Category Archives: Personal posts

Work stress; brief politics; brothels get approval stamps

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Today was one of the worst days I have had at work in recent memory. I had not even actually gotten around to looking at the normal things that I needed to check before I was being demeaned, bitched at, and otherwise told that I was the shit that gets scraped off of the bare feet of malnourished children in third-world countries…Basically, at least.

This was all related to the great shelf tagging adventure, of course. As I have written in the past, I was not going to do anything that was going to lose the store money, I think I may have been a tad dishonest with that statement though. I knowingly did things that were going to cost the store money, just very small amounts. Say there are three different types of La Victoria salsa, one is priced 1.89, one 2.39 and one 2.49 (due to being received at different times), the new tags all read 2.29, so I change them all to that price. That is losing us, on a case of 12, 2.40 on the most expensive one, 1.20 on the middle one, but is also gaining us 4.80 on the lowest priced one. The net of that would be 1.20 profit over leaving them all at their current price. I am not completely stupid after all.

There were a couple of cases when I did make notable changes in price for a store loss. Those were done mostly for simplicity on items that we did not have much of. One particular instance was a little jar of mayonaise, we had three on the shelf, the new price was 30 cents lower than the old price, but getting the new price into the register with all the other changes would save me a lot of time in the long run. An intentional 90 cent loss, knowing that the product would cost us less in the future, knowing that it would save me the time it would take to change the price later, it is 90 cents FFS.

Another instance of my failure was in the cake mix area. I did not change a single price with the cake mixes or frostings while we did the change, the reason was that we never buy them except when they are on a really big discount. So I left all of the prices the same and started hanging up special signs in front of the new shelf tags that had vastly higher prices –But– (there always is a but, isn’t there) I did not realize that they had made price changes in the actual cash register to some of those items, this means that the price I saw on the tag and the price it scans at do not match. Okay that seems a little fuzzy, even to me, so I will explain.

The POS (point of sale) software that we have in the backroom sets the prices and prints the tags for all of the items that we have on the shelf. The price of an item can be changed on the register itself, but you will not have a tag for the item, and the price will revert back to the previous backroom price if it ever goes on sale; i.e. The tag for Betty Crocker White cake says 1.59 on the tag, that is the price in the backroom, if you change it to 1.29 at the register it will remain 1.29 until it goes on sale. Once it goes on sale a file will be made in the backroom to transfer the sale price to the register, when the sale file is removed it will go back to the backroom/tag price.

Blah, I am boring myself as I type this, so I am sure the reading of it is probably not going all that well either. Let us never speak of this again…until tomorrow.

• I have been quite curious about the Fahrenheit 9/11 movie, even wanted to go see it, but I think I have changed my mind. Everything that I have read, from every blog I can think of, says that there is no information in it that has not been in the political blogosphere for a very long time. Damn me for not watching cable news and, therefore, thinking that Bush Dubya is the steely-eyed, strong-handed leader that he would want you to believe. I voted for this jack-ass, but I kind of lost faith in him when he was doing his best to read a book for pre-schoolers when the 9/11 attacks happened -mind you, he wasn’t doing it very well.-

I suppose that was all part of his strategery for the war on terror. Pretend to be an illiterate fool, then prove everyone wrong by actually being an illiterate fool…Well played.

Had I been the leader of the free world, I likely would have tried to make the world perceive me as a strong leader, a leader who was the voice of the people. But, then, I am not the President and that means that I don’t really need any scapegoats…Enough said…

• I saw a very brief mention of some country deciding that it needed to go ahead and put quality stamps on their brothels. I am not going to try to look the story up again since the fact that the countries that do have brothels almost invariably have less sex crimes than in the U.S.. I say almost invariably only because I do not have statistics for every country on earth and I don’t want to be telling lies.

Prostitution is called the “oldest profession” for a damn good reason, it is. Imagine 20,000 years ago, when man was first starting to hunt, make fire, become human as we know it. Man comes back with the bounty of his kill, woman tries to find something to trade for it, man would rather have a few seconds with woman than anything that she offers, woman puts up a red torch to let the clan know that her naughty parts are for sale to the man with the most meat (in trade, not the pants). Woman gets the best cuts in exchange for laying on her back and taking it.

Could it have happened differently? Yes. Is it likely? No.

Males have known, all through the ages, that females possess that which they are searching for. Not just the fact that the female has an ‘inny’ while the male has an ‘outy’, no it is deeper than that. The woman can have offspring, while the male can not. Of course no one in the days 20,000 years ago knew about impregnation, but that is not the point. I bet the woman’s crotch has been for sale longer than the most ancient artifacts prove.

I really think that it is a liberation of sorts to have the woman charge the man for sexual services. It is ‘prostitution’, but it is also of her own choice. That is executing total control of your own body, if you want to use the control of your own body for the sake of financial gain, it is at your own risk.

I really think that the only reason the Greeks started having anal sex with their young men was to circumvent the strangle-hold that prostitution had on their society. Had there been more reasonably priced hookers we might think of some of the Greek rulers as marketing genius.

Prostitution works to help stop sex crimes, prostitution also helps to stop the spread of disease (in coutries where it is regulated). Do we, as Americans, only look down on it since it seems so easy as a solution? Do we want to do everything in the most difficult way possible?

Time will tell.

I hate my job

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There was a lot of work-related crap going on yesterday that kept me from making a post. I certainly could have taken the time to inform you all of the day to day shit that happens, but as I told my wife about it (and the fact that she and I are rougly 2/3rds of my reading audience) I decided I would just let it go for the day. I suppose there could be a real reason why anyone else would care, but I have no idea who that person is, nor what the person is trying to do with the information.

