Saturday, January 29, 2005  

"It's all Coming to an End"

I worked my last Saturday "close" at the store tonight -- it will be months before i ever have to close on a Saturday again. Great feeling. Setting up that weekly ad is kind of stressful. I won't miss it.

Guess what: i am leaving the store in spiritually very sound hands because ever since the store opened, I traced it back and i realize there has always been @ least two real Christians working there at once. At one point there were 5 or 6 of us!!! There is this really cool new chick who just was hired a few weeks ago, and she's going to NorthCentral in Minneapolis, and so we talk and talk and have a lot in common and it's cool to know i'm leaving the store and someone else has replaced me who can be around to remind people to PRAY when we can't get things to go right.

At least 5 times today I prayed out loud in front of an assosiciate to either get a machine to work (like the registers) or to find something we couldn't find, or one time we couldn't get the tax exempt kiosk to kick out a number and we stopped and prayed (well, I did; the guy just stood there thinking i was nuts...) and GOD WORKED IT OUT! P E O P L E ! PUT UP YO' HANDS AND PRAISE 'IM!

lol

   [ posted  @ 7:04 PM | ]

Cucamonga.

I walked my new store today for about a half hour with my new (old) boss and holy cow it's so different. I am so excited now, bc it gives me something totally new to work with and a new challenge. A few things i noticed right off the bat are that half of their store aisles are not laid out the way that it is supposed to according to the corporate maps. That is sometimes OK, as long as you have a justifiable reason for it. I also noticed it's quite a bit messier than our store is. That is partly bc they are still working on putting a truck away, but also because it's a much heavier volume store and it takes longer to keep it nice and crisp.

A good 1/4 of their lights were also off for some reason. They said it was a glitch or some wiring problem so the front part of the store was kind of dark. Their receiving all his not a straight long tube like ours is. Theirs is shaped more like a "V" or "L" and it's kind of cool. Lots of messes to clean up back there. And i will be going back to working early mornings. I have mixed feelings about that. Part of me is happy about it bc that means i keep my nights free for church and i can do more with the youth again. It used to work that i could get off of work around noon or 1, and then come home take a nap and have enough energy for more stuff at night. My schedule will be more set now and i won't be working these odd "any" shifts anymore too.

I start there on Feb. 7 at 5 a.m. !

   [ posted  @ 2:55 PM | ]

Ever said to yourself, "Why didn't I think of that? I could be a millionaire?" 

   [ posted  @ 11:22 AM | ]

"It's Official"

I got the official word today that i will be leaving for a promotion to a higher volume store!! I am not sure if that merits two exclamation points or not. Keep checking up here for further updates haha.

My boss told me that the reasons they are moving me to another store is because my district manager wants me in management but the first step towards that is being able to handle logistics at a higher volume store and also because i've worked at this store for so long now (almost 4 years) that i've done everything i can there and need the challenge of working with a new team. So i'll be switching BACK to logistics as supervisor in Chanhassen which is north of here about 10 miles.

Word is that there will be a handful of stores opening this summer or fall and that they are going to want me to open one or two of them for logistics since that's what i'm really good at. I'm looking fwd to it. The pay increase is not 20% like i wanted but those numbers aren't final yet either. I did put in a request of 20 but he laughed at me and said to expect more like 10-12% at most and then the biggest bump would be when i hit management, most likely within 6 months.
The other thing i don't know yet is if i'll be working early mornings (4 or 5 a.m.'s again) or late nights (like 7p-3 a.m.) or just regular shifts like i do now and be on the floor a lot. I'll be working for Izzy, my old boss again (since he moved half of his leadership to the store he's at now!!haha) and i can't wait bc he really knows his stuff. Him putting in a request for me is a big deal for me personally bc i view him as a mentor and if he sees value in me then i feel COOL! It sounds like their logistics is running very smoothly, as they technically have 2 logistics managers right now, so i won't have a lot to "fix." The main reason i'm going over there is to train a replacement supervisor, learn some more management skills and then move on. Yippidee doo.

The switch will be good for me. I really do need to get out of this store. I was walking the aisles today and realized that i have re-set every one of them 2 or 3 times over, and i've personally made every layout on the tech-side of the store by my own hand - not the corporate planograms. When someone has THAT much invested, they need to get OUT!

