grrgoyl

Retail customers are the laziest, stupidest people in the entire world. This is hardly news to anyone who has worked in any customer service position. After 13 years in inventory I've been in enough backrooms to know that a majority of customer service workers hate their clientele as much as I do, even though the customer is their whole raison d'etre. There's a whole community devoted to it,

customers_suck, if you don't believe me. For my first job I worked 3 miserable years at McDonald's, so yeah, I know from rude, obnoxious, retarded customers. I'd sooner haul garbage than take a customer service-oriented job again. This is why I put up with bullshit beyond reckoning at inventory, because at least I don't have to deal with customers. The funniest ones are the people who come up to the store, stop and read the huge sign, "Sorry, closed for inventory" and try the door anyway, like it's a practical joke or a hidden camera show. But so far the prize for biggest witless fuckwad in my entire career was a customer who interrupted me as I counted a teeny convenience store, literally one set of 8-foot shelves on the salesfloor, front and back, and asked me where something was, as if there was an entire secret salesfloor somewhere else if he got the password right. I told him, "Well, if it isn't on this side, try that side" and gave him the look I felt his IQ level fully deserved. Customers on top of being idiotic are frequently unspeakably rude. I've counted stores in some of the dodgiest areas in town and encountered some of the nicest people; conversely, the rich folk treat us like cockroaches. I and my fellow auditors have been run over by shopping carts, shouldered out of the way and talked sneeringly about with us standing right there by these people, proving that money can't buy manners.

No, I have no reason to like customers at all.

So last night when we did a Whole Foods inventory right in the heart of Denver's Cherry Creek district (the name should be a big enough clue as to which side of the dodgy/chi-chi-poo-poo line it sits) on Fourth of July evening, I had my reservations. We started at 6 and the store was hoppin', but I was encouraged by a sign on the door telling people they were closing at 7. It was a fairly carefree job despite being so busy, and at 7, as planned, the store cheerfully announced closing time. The aisles were empty, we could work in peace, all was right with my world. Until about 7:15 when while counting the pasta aisle a customer asked me where the sun-dried basil tomato sauce was. Okay, a.) I realize the array of product choices on the shelves can be quite dizzying, but could you just make the smallest effort to find it on your own? b.) As much as I enjoy shattering the customers' illusions that I exist to serve them hand and foot, I have my limits, especially when c.) THE FUCKING STORE IS CLOSED. I gave him my well-practiced, "Sorry sir, I don't work for the store," except I left off the "sorry" and the "sir," and with a decidedly brusque tone. He stepped back in surprise and said snidely, "Sorry, didn't mean to piss you off." I just looked at him and went back to counting. A few minutes later Mrs. Witless Fucktard came up to me to ask the same question in her best Malibu Barbie voice. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him grab her arm and pull her away, like I was a rabid dog. They searched for close to ten minutes for their sauce, and I heard him at one point whine, "It has to be sun-dried!" I apologize for the crass stereotyping, but straight men do NOT talk like that. Looking around I realized there were other customers still lazily roaming the aisles, as if this was a bar after last call, and as long as you were inside the doors before it was made there was no hurry. I hoped and prayed the store was closing up their registers so they couldn't pay for anything, but I knew this was probably not the case. The customer is always right, after all, even when they are obviously, totally, dead wrong.

Fucking rich people.

-=Lainey=-

Current Mood: energetic
Current Music: Underworld soundtrack

I wouldn't consider myself a workaholic, but I am psychotically opposed to being late for work. It isn't the unprofessionalism of it that bothers me as much as any time I miss is money I am not getting paid. Even five minutes makes me insane. It is gratifying that this attitude is so widely recognized by my co-workers that if I'm not in the store at least fifteen minutes early, people start to worry about me. Tery, on the other hand, doesn't share this viewpoint, not by a long shot. We even have a running joke after countless mornings spent sitting in stoic silence in darkened parking lots for twenty minutes at a time because I drove like a demon unnecessarily, and sheepishly muttering, "We're a little bit early, honey" as she glares at me from the passenger seat.

