocolate, and read my book. But I'll be doing so much of that after we move that I feel almost guilty like I should do something more power consuming, like play the 360. But then again I do need to finish these books before the February 1st release date of Green Rider 4. But I am about 100 pages into book 2, with another 500 pages to go, and then book 3 is, like, 700 pages. And it's the middle of December, so I have a month and a half. And it's taken me from the week after Deathly Hallows to read book 1, so that would be about three and a half weeks give or take a few days. But that's right during our busiest time of year. January will be fairly slowish. But let's assume on four weeks just because this one's longer by 100 pages thereabouts. January 12th, and then that gives me almost three weeks for book 3. Yeah, maybe I should go read.
Oh, to also cheapen our grand opening our other store nearby was also celebrating with the same freebie giveaway and sales. Not that we had a lot of good sales. I suppose some of the meat and service deli sales might be good if you're into seafood and specialty cheeses, but I don't follow the pricing on that so I don't know. We had soda for a really good price, coke and pepsi 12pk 4/$9.00 when you got 4.
Also, we picked these up today:
I'm not the fan, Victor is. But I dragged him to Harry Potter, so I'm going to see this. I didn't quite grasp the first one. I suppose you need to know about computers to fully understand it. If you don't know anything about computers you could see it as a neat movie anyway. But the problem for me is that I'm somewhere in the middle. I know just enough to have a vague idea of what's going on, but I know so little that at times it was frustrating and confusing cause I was trying to view it both ways, when in fact I gather you kinda need to see it one way or the other. Mind, I've only seen it once so I might not even really know what I'm talking about. And it's not like I'm dreading seeing it, the soundtrack is very nice, and I did enjoy the first movie.
One more thing. Looking at my google ads is fun. They mostly advertise dairy or cooler products and the one on the side was advertising bookshelves. I guess it really can tell what I talk about the most.
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