A few updates, just in case you actually do read the site on a day to day basis. I have solved the cash register problem, the problem being that the memory was full and could not hold any new items, and have made it so that I can upload new items through the handset as usual. That is a bit of a bitter victory though, since that will likely result in having to do a full system purge at some point. By that, I mean that they will ask me to print the PLU list then walk around the store to find the ones that we still carry, then delete the rest. Since the process of taking out a single plu takes a couple of seconds, this could take a very long time. I am getting paid to do it, of course, so it is no sweat off of my nose, but the thing is that I am given just a few seconds per day to work on it, while they expect that I should be able to take care of the whole store in about an hour….or something…Given a full day to work on that alone, I could probably get rid of several thousand items that we no longer carry, which would keep the store operable for the next year at the very least, but I am not given that kind of time.

Much like the old adage says, they want it done yesterday, however, they wanted me to occupy my time in other ways the day before…Like scraping excess wax build-up off of floor tiles. Of course the fact that they wanted me to do that the day before will always slip their minds when they get back into the bitching about why the pc/cash-register communication seems sub-par. I actually asked the Male half of the owners of the store if I could work on the computer for a bit to delete some other items, he said, “not until you have finished all of the jobs that you started in the store”.

Keep in mind, at this point, that I can only add one new item to the register for every item that I have deleted. There is no way that I can add 20 new items to the register when I finally got the damn thing back to exactly even yesterday. I must delete one item in order to add a new item. So, why haven’t I added those fifty items in that little box? Becasue there is no way to do it. I really want to just clear the memory of the registers and start from scratch, because, honestly, they want me to add every single item that they stock, even if that item will never, ever, ever be in the store again. Then they have fun bitching at me about why their ‘bottom of the barrel’ registers just don’t seem to be able to handle all of the crap that they want me to put into it.

The average scale/scaner system today can hold about 4 times what is in our current system. I am not going to say that this particular fact makes our system less effective, but, I am going to say that you should only add the items that you are going to carry on a day-to-day basis.

If you never want to upgrade your system, you should certainly do your best to clean it out. If you are never going to give me five minutes alone with the machine, you should bitch about the fact that you bought bottom-of-the-barrel technology all of those years ago. I only work there, after all, and I do my best to keep their shoddy system working.

I have crap to work with. The company that sold them the POS software is now out of business, the company that owns the software for the register/pc communication won’t even talk to them/me/us, since them/me/us didn’t buy software support.

This is where I am supposed to explain why it is all good. That is not going to happen today. I had nothing to do with the registers reaching their maximum capacity, I have nothing to do with the decision to try to delete items until all is good again, that might all work well in the short term, but in the long term what have you gained when your gain was nothing?

Store database; Meat scale

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Well it seems that missing every second post is becoming routine. That is unfortunate since it has not been my intention. I am sure you know how it goes when you start doing something thinking that you will only be a few minutes, then something else comes up, then something else, and so on, until at last you realize that an entire day is gone and you never did get around to what you had planned to do that morning. That is kind of what happened to me, with the exception of the fact that going to dinner, and watching a movie, with my wife will always come before updating this website. As for how I pissed the rest of the day away, you got me.

I have written over the last several posts about the tagging of the store leading to a requisite SNAFU, not knowing exactly what course we were going to take to remedy it. Well, I got my answer yesterday. If you recall, the options that I could see were 1) I would get word back from the people at RIS (the software manufacturer) about how to do a mass item delete. 2) I would have to start manually removing the items one at a time. 3) We would add memory to the cash registers so that they could take more items. Now if you knew the way my life works, you would never have thought the solution would have been anything other than having to manually remove old items one at a time, which was what I started to do yesterday.

The following is the process for manually removing each item, after I have brought up a listing of the upc’s I want to remove and the register interface, of course. First I have to click on the blank area where you input numbers (there is no other way to get the cursor there, none of the hot keys that you use in normal windows applications will work in this program) and type in a number, the first was 1120500048. Then I have to take my hand off of the 10key to move the mouse cursor over the button that says “Search PLU” (I actually can use the tab key to make the highlighted button be the correct one, but I have to hit it at least 30 times to get past all of the other paramaters) and click it. Then simply move the mouse over another button that says delete, after which the system will freeze for about a second and then I start the whole process again with the next number. Honestly, it’s not really that bad.

The biggest problem with the process, so far at least, is that if I mistakenly type in a number that I have already deleted, and it has happened a bunch of times, it is not like the list automatically removes the number once it is gone, the program will freeze and I will have to end task on it. It takes about ten seconds per time to open the program, connect to the register, get a listing of the upc’s and bring up the register interface, so you see it really sucks if I type in a number twice. I have taken to holding the cap of a pen on the item that I am deleting so that I won’t forget my place while I am screwing around with the mouse and the buttons, but still I sometimes forget that I have typed in 1120501113, but not 1120501114. It is all a bit irritating, but it is making it so that the program will work for its intended purpose, and I am getting paid to do it, so bitching is futile.

• If you read this page at all, you likely would also have read about the meat scale going out after a series of power-outages late last week. I managed to repair one of our old scales, the ones we used at the cash registers before we upgraded to the scale/scanner system, but they will not print tags, nor do they have Price Look Up numbers, so it is kind of useless for the task. I will say that it was a serious upgrade from what I was doing prior to fixing the old scale. The only thing that actually works on the meat scale is the weighing part. It will tell you exactly what the item weighs, then you just had to use a calculator to multiply the weight by the price; This is exactly what the now-repaired old scale does, which takes a lot of the work out of the process, yet it does not print the tags, so one must remember the price while they carry the item to the wrapping station, wrap it and tape it shut. I know this is the way they had to do it before printing scales were invented, but you see I have always used a printing scale so I often forget the price before the process is done. That is irritating.