For this reason it is amazing I survived our trip to work Saturday night. It was a store situated more or less in downtown Denver that I dislike going to only because the traffic is so hard to gauge on a Saturday evening. We left at 4:20 for a 5 pm start, Tery insisting she needed to stop for a soda first. As I pulled into the convenience store across the street I could see out onto the main road where traffic was at a dead standstill. I panicked momentarily and she irritatedly told me to forget stopping, but I did anyway, because without caffeine Tery can be just about as unbearable as me. After buying the Coke we approached the ~~three lane parking lot~~ main street and had a bit of luck in the form of one thoughtful motorist who let me in front of them immediately. As it turned out, this was the only luck we would have for the next practically two hours. <-----note skillful foreshadowing

Nosiree, the traffic really wasn't moving, it wasn't just a trick of the light. We couldn't see how far ahead the problem lay, so clung to a faint hope we could at least get to the highway on-ramp, a mere mile or so away. The stressful lack of motion was not helped by the presence of kids in the road, weaving in and out of the trapped cars apparently distributing flyers for one of the local businesses in the plaza we just left, so even when you got a small window of opportunity to move a precious foot or two you had to be careful to avoid hitting one of them, or at least I knew a more levelheaded person would be careful of such things. They wisely avoided my car, I wouldn't be surprised if at that point the hostility was emanating off the roof like a heat mirage. After traveling only half a mile in 30 minutes I had resigned myself to the fact that we were indeed going to be late, no doubt about it. An uncustomary peace comes with such a revelation, and I myself am quite proud of attaining it, being a horrible control freak. I was glad I hadn't begrudged Tery her Coke at least, I would never have heard the end of it. We speculated about what the holdup could possibly be. She loosely quoted from Raising Arizona, "There'd better be a spherical object on the highway."

As we came up over the hill the stress temporarily increased tenfold when it became apparent the three lanes were becoming one (ours, explaining why for the most part we weren't moving) and then being diverted well short of the on-ramp (no spherical objects or any clue as to the cause of the jam in sight, I might add). Thus began the cutthroat car politics of who to let in front of us. I let a few in, but Tery and I were of the same mind that assholes who could see damn well that their lane was ending yet insisted on speeding on to the very last minute to get the farthest ahead in line did not deserve generosity. As we neared the front and these wankers became more directly our responsibility, Tery uncharacteristically spurred me into tailgating dangerously to shut them out, which I was only too happy to do. It also pleased me uncharacteristically to see the guy behind me clinging to my back seat to do the same.

Thus diverted onto another side street, I panicked as I struggled to think of an alternate route, customarily taking the highway to get to this store every time. Fortunately I had a large amount of time to do this, as this road was only moving the tiniest bit faster than the last. I was reminded of Office Space when I noticed a young woman walking on the sidewalk chatting on a cellphone and easily keeping time with us, often getting well ahead of us. We measured our progress based on hers until she reached her apartment complex and left us in the dust. Bitch. Naturally almost everyone was planning to make the same left turn I was, and naturally the left turn arrow mercilessly only let about four cars through at a time. It was about this time I noticed that I had to pee very, very badly. I complained to Tery who sat there smugly sipping her Coke. "You've got guts, girl," I said, "There's no telling when we'll see a bathroom again....let me know when you're done with that can."

At about 5:15 we finally made the left turn and started moving again, which raised my spirits somewhat. We made good time to a gas station where I thankfully solved one of my problems, raising my spirits even more. We weren't out of the woods yet, though. I knew the store was on 11th, but not the cross street, only that it was still quite a ways to go. Denver is laid out more or less in a grid, though not as concise a grid as, say, Manhattan. I knew from my first attempt to get to the store from this direction that 11th, or for that matter most of the streets, do(es) not go straight across as one would hope. Sure enough, what ensued became a comical string of errors as every road I tried to take across the city would abruptly end, necessitating a detour north or south, then over a few more blocks west, rinse, repeat. This continued so consistently and often that when I made another venture west and we immediately saw the road ended in a big old "Road Closed" barricade ahead, I burst into psychotic, uncontrollable laughter, the kind of desperate laughter you see in movies when you think it just isn't possible for anything else to go wrong, and then something else does. I took on an Alabama drill sergeant accent and explained to my troop, Tery, we were approaching the store "serpentine."

