certified

finally, it's done. i'm officially in management at my work. it's taken a long time, but all ends well.

so, to christen my newfound position, i go into the freezer where we house our pastries, and find a collapsing tower of boxes. the new pastries i ordered had come in and were haphazardly stacked on top of the collapsing stack.

i start dismantling the pile, mind you, i'm working in a freezer, so no one wants to do this. they just want to lob boxes in and get out of there.

but i have found by taking a moment to organize, to cut access holes into the boxes so we don't have to shuffle boxes constantly, it keeps things orderly (until empty boxes are not removed and the integrity of the structure is compromised).

i keep inventory of all the pastries each time i order. if, for nothing else, so know, exactly what i have and what to order. this is easily done and i don't spend a lot of time on it. the major percent of time is in simply deconstructing the empty box towers and breaking them down.

i worked with a kid last night who normally coasts about doing a moderate amount of work.

when he arrived, i said,

i have a lot to do. you are responsible for x, y, and z. that is all you are responsible for

(but he was also the only one manning the station while i'm in the freezer and the cage in the stock room), so it required a bit of foresight and planning on his part to get it all done and serve the customers (who tend to flow in groups, a bit like fish that way).

i return occasionaly as work permits, doing jobs i did not ask or expect him to do upon my return, and to check his progress, which is minimal. i knew he would not be prepared to wrap it all up by the time we were to leave, but i let him do what he had to do.

he kept telling me,

chill suzanne.

(mind you i was moving at lightning speed because the store was full of customers at one point and i was watching him ring. it was a bit more than i could handle so i stepped in and rang customers up, while he bagged the stuff. it was tough, took the kid a good minute to open a bag to put merchandise in. but i let him do that, and kept the people moving. until i could get away to do what i needed to do.)

and i kept saying,

i have a lot to do.

but he kept insisting, i take a break. i knew he didn't get it (and wouldn't get it until 8:45 that night).

since i have a similar set up to the freezer going in the back cage (i have finally convinced everyone removing all the sleeves of cups from boxes and stacking them precariously, then moving them into the kiosk as we need them is excess work. as we need to stack the boxes in an area adjacent to the cage before they even go into the cage, we are moving those same cups a minimum of four times before the get to the drink we are making). if we take a box and stack it on the shelf, allowing the box to stabilize its contents, we eliminate "stocking" the cage, aside from popping in whole boxes of product when it gets low. it took a long time to pick up the loose sleeves of cups when they would collapse with the former system. and a great deal of strength to shuffle through closed boxes with the system before that. my system has all the cups stacked side by side in their original boxes with panels cut out so the cups can be extracted from the intact, but accessible box, via a giant window. the box remains in tact the entire time it is there because it is not cut in any way except to create this access window.

all the cups are accessible. i am doing this with every product i can, because it is something to need a pound of coffee and have to move twelve boxes to get to it. just as it is something to need two biscotti and have to move fifteen small boxes to get to it. time is money folks and we're operating on a skeleton crew. (mind you, moving the cups, except when they collapse all over the place, was not such a big deal, but when you have eight flavors of gums and mints in tiny little boxes stacked under fifteen or so flavors of teas beside biscotti and cookies, graham crackers and chocolate covered whatnots, it becomes quite tedious moving and stacking and shuffling through boxes).

these principles are simple. they eliminate the need to handle the boxes repeatedly.
all product is neatly organized and accessible, box contents can be evaluated either by sight or sticking one's hand in the hole and feeling the product. no need to move anything.

but by the time i have inventoried the paper goods, which required restocking all cups of every size, and to do that i had to climb up on three crates (that or move a fifty pound--i kid you not--twenty foot ladder that nearly bested me once), to access these boxes. i could not even reach the lids becase the quitter stacked them about twenty feet up inside the cage. i'm not sure how he did it, but it's not something i can undo without assistance.

so i go back to the kiosk, bar, whatever you call it, and my co-worker is scrambling. customers are an afterthought at this point because it is 8:45 when most of the stuff is done usually, and he had lots to do.

but if he doesn't ever get stretched, he will never grow. that's what i say. so i end up staying until well after 10pm, finishing, and i didn't even do everything because i need to get shit done and there is no one else to do it.

i sent my co-worker home after he did all he could and his dad arrived.

it was a good busy night, and i've just got to get the core product inventoried and ordering under control, as right now it's all over the place. we can't keep what we need in stock, and i think it is because no one really knows what we have and can't estimate what we need because they aren't thinking about everything.

i use the order form for both tracking inventory as well as ordering. i figure, why reinvent the wheel. and my previous attempts to catalogue inventory had me searching the order forms to see what i had (a second eyespy i simply don't have time for), so i got the idea to blank out all the order price information and use the blank lines to catalogue stock. it works very well, exceptionally well. and if i can get the system down right, i can know exactly what we have and inventory shouldn't be an issue again.

but that's my plan. it's not reality yet.

peace. out.