I asked the owners what a new scale would cost, and they said it was about 1400 dollars. With a price to beat in mind, I headed for google. There I was able to find new scales with all of the necessary features for a shade under a thousand dollars. Now, knowing what it would actually cost to buy a new one, I hit eBay. Have you ever tried to search for something on eBay when you weren’t quite sure what people would be calling it? I did. The search for “printing scale” showed a bazillion results that were exclusively postal scales. A search for “meat scale” came up with a bunch of vintage crap that a collector might be interested in, but that would not pass health requirements even if they did print, which they didn’t. The term “retail scale” did get a few results for scales, but just the type that weigh but do not print, however, I noticed that they were all in the restaurant category and went to that directory. There were still tons of scales that didn’t have printers, in fact I only found two out of the whole section that did have printers, and, as luck would have it, one of them is damn near identical to the one that we have at work.

My hope had been that I would be able to find a scale that was exactly the same model as the one that we have at work, there are three reasons for this. The first is that we still have over four cases of labels for it. Those thermal printing labels are pretty expensive, like sixty dollars a case. If we have over 240 dollars worth of labels, it would be nice to find a scale that could use them. The second is that both of the owners know how to work the old scale for all of the things they want to use it for; To see how much bologna we sold that day, for instance. I would like to not have to learn the options of a different scale and then teach them, if possible. The third reason is that I spent a few hours of my own time, albeit years ago, making a list of all of the plu’s on the machine. I did it once in numerical order, which I could easily replicate on the new machine so that no one would have to learn different plu’s. But, I also made an alphabetical listing, by type, with a pork section, a beef section, a cheese section, etc. I did not include the first 35 plu’s in my alphabetical listing though, since they all have hot-buttons associated with them. That means, at the very least, I will have to redo that entire alphabetical listing if the scale is not the same.

The scale that I found on ebay does not match any of the three things I was looking for. Wrong labels, different face (therefore different plu format), though the switches on the front are the same, so it is possible that the daily reading options would be the same also. Of course there is no way that I could ever know since the model has been discontinued and the only way to get an owner’s manual for it is to buy it directly through the manufacturer. Now it would be one thing to buy the manual if you actually own the machine, there is no way I am going to do it just to see if I want to own the machine. This will all be pointless by tomorrow anyway, as the price of that scale is less than 10% the price of a new scale, and unless there is a real bidding frenzy I will be able to get it for a hundred bucks or so. Saving the company some 1300 dollars might take the edge off of having to pay 15 dollars for the owner’s manual, eh?

While trying to find an owner’s manual for the scale that we do not yet have, I found an actual scale that is exactly the same as the one that we have in the store. Well, it is not broken all to fuck and it actually works, so I guess it is not exactly the same. The problem is that the item is in a used machine warehouse that is on the east coast so every time I call to ask about the price I get an answering system. I have left my number with an inquiry about the price, but they have yet to call me back about it. My first thought is that they are concerned that the shipping might be so high that I wouldn’t want to buy it, but I tell you what, if we could get an identical system to the one that we currently have we would likely pay a bit more than what I am looking at paying for the one on eBay. So, hopefully, I will remember to call them tomorrow before I put in my bid on the other scale.

Well, I am going to call it a day. Tune in tomorrow for the end(?) of the meat scale saga…

Technology at work

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There was nothing posted yesterday, and when I thought about it I read the post from June 23rd, and sure enough I did say, “If I do not post tomorrow, check the registry of jails and prisons in Florence.” There was nothing of the sort that kept me from actually putting anything up, more that I was just tired and only looking to have a bite to eat when I got home. I read the news and all the sites on my list yesterday, but nothing would have motivated me to actually make a post.

Just to clarify before I move on, I did not kill anyone, I am not in jail or prison, and anyone who is spreading those lies may be next on my list…

Now for more discussion of the ‘Great Shelf Tag Adventure’. Yesterday we finsihed the tagging of the store, in theory. There are tags for like 98% of all of the items that we have, most are at or near the price of the items that they are replacing, and the ones that aren’t are behind the tags of the items that we have in stock. That all went pretty well. Where we ran into a problem was when I was trying to get all of the new items uploaded to the register. I had been wondering if there was going to be enough memory in the actual registers to hold all of the new items that were being added, the actual total of new items was actually only around 1,500, since I didn’t put a lot of them in thinking that we may not actually order them, so I would add them later if we did.

I had uploaded about 600 new items to the register, and had about another 400 in the program ready to upload, when I tried to do the upload and got my question answered with the following quote, “Request has over-loaded memory banks”. What this means is that we/I/the store can not add a single item to the register without first deleting an item that is no longer in use. The problem with that is that I only know how to do that one item at a time.

I tried to call the people who made the software that actually interacts with the register to see if they could tell me how to do a large group all at once. I was not able to contact them by phone so I tried to email the guy who sent me a solution to a problem that we previously had with the software, still no response. We could simply be fucked on this. If I take the items out one at a time I can only do about one item per five or seven seconds, and I would need to take out about 400 of them to complete the items that are already in the program but not the register. There are literally thousands that I know can be deleted, I can even print out a list of them since the program will let me display a list of upc’s based on paramaters that I make, unfortunately I can not figure out how to delete them in a similar manner. Being that it is already Friday night there is no way this will be resolved before Monday so I will just have a lot of time to stew on it, and try to figure out a way to circumvent the limitations of the program.

Technology sucks when it is not doing what you want it to.

Now for a bit of background relating to the problem, not because I think you want to read it, but because I really want to say it. This problem has been a long time coming. Our cash registers don’t have monitor screens like a lot of stores, they don’t have hard drives or anything of that sort, all they have is a stick of RAM. The memory was upgraded a couple of years ago, though I don’t really remember why, but it is still just a stick of RAM. There is only so much that one can put onto a memory device of that sort. As they were constantly telling me to add items to the file, items that I knew we were never going to carry again, I was thinking that there was going to be a time when there just wasn’t any more memory to do it. Of course it only happened now, as I was trying to add a thousand items to a list that probably has ten-thousand items already in it. Of those items already in the file we likely still stock less than half of them.