   [ posted  @ 2:14 PM | ]

"How Embarrassing"

The other day @ work, i got a call from the Edina store asking if we had a certain "word of the day" refill kit in stock for the DayRunner products. I searched for ever and finally found one for their customer, who they said was the morning weather chick from channel 9. She needed directions to our store, so they put her on the phone and she was super nice, and did have a TV News voice, and i was very clear about directions and i would put the item on hold for her at the service desk. She said she would be in sometime after 5 to get it.

Well no big deal. I don't watch the morning news so i would not have recognized her. But at one point in the evening, i saw one of our associates going to grab the refills from the service desk, so over the walkies i told everyone that the customer she was getting those for was a weather chick from channel 9. Sure enough... one of the guys went to scope her out and he started FREAKING OUT! I didn't think anyone would bother her at all, but he went up to her THREE TIMES!!!

AND
SHE WAS IN THE
STORE
FOREVERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!

Shopped every aisle. Spent most of her night totally engrossed in the day planners... she was there for at least 2 if not 3 hours. OMG. First, Jonny went up to her to tell her that he watches her every morning when he gets ready for school. Then he went to ask her a question. OMG. I told him to knock it off. Then he'd come tell me about it and give me all the reports. It was hard to avoid her in our little store -- everywhere i went there she was and i didn't want to ask her if she needed help.

"How embarrassing" as i always say. I don't know who finally rang her up in the end.

Anyways, this also reminds me of a story. Did you know that i once was a cashier for a famous person at the grocery store i worked at in college?

So there i was, ringing up this food stuff and i get a page on my register's telephone. It's the girls upstairs in the breakroom, which had one of those fake one-way mirror things that overlooked the entire store. I look up to see their shadows and there is a GANG of employees gawking at me and my register and my customer.

"Katie, do you realize the guy you are checking out right now is DANIEL BALDWIN???" the chick asks.

I don't know who that is, but i do know who Alec Baldwin etc. is, so i say, "Who's that?"

And they proceed to tell me. Of course now they are all watching me look up at him, and he realizes from the few words i am saying on the phone, that there is someone telling me that there is a famous person standing in my checkout lane.

I said to them, "No it's not... Whatever..." and i hung up the phone.

OMG. Then the man proceeds to pay with a credit card, and when he signs the receipt, he gave it to me, and as i went to grab it, he held on to it just a little bit, caught my eye, stared at his signature, and then winked at me and walked off with his bags... ! And sure enough it said

DANIEL BALDWIN on there in cursive! So as soon as he left, the flock of women came down to my register to ask me all about it. LOL How embarrassing. I didn't even know who that was. Apprently, according to them, the gossip women, the Baldwin mother lived about 20 min. from the university and the boys were in town. Super weird. So then they all had to look at the receipt. LOL

   [ posted  @ 7:39 PM | ]

GOO FOR GOD

What do you get when you mix the following ingredients?

1/2 can mt. dew
1/4 c. milk
half a block of colby jack cheese
fair amt. of cheese wiz in a can
valentines peeps
one Crunch candy bar
green food coloring
blueberry oatmeal - made from pkg directions
ruffles potato chips

mix in a blender.

I'm not making this up. Last week, Pastor Craig, our Jr. High pastor was riding on the shuttle with us from the main church campus to the extended campus where we have all our youth/band church stuff. We were all talking about the Vikings vs. Packers game. Lots of Packers fans over here in the Purple State. You'd be surrrprised. Pastor Craig was saying how he knew the Vikings would win, and also, how much he HATES those "peeps" candies. He always talks about how gross they are and he just doesn't like them. He said he was so confident the Vikings would win, that he said he'd eat a whole PACK of peeps in front of Jr. high if the Pack won.

Well, Packers lost. He didn't have to eat the peeps. But he did say that he was going to think of something disgusting for Packers fans to have to eat, if the Vikings won. Something that was as disgusting to them as PEEPS were to him.

So today he wheeled in a blender on a cart with all these groceries. I am probably forgetting some ingredients. He kept adding a little big and then blending it. Thankfully, he took volunteers to drink the green goo (he added a lot of cheese and green food coloring bc of Green Bay's colors) - in different stages of it's grossness. Lots of kids tried it. No one threw up, tho we did bring up some puke pails. It was all gross thick and CHUNKY!! lol!

I was soooooooo hoping he wasn't going to make all of us who were on the shuttle drink it. I don't know if i could have stomached that. I work with cool people!