So it was that at 6:15 we finally triumphantly pulled into the store parking lot. Well, the triumph was diminished somewhat by a chick waiting to pull out of the parking lot. Since she was going left she was taking up almost the entire entrance. As I gingerly turned into the small lane she had left me, to my surprise I looked at her in time to see her giving me a spiteful, enraged middle finger. I am still trying to figure out exactly how I deserved to be flipped off in this situation. Even more surprisingly, she wasn't even driving an SUV, where I am used to encountering such an "how dare you drive where I need to be!" attitude. I would have kicked her ass if I weren't so grateful to just not be driving anymore. We were met with some concern by our co-workers, then gratitude that we had finally made it.

Tery couldn't wait to get home and find out what we had sort of been a part of. Apparently it was a gratifyingly large accident (to merit such a huge inconvenience, I mean). Someone had lost control of their vehicle on one side of the road, taking out a couple of cars, one of which flipped over the median and took out some more cars in the oncoming lanes. Two people were hospitalized in serious condition.

It is days like this that make me soooooooo grateful to have a work-at-home job most of the time.

-=Lainey=-

Current Mood: I think my choice of icon sums it up
Current Music: LOTR//TTT

To my Faithful Readership of 5 (or so), I apologize for my absence. I didn't mean to alarm those of you who noticed I had disappeared.

I have just undergone the hell that is RGIS January (or at least the last two weeks of it). For approximately 12 years of my life beginning back in college I worked for RGIS Inventory Specialists, until seemingly overnight I became burnt out and within a week had found another job (this, obviously, was before the George W. Economic Golden Age). Finding my current transcription job's wages inadequate to keep me in the lifestyle to which I had become accustomed, I returned to the inventory as a part time source of funds and found it infinitely more tolerable on a 3-times weekly basis or so as opposed to every single day. However, in January I take time off from my slave-wage transcription job because January is traditionally the busiest month for retail inventory, being after Christmas, so I can work myself into the ground and make a hella lot of money.

For anyone who doesn't know what I am talking about and wishes they did, our company is hired by retail stores to take inventory for them through the use of tiny computers (basically glorified calculators) we wear on belts that can capture any information the customer wants, from a simple retail dollar amount to scanning their barcodes and capturing quantities for stock replenishment (geez, I am good. I should write the marketing video for us). We do everything from Walmart, Home Depot and Target to mom-and-pop stores and military bases (which is what we did this past week, as a matter of fact) and almost everything in between that you can imagine. If they sell it, we count it (not our official motto or anything. Actually ours is a lot more boring, something like "Accuracy is our primary concern." Just doesn't pop, if you ask me.)

Here I am in all my counting glory, a security photo given to me by the store manager:

After 12 years I don't think I am blowing my own horn too much to say that I am damn good at taking inventory. I can see quantities of up to 7 in one quick glance (or 12 if the product is arranged properly), whereas mere mortals do that annoying air-pointing counting thing (or worse, have to actually physically touch each item while counting) to arrive at the same number some 30 seconds later. I can do 12 and 24 times tables in my head, those being the most popular case quantities stuff is shipped in. I can do 10K in my sleep (and sometimes do), and on a daily basis impress someone new with my ability to key furiously on the machine while carrying on a complete conversation with someone. Counting is so second nature after 12 years that it literally is no longer a conscious activity for me to perform. I can understand that this might be impossible for store personnel to believe, while at the same time being continually infuriated by them assuming I am screwing up if I am talking while counting. This is probably the reason for this entry, the insult we suffer at the hands of store people.