The biggest problem, however, is the store brands. There are always two ‘store brands’. One is one that supposedly rivals the national brands, while the other is a cheap, plain-label type that is always a lot cheaper than anything else on the shelf. When we started using the scanners (and thus when the original database of items was made), the store brands were TV and Rainbow. Very shortly after we had started to use the scanners TV was replaced by Best Yet. That meant that every single item in the store that had been ‘TV’ had to be entered into the register as ‘Best Yet’, and since there are different upc’s for every different brand, that doubled the number of store brands in the register. Fast forward about two years and Rainbow was replaced by Exceptional Value, with the same doubling thing going on with the registers. Then, last year, Fleming went out of business taking with it ‘Best Yet’ and ‘Exceptional Value’, which were simultaneously replaced by ‘Springfield’ and ‘Special Value’, respectively. If your count is working, you should note that we already have SIX store brands stored in the memory of the cash register. This latest undertaking was trying to put in ‘Shurefine’, ‘Super Savings’ and ‘Western Family’. Numbers seven, eight and nine, as far as the number of ‘store brands’ in the register. If, at this point, you have not yet figured out that there is way too much useless shit in the register, you are likely going to vote for Bush since you just don’t understand logic.

Now for the upside. The UPC of every distributor is on every product they sell. The first five digits of that UPC is the company code, while the last five digits is the product code. As a for instance, 51000 is the company code for the Campbell’s company, while the last five digits are their own number to identify what type of soup it is. All of the store brands have to abide by those same rules, so I know that all of the items that were either TV or Rainbow start with the first five digits of 11205. I can list all of the items that start with those five digits by doing a search for all items from 1120500000 to 1120599999, and I get a listing of every TV or Rainbow item that we ever had in the system. I can delete them one by one, then it will let me add one new item to the system for every one that I have removed, but that is slow going. By Monday I am hoping to have gotten an email back from the people who made the software explaining how I can delete them all at once. Deleting all of the 11205 items would free up thousands of item spaces in the register. For that matter I could also delete all of the 42187 codes in the register, since we only have a couple of Best Yet items left on the shelf and I could re-enter them if necessary.

Adding to my frustration is the fact that if the size/weight of a consumer package changes, the UPC must also change. This means that when you buy that thing that says “33% more FREE” it will have a totally different UPC than the item has when it is the normal size item. Similarly, Frito Lay likes to change the weight of the chips that they sell so that they can keep from raising prices- What used to be a 16oz. bag of Doritos is now at 13 1/4oz, and it still has gone up in price- every different weight must have a different UPC, that is something I would have never known had I not been working here, though I did think that the amount of air in the bags had been increasing pretty considerably over the last few years.

Long story short, there are exactly two options at this point. The first is that I get an email from the guys at RIS, or even a call, explaing how to get rid of all of the 11205 and 42187 upc’s, thus clearing the space for thousands of new items. The second is to actually pay to upgrade the registers so that they have enough memory to handle all the upc’s. There is a third, very frightening, option. That third option would be to completely blank the cash registers and go through the program files to send only the current upc’s. The only way I can think to do that would be to do it one at a time. It would take a hell of a lot of time, but I could completely purge the system and thus free up a hell of a lot more space than either of the other options. Estimated time: 100 hours. The quickest, easiest fix would be to slap a bit more memory in the registers, what will actually happen remains to be seen…

Also, the meat scale at work started to malfunction after a series of power outages around noon today. By ‘malfunction’ I mean that it just doesn’t work at all. That scale has been there far longer than I have, I tried all of the troubleshooting things in the owners manual and got nothing. It is just fucking broke.

As with damn near anything, if they were to give me an hour alone with either system I bet I could come up with a way to solve, or at the very least circumvent, the problem. Unfortunately that never happens unless I do it on my own time. Imagine trying to simply do surgery to remove and appendix while someone is constantly hovering over you yelling, “are you almost done? How much longer? Are you sure you know how to do this? I don’t have time for this. You either can or you can’t. Where’s the god damn appendix, we have been here three minutes already.”

Enough Said.

Scanner database

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The hard part of the changing wholesalers/tagging the store began today. Myself and five from the crew from New Mexico began at 8a.m. (an hour before the store opens), while the leader of their group was picking up yet another helper at the airport in Phoenix. It went just about as I had been expecting, perhaps dreading. We finished the straight price changes early in the morning, within the first hour, then it was on to the more difficult task. Each of the guys that was on their team was going through the aisles and putting tags for items that were of a similar size/pack/price on the shelf (turned sideways so that we could easily spot them) after which I had to begin going up and down the aisles doing new item scans with the hand set.

While going through the aisles I did have to check to make sure that each item was something comparable to what it was replacing, make sure that it was near enough in price that the consumer would purchase it, and then begin to key it in. The Hand Held Device that we have for this sort of thing is programmed to scan bar codes, and while their tags have bar codes, they are bar codes for the item order number. What I needed was the Univeral Product Code (UPC) from the tag, which was there but had to be keyed in manually. That not only lends itself to operator errors (me being the operator), but it also takes way longer than just zapping the tag with a laser-light.

The first aisle that we actually had totally set was the one with the baking goods, flour, cake mix, that sort of stuff. I wanted to take a test run of that idea to have Steve scan the tags and have his company fax us back a print-out with all of the information I would need to do it at the pc. While waiting for that little venture to come to fruition, I went ahead and started doing the changes manually on the aisle where we have the cooking oils. Once I was done with the cooking oils, I did the part of an aisle where we have pickles and olives, after which I knocked out the rice and dry beans sections. What I did manually was as large if not larger than what he had sent to his office to send back, and I did it quite quickly with the handset. There is a downside to doing it with the handset though; something that I had completely forgotten about since I had not tried to re-tag the store in this manner since we first got the scanning system in like 1994. The new item scans that I was doing do not automatically get put into the file for broadcast to the registers, that means that after I upload all of the new items I also have to use the 10 key on the pc to add them to the broadcast file.

