Okay.  Brace yourself.  You’re going to love this story.

This morning, I show up early for work.  This is usually the norm for Wednesdays, since the delivery is done every Wednesday.

I show up for work and…what do you know?  The delivery truck is just getting ready to leave!

Anyway, I enter the store and see all the dry goods laying where they all belong.  All prepared for me to put away.  Nothing out of the ordinary here.

But then, I heard a loud humming sound.  I looked up and sure enough, the oven was on.  They left the top oven on all night long!  For goodness sakes, if you’re going to be a closer, go through a checklist or something.  I can more than assure you that it was the lesser experienced managers that were responsible for this.

I turn the oven off and open the vent to let the heat out of the oven quicker.  I also turn off the ventilation fan that they also had on all night.  Okay.  Just one set back.  This isn’t going to be as bad…right?

I grab my sack lunch and water bottle and take it to the walk-in where I usually store it (in a plastic container with a lid, of course!).  I open the door and…OHMYGOODNESSTHEREISSOMANYBOXESHOWAMIGOINGTOGETTOTHECONTAINER!!!!  I move the boxes aside until I could get through enough to reach the plastic container.

And this is where it gets bad.  There are boxes of cheese that are literally stacked all the way to the ceiling.  A mountain of boxes.  From my experience, I know what a normal shipment looks like and this is no normal shipment!  I begin playing Tetris with the cheese boxes, moving 23 of them out of the walk-in so that I can put all the old cheese boxes where they belong.  First in, first out.

About 20 minutes later, I manage to get pretty much all of my store’s shipment put away.  Only there’s one problem.  There’s still a whole lot of boxes in this walk-in!

To understand this, it would be worth noting that the other store across town is in the middle of an important remodel.  The tiling of their walk-in needed to be finished, so I was given the heads up yesterday that some of their product would be stored in our walk-in.  About a day’s worth.

“Okay!” I smiled.  “One day’s worth is nothing.  We can handle that.”

Now when I looked in the walk-in, I can’t help but notice that they made a mistake.  The delivery didn’t just give us a day’s worth of their cold product.  They delivered the ENTIRE shipment of their cold product to our store!

So I’m standing there in the walk-in, wondering how the store is going to even function with all of their boxes in the way.  With two stores worth of inventory in one walk-in, how will I and the morning crew be able to make food and dough?  As it is, I can’t even reach any of the dough balls in there!

Yes, I understand that the other store is in the middle of a remodel.  But I was told only one day worth of inventory.  This is all seven!

So I made the decision to not make any dough in the morning.  The priority was to try to get the dough balls to where we can reach them so that they are somehow past the enormous barricade of boxes. Because yeah.  The entire walk-in was pretty much covered in boxes.

When the other morning crew arrived, I showed them the devastation and action was taken immediately.  Someone from the other store came and loaded a good portion of those boxes into their pickup truck.  It wasn’t much, but it was just enough to be able to reach everything that we needed in the walk-in:  sauce, dough, cheese, pepperoni, and parmesan.

After that, I exhaled.  Maybe I will be able to make all that dough after all!  But with all those boxes still in there, it required moving around the racks.  A little bit of inconvenience, but was still manageable.

Looking back at all this, there is only one thing that I can think of to make this smoother.  If you’re going to do a remodel, have the workers work on the walk-in overnight!  They could get it done and could have the walk-in operational before the delivery arrives.  Then you don’t have to ship a delivery across town to another store!  What if you only had one store and were planning a remodel?  Sending your product to another store would not be an option.  The walk-in would have to be finished overnight.

So yeah.  That’s my story.  It came with a very good lesson.  One that I hope doesn’t happen again.

And I visited my Muse already.  She’s napping, and an infant once again.  She’s 6.25 months old.  She’s 21 inches long and she weighs 7.9675 pounds.  The height of a 1 month old and the weight of a newborn.  From what I have been told from Nurture, she’s been very sleepy…

Time to get prepared for ideation.  I have that and a conference call at 7:00, so I will have to leave ideation early.  Survivor’s at 8:00 and I go to bed after that.  That’s pretty much today and I get to repeat it tomorrow, minus the delivery chaos from today.

Today’s high is going to be 79 degrees and the silver lining is going to ideation tonight.

To those of you who have ever dealt with a work-related problem, I hope that you all have a fantastic day.

 

Nurture:  What a sleepyhead!  She has only woken up once today…

Muse:  *snore*  Ehhbhhhmhh…  *snore*