   [ posted  @ 6:45 PM | ]

"Seeing Red"

Our store's new operations supervisor is a total knob. I would go into greater detail, but i don't even want to bc anytime i think of her face or anything about her, it makes me literally so angry that my heart starts pounding and i just get so anxious. I can't stand her. This is why i think people should have to take emotional health tests before being put in management; she has so many emotional problems due to a bad boyfriend breakup that it's all she can do each day to not tell SOMEONE how bad she was hurt. Thankfully, since i'm such a jerk, she has not shared this with me, because i am the LEAST sympathetic of all the people at that store and i have no time for your stupidity - especially when i know you are just providing a distraction because you don't really want to WORK.

Anyways she has this cork board in the cash office (which she calls "my office" (referring to herself) -- grrrr). She has green push pins, yellow push pins, and red push pins. At one leadership meeting, she informed us that we are to use the RED PINS only for emergency things she needs to deal with right away. When we all got done rolling our eyes, one mgr asked her if the green/yellow pins have any other signficance. He was saying this in all sarcasm, so she'd get the hint that it was STUPID but she answered him in all seriousness, saying that there is a "system by which the other ones are used for priority too" but she wasn't going to ask us to remember it.

So, two weeks ago, a customer came in to talk to a mgr, and i happened to be the person that responded to her. She was a very nice lady in her 20's and starting a business, and said that she had applied for an OMX business credit card but she had to leave and "one lady who worked there" said she would call this customer back, but no one ever called her. So she was coming in person to find out what's the deal. After all, she left her credit card application with "someone" and it has all her personal credit info on it.

I asked all the leadership people over the walkies to come to the service desk and i put the customer on the spot and asked her if it was one of these people who took her papers, and she said no. This included the new supervisor, so i narrowed her out. One of my managers said that since we don't know who took the application (the customer's description of the associate was very vague so we had no clue...), that the new supervisor would call Card Services and find out the status if it had been processed. I took the lady's name address and phone number and assured her that she'd get a call back, and i handed it off to "Gretta" [not her real name] the new supervisor.

I found the lady's address info laying on the service desk later which ticked me off bc Gretta should have immedately called Card Services. So instead of talking to her, i took the paper into "her office" and slammed it on the cork board with a RED PUSH PIN.

For 2 or 3 weeks now, it has remained here. She's done nothing with it. That has irritated me everytime i walked in there.

OK well two days ago, i had barely got into work and wired up, when Gretta made a bee line for me. She had that wild "i'm a victim" look in her eyes (and her eye liner is always all smeared around her eyes like she's been crying.......GRRRRRRRRRRRRRR) and as she opens her mouth, she gets all red in the face.

"DID YOU TAKE ALL MY PUSH PINS AND CHANGE THEM TO RED PUSH PINS????" She is demanding to know.

Since i did not, all i could do was stand there and stare at her, but this grinch-like smile crept across my face, and then when her question sank in, i started to totally buckle over and laugh out loud.

"YOU DID, DIDN'T YOU???????"

"OMG no!!!" I said, "When did this happen?"

"Must have been yesterday..."

"Oh my no i didn't but that is the funniest thing i've heard all year!!!"

"If you didn't, then who did?" Gretta asked, now so angry and getting redder in the face, not believing my laughing for innocence.

"I have no idea, and i know you're going to hate me, but i think that was GENIOUS and i only wish i would have thought of it first!" (Yes i really did say this to her bc someone needs to put her in her place.) I then went on to verbally tell her what she had probably already surmised. The 5 other people besides herself that have keys to the cash room - 3 of which are managers and 2 of which are me and Chris, the other supervisor are the only ones who could have. None of the managers would have, and I didn't, so that leaves Chris (and his sidekick on the night crew who were alone in the building on Tues. night.)

I also took this opportunity to tell her that her red push pins are a joke because i had put something of serious importance on two of them that is her job to take care of and they've been sitting up there for 3 weeks and since she isn't doing her job to remedy those situations, why should we worry about her color code system? I told her i don't pay attention to the push pins, but that i did pay attention to the memos that i attatched to them bc i felt partly responsible for them, since i was trusting her to take care of it, but that i should have probably just stepped over her and done it myself so it got done RIGHT and not leaving customers in the lurch. She didn't like that AT ALL.