I am pretty good on a 10 key, but I would have thought that having a printout with all of the items would make it faster, though I found that that particular assumption was horribly wrong.

The first upload that I did was 259 items. The program prints out the items that I add, then it is up to me to key them into the broadcast file. All I have to do is type in the 10 digit UPC, then hit enter (which is the top line and says, send current price). I typed the first 259 changes into a broadcast file and sent it to the register in about 12 minutes. That might seem like a long time to type 259 10digit numbers, but I did make a few mistakes where I would have to type the number in again. It is extremely irritating that I have to re-type all of the numbers to add them to the broadcast file, but the company who made this particular software went out of business about four years ago, so there is no one to bitch to about it.

When the fax finally came in with the stuff on the baking goods aisle, it looked horrible. The font size was about the same as your average phone book, there was a number, followed by about ten blank spaces, then the item description, then blank spaces, then the retail price. There were no lines connecting any of the aforementioned attributes, but they were actually line by line. Perhaps I am being a bit pissy in thinking that if you are going to put all of that information on a page you should at least put a space between the lines if you are not going to have, say, dots, at the very least, to hold your eyes on that line. Especially when the guy(me) who is having to read it is doing so through a blurry faxed copy. I gave up on trying to “save time” by entering the info at the pc when it took longer to do the first ten items on the page than it took to do the 259 items on the other aisles.

Once we got into a bit of a flow, that is, when their guys would come and ask me to scan the aisle that they had just re-tagged, it started going pretty well. I was hindered by the fact that the handset can only take about 250 new items before it just dogs down and then I have to upload to make it work again. The fact that they had so many people helping actually slowed the process pretty considerably. Once the aisle was done, for their purposes, the guy would leave. Then another guy would find tags for the same aisle and assume that it hadn’t yet been tagged. I found at least 100 duplicate tags while I was scanning, not because I am all that smart, just because if I have to type the number “51000-02036” it will be in my head long enough that when I come to the second tag, with the same number, I will call one of them over to ask WTF there are two of the same tags for.

It got really bad when we got to the section with the ramen noodles. You know the ones, little pack of noodles with a spice pack, costs about twenty cents unless it is on sale, then it is 10-12 for a buck. Yeah, somehow the new company happened to have the same UPC code on their order tags for at least three of the different flavors. I say ‘at least three’ since I caught three, but that was after I had already been doing the scanning for eight and a half hours. I really hope that they will work to remedy that problem, but somehow I think that they are a bit irritated that I caught it. There were also issues of the same nature where their tags were saying things like “.19” for a can of spam, while I am not an eater of spam, I know that it costs more than that.

Tomorrow will be another day of the same stuff I was dealing with today. With a bit of luck, they will help me get through it all with what is left of my sanity, if not, I may have to skew this page a bit to be more like the diary of a sociopath. There are only so many times that they can thank me for finding their errors before I actually snap and start killing people. I am working a lot of extra hours to get this done and I really think that their solution should be something better than, “we will inquire at the warehouse”.

If I do not post tomorrow, check the registry of jails and prisons in Florence.

Tagging the store

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Today brought about the beginning of a pretty monumental task at work. We are changing wholesale sources, and as such we are having to change every single shelf tag in the entire store. That, in and of itself, is not so bad really, just swapping a tag for a tag. What is really making the process so monumental is that we are having to replace all of our ‘Store Brand’ items with different store brands.

The part of the process that we were doing today was the easy part, we were just switching out old price/order labels with the ones from the new distributor. This was just on the national products. So they had six guys swapping out tags and writing price changes on the products so that I could scan them with our hand-held device to upload the new price to the cash register. I am not new to the switching wholesaler thing, so I was making sure to note any price changes that were more than about 20 cents. I put all of those type of items into a separate cart to be dealt with in a much different manner. That being that I will reprint a tag at the old price to put over the tag with the new price. The whole reason that we switched was to make it so that our prices are lower for the consumer, but at the point where you have to sell the stock on the shelf at a twenty percent loss, the consumer needs to foot some of that cost until we are able to buy the stock at the new, lower price. Whether the owners believe me or not, I am not about to actively make a change that is going to cost them a lot of money, I mean they write my paycheck, if I were to knowingly make a decision that would cost them a lot of money that would be a bit foolish.

The team that is helping me in the process didn’t arrive until almost two in the afternoon, and they arrived after having been on a plane for a couple of hours and an equal amount of time in a rental car on the drive down. I kind of admired their stamina as they worked straight through until six, as did I, but they were doing it without ever even seeing the hotel that they are going to stay in or anything of that nature. I would mention that they all worked without lunch, were it not for the fact that I only ate anything today after I was already off of work, and then I just ate a hot dog from the local circle K.

We made some pretty good headway today. Completing about 90% of the direct changes, that being the ones where the item needed a new tag and a price change in the register. The thing about that is that, like I said, there were six of them and one of me. Six of them were tagging and pulling changes, one of me was trying to scan all of the changes and get them uploaded to the register. There were six shopping carts that were constantly being filled with items that needed the changes which I had to scan, as quickly as possible, and then return the items to the shelf, then upload the changes to the register so that the price on the new tag would be the price that the product scanned at.

The team had planned to leave at 5:30p.m., after which I would have completed the price changes myself, but seeing that I was now staring at six whole carts full of additional price changes, they stayed for fifteen more minutes to put the items back on the shelf after I had scanned them for changes. I am quite thankfull that they did, else I would still be there hammering away at the archaic pc in the office as opposed to telling you all about it here.