As an example: for the past two weeks we have been doing a large chain of department stores, Kohl's, similar to JC Penneys or Mervyn's. Our machines have two programs for scanning merchandise. There is the very popular "auto-one" program, meaning when we scan the barcode, the machine automatically enters a quantity of one. (The poor saps who are relegated to this program are affectionately called "laser losers" by some of us veterans. Though obviously not to their faces). The second program allows us to key in a quantity after scanning (more suitable for those of us with experience who know what we are doing). It should be obvious to even the inventory-illiterate that each program has its merits depending on what you are counting. For instance, auto-one is very useful in clothing areas where everything changes by size, color, etc. However, it is a definite drawback when counting a stack of (very breakable) plates. Sadly, the sensible application of each type of program seems to be lost on most store managers, who slavishly adhere to procedures written by men in suits in large offices who never set foot within 20 miles of an inventory. Their procedures only want us counting towels (and only a certain brand of towels, at that) with multi-quantity, and everything else in the store as auto-one. They think this is the way to eliminate "batching," counting things as the same that aren't. I have seen areas designated for auto-one counting simply because they have red candles and blue candles, and apparently someone somewhere is afraid that we will not notice the difference and count them all as blue. That is how insulting this is. And trust me, you do not know frustration or mind-numbing boredom until you are forced to scan a stack of 40 placemats one at a time, knowing damn well the whole time that they are all. exactly. the same. Some of us are of the opinion that trained monkeys could handle the auto-one task and work far more cheaply. If you ask me, counting things auto-one is the refuge of the poorly-prepped store that is too lazy to straighten their shelves and put similar items together where they belong.

In all fairness, the inventory job is a "no experience required" position and we get our share of morons who couldn't handle the complicated task of flipping burgers. But I am among a small core of auditors who have been around for years; we know what we are doing, and more importantly take a certain degree of pride in our work, and invariably we are the ones assigned to count multiple areas, because we aren't colorblind and we do know when the product changes and can count quickly and effectively and extremely accurately. But the store people have the habit of seeing us as no different from the "laser losers," who truthfully probably couldn't do this. On the other hand, they are hardly in a position to throw stones. If I had a dollar for every time I overheard store people recounting us and holding debates like, "Well, I counted it twice and came up with 63 and 62, but Mark got 64," that would be a nice little bonus in my paycheck. No offense to retail personnel, but they are paid to help customers and sell things. We are paid to count. It is right there in the company name, "Inventory Specialists." They hire us to come and count, and then assume at every turn that we don't know how to count. I will never understand this fact in a million years.

We did six Kohl's stores over the last two weeks, and by the time we got to the last one today, I had just about had my fill. In every single store we had the same arguments to get them to let us count the logical multiple quantity areas that way. I felt so bad for our manager who was running them; all I had to do was point out the problem areas to her, she had to talk to the store manager and fight an often losing battle. But the highlight of the whole week was last night. We were counting in towels, which we had been doing for two weeks. The areas had large pink signs warning us that there were different sizes of towels in the bin, which you would think they would realize we know after doing five of these. We were chattering with each other as we counted, and I mistakenly counted a hand towel as a facecloth, and thinking aloud commented on that being wrong. One of the store women came running up and said to me, "Be careful! You've got bath sheets, hand towels and facecloths in there." She was reading it from the warning sign, pointing to each word for me like a teacher at a chalkboard. Oh, no she didn't!!! I was so insulted and so furious, I said to her, "Thank you, I know that. This is the sixth Kohl's I have done. Not to mention I have been reading since I was 5." Strangely, I didn't see too much more of her after that. The thing is, a lot of store people treat us with about as much respect as they would give a floor sweeper, failing to realize that we are not simply auditors, we are also potential customers, and if they piss us off enough, we will absolutely refuse to shop in their store. In stores like Kohl's with a large crew, that could mean up to 50 alienated customers. I have been in stores where I loved their stuff, but they treated us with such contempt that I never set foot in there again. Word to the wise if you ever hire a service to do your inventory...we are people too, not mindless, idiotic drones. Give us a little bit of credit.

So January is over. I worked a paltry 60 hours the first week I worked. This past week I put in 71 hours, which didn't leave a lot of time for journaling. But I am done now, rich temporarily, and back. And really, really sick of counting stuff.

-=Lainey=-

Current Mood: content
Current Music: T.A.T.U. - Malchik Gay