As i laughed her out of my presence, she stormed off, so mad she couldn't talk. GENIOUS people! So by the time Chris and his side kick got to work on Wed. night, she had had two more run-in's with me, where i had put her in her place and she was not talking to me anymore, and Chris asked me if she had said anything about the RED PUSH PINS and then i remembered that, and we had a very good laugh. After she left for the night and after the store was closed, we resumed our ALLIANCE to vote her off the island by hatching a few more plans to mess with her head. The alliance is TIGHT. In fact, I have hatched 3 total and seperate alliances to accomplish this feat, and none of the other alliances know about the other ones.

So when i can't watch reality tv, i can star in my own show. It's a proud day for kt.

SHE'S OUTTA HERE.

   [ posted  @ 5:05 AM | ]

Just a question.

Say you are going to go shopping at an OFFICE SUPPLY store. You were lazy all day and didn't come. Now, it is night time. You look at the windows of the store, and there are GATES DOWWWN over the windows. Hmm.

So you get up to the doors which do not automatically open. But yet there are still people inside, but not many.

You don't care that the gates are also half way pulled down over the main entrance doors. Do you

a) pry the doors open with your bare hands and get in. since it's not locked, why not?
b) leave. they are obviously closed...
f) get in your car and call the store on your cell phone asking if they are open or not
y) something else...?

We closed at seven tonight. There were OLD MEN prying the doors open until 7:30 and later, until i locked the doors and pulled the gates all the way to the floor. This presents a problem when associates have to let their customers out, there are IDIOTS OUTSIDE WAITING TO GET IN STILL!!! Everytime i tried to lock the doors, each time the associates would let people out they kept forgetting to lock it, so people would just pry the doors open. I can't believe this. The sign on the door clearly says we close at seven.

CLEARLY
WE
ARE
CLOOOOSSSSSSSSSSEEEEEEEEEEEDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD LOSERS!!!!

grrr!

Then, I have people in the parking lot calling me on their cell phone asking if they can come in and shop bc it looks like we are still open. "But i have this coupon i need to use today!!!" they say. I lie to them and tell them my registers are all taken down and we are closed. This is obviously a lie because there are customers in line in the store paying us money. Then when the old man comes in (he broken in; i should have called the police) and asks boldly, "AREN'T YOU STILL OPEN??"

I tell him, (this is true, this is what i do...) really loud i embarrass him and say, "Hey we're closed but i'd love to take your money! Grab a cart and start shopping! I'll take your money any day anytime!!!"

LOSERSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

I can't believe how brave some people are.

   [ posted  @ 7:03 PM | ]

I serve the best students ever!!!

Sunday just before we were supposed to start Jr. High for the band, a group of the bandmates handed me a Christmas present and told me i had to open it real fast.

Well i didn't have any clue but i opened it and it was this watch i wanted REALLY BAD from a catalog someone was doing for a fundraiser for the Brazil trip. The watch was too much $$ so a few weeks ago i bought a ring from it instead. But i had made a comment to one of the girls how cool the watch was and she somehow went to everyone and gathered the $$ for it so i could have it! I am still shocked everytime i see it! It's so cool and then i remember to pray for my students more and stuff!

I'd take a pic of it but i'm short on time. Also, then we had a party at the Jones' house after church and they ordered a billion pizzas from Dominos and we played games all afternoon. I had to leave early bc of having to go to WORRRRRk.

Which is where i'm off to now!

   [ posted  @ 11:54 AM | ]

Happy New Year (s)? and who would have thought the world'd still be spinning at 2005???

OK beyond that the only thing i really wanted to say is my clogs rule, and i am making mom's chocolate cake recipe (well i'm not making the recipe. I'M MAKING THE CAKE. THE RECIPE IS MADE. DUH.) for a party with the teenz tomorrow for band and everyone better show up to it at the JONES' HOSUE.

And also, then i have to work an overnight. It's all icy here right now really bad so i'm glad to be home [the store should not have been opened today. talk about a payroll killer. our sales could not have sucked more if they were consumed by a vacuum cleaner] and i'm going to bed super early tonight on my new flannel sheets (which also came from Terri thank you thank you) after i make the cake's icing. I'm going to try the recipe on the back of the Hershey's' Cocoa box for the icing. Looks good.

   [ posted  @ 3:55 PM | ]

[=Links=]

[=Designed By=]