Mind you, we have basically completed the easy part. Tomorrow we will start at 8a.m. and likely work until 6p.m. on the more complicated part, then with a bit of luck, ten more hours on Thursday and we will be done. The hard part is with the new items (item changes if you like to look at it that way), the store brand items will all be changing. We (the store) was forced to change store brands when Fleming went out of business last year, and to this day our shelf is still not properly tagged for replacement items. That is why we are going to make damn good and sure we get it done right now this time. The previous wholesaler did not help in any way with the new tagging, new items and the such, these guys are willing to, and I am going to hold them to it.

Steve, the guy who is running the team, is going to go up and down every aisle with me tomorrow and work with me on every single item change. The goal is that every single item that is being replaced will already be in our system when it arrives, and at the correct price, which is quite important. I do not know how difficult it is really going to be, nor will I know before tomorrow, what I do know is that if I have to add the items based on typing in UPC’s it would take about a minute per new item. Based on that, it would take me about 34 hours to enter the number of new items that we assume there will be. Now, even working at maximum efficiency, I don’t think I will be able to do 34 hours of work in less than 20 hours time, so I hope we can find a better way to do it. Regardless of time, it will be done. I do not want to be sitting here at this time next year bitching about how long the change has taken, I want it to be done…Done

Steve also mentioned that it would be possible to scan the new item tags by aisle, transmit them to his base in New Mexico, and have them fax back a sheet that would have all of the information that I needed to actually enter the items via the keyboard on the pc. I am thinking that while I am quick on the hand-held device, I am way faster on an actual keyboard. If the fax has all of the information necessary for adding new items we may just try it that way. That would lay all of the necessary information out in a page that would be far easier for me to deal with than to have to type in the UPC’s out in the store (since the new tags have item order codes instead of the UPC’s that I programmed our old system to print on the tag). -I would probably get really mad, again, if you were to ask why I had to reverse engineer the source for the old tags, then modify it so that they looked remotely presentable, please don’t bring it up.-

I don’t know how long they (the team from New Mexico) are planning to stay tomorrow, so I really don’t know when/if I will ever be free to come home. I do know that half of the team is going to fly back tomorrow evening, so they will likely be pretty gung-ho about getting most everything done. If I do not make a post tomorrow, just assume that we all decided to work a bit long to try to take care of this whole thing all at once. It may suck for me in the immediate future, but it will be so much nicer in the long term.

Harry Potter; Personal

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Today was a day of mixed blessings. The first of which was that I did not know which of the pipes was distrubuting cold and hot water, so I let each of them run into a bucket for about a minute. Or course the one that was spewing out warm water turned out to be the “cold” water, a fact that I did not know until I went to see what was taking the thing so long, and noticed that the water line marked as ‘C’ was quite hot to the touch. You live, you learn.

The stalemate between my wife and my parents-in-law seems to be over as they were over at the house today. While she (the mother-in-law) was less than friendly, he (the father-in-law) was quite cordial and I did enjoy speaking with him. That is likely in a lot of families though, the public in general would like to villify the father of the bride while the reality is that the mother of the bride has so much control over him/the situation that it is always going to go her way no matter what. That is not a given fact so much as it is an estimation that I have come up with after seeing the reactions of numerous Mothers on the day of the prom, compared to numerous fathers on the day of the prom. After all, whatever happens on PROM night is sealed in a mayonaise jar on the front porch of Funk and Wagnalls so it can’t be disputed or conversed about, right…

• So I read the first Harry Potter book over the weekend. I suppose it would be more true to say that I read the first thirty pages of it while I was on the shitter on Friday and Saturday, then read the other 300 pages today. It was a pretty decent read.

I am not trying to imply that it is a literary masterpiece or anything of the such, just to say that it kept me involved to the point that I read the book (basically cover to cover) today. I have not been so involved with characters as this book makes you since the first John Saul novel that I read. Of course Saul continued to write the same story over and over again just to get a check.

The first two chapters of the “Potter” book, I was joking with my wife about circling the noun and under-lining the verb. Sometime between then and now I actually read damn near 300 pages of that same book.

Was it compelling? No. Did I feel drawn to the book enough to keep reading it? No. It was certainly a book for very young people. There were no complex sentence structures, even the ending had been telegraphed from the start of the book. At the same time the characters were wonderful and you want to read just a bit more to find out what happens to Hagrid, Draco, the Weasley’s and Ms. Granger. The story that this book told might not have been compelling, but the speculation of the next book is.

Bottom line, had I been in my teens, or pre-teens, when this book was released, I would have been all over it. Like a teen-ager to a new Harry Potter book, if you want to use an analogy. Why this thing, “Harry Potter”, is doing so well at the moment we may never know, but if it is getting kids to turn the pages of a book rather than stealing their daddy’s gun, it is certainly a step in the right direction.

The ultimate in customer service; silly games

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My wife and I went out to dinner yesterday, and it was nice. There was a bonus in the fact that the establishment did not have any grenadine syrup, which is one of the three ingredients in a Tequila Sunrise, which was the drink that my wife ordered. So the guy who was tending the restaurant’s bar (who actually runs the joint) gave her the unfinished tequila sunrise (which was just O.J. and tequila) and a different drink that he thought she might like, which was just coconut rum with pineapple juice, at no charge. Aside from the that the food was quite good, as always, the service was great, it usually is, and I likely gained three pounds by eating all the food.

The reason that I bring up the dinner story is that I wanted to talk a bit about Mario. I am not sure who technically owns that restaurant at this point, but I do know that Mario is the guy that handles all of the day to day operations of the place. In addition to that he also runs a bar at the other end of town, again handling everything on a day to day basis. Can you imagine how many hours a week he must spend at one place or the other? That must be a tremendous amount of work and stress, I don’t know how he does it. When I say that he is running the place I don’t mean like a supervisor, he actually does whatever needs to be done. Last night he was tending bar while also dealing with customer complaints and the such. That is a level of dedication that I don’t think a lot of people really ever have, though it is true that the more money the places make the more money he makes, but at some point you would think that he would just get tired of being there eighty hours a week.

His dedication to both of the establishments is probably a huge factor in why they both remain busy all year while other restaurants and bars end up going out of business the first slow season (which is now). I am sure that like any good P.R. Guy he knows just how to talk to each customer to make them feel like whatever problem there may have been it had been completely resolved. To the point that they will not only leave happy, but recommend the place to friends even after a potentially bad experience that was taken care of. Whatever good fortune comes his way it is going to be based 100% on his dedication and understanding of the customer. I know that I could never do that.

There was a particular incident where I am working now that would prove that, or at least it did at the time, though I have gotten a lot better at keeping a level head when people are being belligerent since then. Without going into too much detail I will just say that there was a guy who was screaming like we had shot his wife when he was overcharged by six cents for something. He would not accept the six cents in return, he would not accept a full refund for the item as a courtesy for our mistake, he just wanted to yell about the damn six cents. He wouldn’t leave the store, there were a lot of people watching, I was barely 21 I didn’t really know how to handle it. I explained to him that all I could do was refund his money, he would not take it, he just wanted to yell. After ten minutes or so of this I told him I was going to call the police to have him escorted from the property.

This was the exact moment that I got really, really pissed off. When I went for the phone to call the police, the man in question made a very quick, very quiet exit. In fact when he saw me reach for the phone, he ran out the door. I proceeded to NOT call the police, I gave my name tag and apron to the cashier, reminded her that I was not actually on the clock (which was true, I came over since the boss was on vacation and someone needed to make this guy go away,) and chased after him. When I confronted him out front he seemed a lot more agreeable than he had been while he was inside the store and for some reason that just pissed me off even more…

The actual details get a bit vague at this point. I remember a bit of very stern dialogue, I remember giving him five dollars, I remember punching him in the face so hard that it probably ruptured his appendix, beyond that I remember nothing. He apparently never called the police on me (I thought he wouldn’t since he bolted when I tried to make the call from inside the store, that was likely why I did what I did) and I never heard another word about the entire thing again. Well, truthfully the cashier did ask what happened when I went back into the store and I told her what happened, but I never said anything to the owners, nor has anyone come around looking for the guy that punched the guy in the parking lot all of those years ago. I never saw that guy again either, which was unfortunate since I really would like to have apologized for what I had done, either that or I really wanted to see how bad a shiner he had, I mean I hit him hard.

Now that I am a bit older I know that I would not have handled that situation the way that I did then. When you work in customer service or retail for any amount of time you simply learn to mask your emotions with a happy smile, while you are thinking about doing something like that. I guess it takes a lot of years to develop sufficient patience to handle people like the guy that I dealt with that day, but I would also think that no matter how patient you are there has got to be a limit. Fortunately I have not found occasion to actually bring a fist against anyone since then, though I have really wanted to a few times.

For the record, that story was just that, a story. There are only two people in the entire world that know the outcome of that particular altercation, if you happen to find the other guy, please kick his ass, he deserves it.

• There is a game that I have been playing a lot of recently, it is called “Phlinx”. It is one of the games on Pogo.com. I think that you have to be a “club pogo” member to play it, but as I recall there is a free trial period for the club if you really want to give it a try. The game is very similar to Snood. It is also very similar to Dynomite. I am not sure why I have such an obsession with this one, but it probably is due to having high scores by the hour and by twenty-four hours that you can check after every completed level (a level being four games).

The graphics and sounds in Phlinx are a lot better than the ones in Snood, while it doesn’t have an actual puzzle mode like Dynomite. Also the different difficulty levels in the game actually make a difference in your ability to solve it, as opposed to just having more blocks to start with. You can not necessarily ever “win” the game since it will just load up and start over, but you can marvel at getting ever higher scores, particularly when you set it on expert mode, to see how many of the day’s high scores you can get.

The game certainly isn’t for everyone, yet for some reason I play it a couple of times before I actually get into playing any of the actual games that I have installed on my system. Why? I guess to just make sure that I can still at least get on the top 5 high scores in the last 24 hours. I know that is a pretty empty goal, but it is all mine.

Links circa ’04; D-day; Puppies

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First I just want to mention that I updated the music lost to history feature on the side bar. The previous song that I had on there just went so extremely long with my comments that I felt compelled to write more than I wanted to to try to make the actual text of the site at least as long as the side bar. That led to a lot of half-assed stuff towards the end of the posts. Sort of like adding the “very, very, very, very much” to your report to make it meet the minimum number of words. Also I recently listened to the Megadeth song Hook in Mouth again recently and it was not nearly as cool as I remembered it. Not that the Alice Cooper one that replaced it has been nominated for any awards either.

• When I log on to the internet I go through a little routine. First to check my local email, then to check the website email. After that is done I go to BlackChampagne to check for updates, as he can be as erratic as me when it comes to a posting schedule. The next click is only a few days a week that I go and check out DiabloII.net the frequency of my visiting that site has dwindled down to almost nothing as the content no longer seems to matter by the time it is posted, I do still enjoy the guest articles on occasion. Once I have done all of that, I start to do my “real reading”, that is reading for the sake of finding things to spark my interest and make me want to write a post. Political Animal is the next site that I visit. It is a liberal political blog that often has a lot of interesting information both on it and linked to from it. After that there are numerous news sites that I will hit looking for something to set me off. By now I am sure that you are wondering what the hell all of this has to do with anything. I will get to it soon enough.

Today on the aforementioned political blog site, I saw this particular headline, “CLICK THIS….Via Unfogged, Microsoft has been granted a patent on double clicking.” Now that really seemed to be just a tad unbelievable, and as I found out with a quick news search, it was. Not that I can fault anyone for linking to sites that don’t quite have the whole story, especially when the story is just breaking, but in this case it just seemed wrong. From what I was able to understand about the actual patent that was issued it was about portable devices, such as PDA’s and the software’s ability to recognize very specific actions done with the user interface. It seems to have absolutely nothing to do with a mouse, as the headline would lead you to believe, whether that was the intention of the author or not. That is exactly the reason why I mentioned that I do go and read news sites before I post anything here, I do not want to go into a rant about a half-assed rumor, as I certainly would have done on this issue had I not educated myself a bit about it before I started writing a post.

• Tomorrow is the sixth of June, besides the obvious reason that people will remember the date, that being that it is the date in the fabled song Convoy by C.W. McCall, it is also my other brother’s birthday. No, they were not twins that were born an agonizing 48 hours of labor apart, they were actually born three years apart, the fact that their birthdays are only two days apart just means that ma and pa were often frisky in September, while my birthday is in july it seems that the friskiness kept on for a month or so. In the interest of journalistic integrity (or something), I just called my mother (at damn near ten p.m.) to ask if the september date might coincide with their wedding anniversary (a fact I would likely know had they not divorced when I was like seven) and it turns out their anniversary is actually in August. So my next assumption was that September was when children go away to school, but as the oldest brother would only have been two when the other brother was conceived that theory went down faster than Monica Lewinski.

Also, the sixth of June is the anniversary of “D-Day”, when the beaches were over-run at Normandy and the tide of WWII began to change, thus leading to the eventual defeat of Hitler. All that is fascinating reading, and likely great for the world as a whole, but had it not been for C.W. McCall’s song “Convoy”, we likely would never have had the movie Smokey and the Bandit. Now you just have to ask yourself which was more important, the fall of Nazi Germany and the end of World War 2, or the release of Smokey and the Bandit. I have made my choice…

• Now that I have exposed myself as the trailer trash that I am, which is unfortunate as I never really called a trailer a dwelling for long, I guess I must move on to bigger and better things. Of course having nothing bigger or better to move on to, I will just continue with the same mindless dribble you have grown accustomed to. That being puppy stories.

Now that the Zelda puppy has overcome her previous problem, she has gone right back to the intimidation/ass-kicking thing that she is known for. Yes, she is constantly whipping Warlock’s ass, despite the fact that he outweighs her by a good twenty pounds. Of course he doesn’t have any testicles, but still, he outweighs her by like 1/3rd. He is about fifty-sixty pounds while she is in the 30-40 pound range. I suppose if Warlock had some male dogs as peers he would be a bit more interested in trying to win the fights as it would look really bad for any male entity to get their ass kicked by a girl that is smaller than them (unless they know martial arts), but man, it is usually ‘no contest’ type stuff. He will just admit defeat and run away. He then will lay down to sleep in a closet or under a desk (as he is currently) so that mean old Zelda can’t come and beat him up again. Of course after the death matches (where no death is involved, so that might not be the appropriate term), they can be seen licking tongues within five minutes. Strange thing the differences in interaction between humans and interaction of animals.

Java game; Dog toes;

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As stated above it is the fourth of June. This is my eldest brother’s 34th birthday. Though I do not have any way to contact him, nor do I know where he is even living, I will say Happy Birthday here. Just in case he has caught word of this site through one of the relatives that actually know the URL. However unlikely that is, I made the gesture. Fifty years down the road, you know when I am dead from stress, smoking and alcoholism, he will be able to read through the stuff that is saved to my hard drive and see that while I don’t know where he is, or how to contact him, I actually thought about him on his birthday. Of course in that scenario it would be his 84th birthday when he reads this and the odds of him making it to 84 are no better than mine. Perhaps this entire paragraph is a moot point?

This is just a random curiosity that I have. Why do the colors of a dog’s toes dictate the color of the toenails? I am sure that I could google around a bit and find a very scientific response to that question, I am just wondering as a layman without so much desire to know the answer as to go and look it up. I mean sure the skin pigment would be passed to the nail, since the cuticle is what actually makes the nail grow, right? If that is the case, why don’t black people have black fingernails? As I said, that is just a curious thought that I had today and am not so intrigued by that I actually want to spend the next hour reading articles about cell composition and the such. If you happen to have the simple answer, in layman’s terms, you know what to do.

• There is a bit of trouble brewing on the home front. I am not going to discuss that here because, 1) I do not have any intention of airing my family’s dirty laundry on this site, and 2) You would only be getting my side of the story. As with everything there are at least two sides to every story. Perhaps you are better than I am at separating fact from fiction, but I tend to believe the story that I hear first. I suppose that I would be bad in a jury for exactly that reason. The prosecution gets to go first, they make you believe that the guy did it, then it is up to the defense to make you switch your opinion. If this country was truly based on the legal ‘innocent until proven guilty’ premise, shouldn’t the defense go first? Paint the guy as a simple painter who got flim-flammed into something that he didn’t understand…Not that the trouble on the home front involves anyone actually being put on trial or going to prison or anything, just that it would be a bit unfair for me to put my side of the story here without giving the other people involved equal time to voice their view.

This damn democratic society has infected me!

• I wrote about the popularity of the little java game Lightz Out back on March 19th. I am still getting emails at my old email address requesting the source code for the game. I really wish that I had known what I was doing as I programmed that game, as I think that everyone is going to look at that code in ‘what the fuck’ mode, but I am still getting requests for the code. For my ease I am going to go ahead and link to the file that I uploaded to this site previously, just in case someone searches for it. That will happen when I get around to it of course. Until that time, you can find the link to the source code Right Here. Just keep in mind that I have absolutely no idea what I am doing when I program Java. I know some of the basic arguments and I use them and guess and check until it works. Why the damn Lightz Out game has such staying power is totally beyond me.

• The little puppy Zelda seems to have overcome her malady. She is running and barking just like she did before she was stricken with the…problem. The thing about her little problem is that it may have been caused by the fact that she lays on the floor with her hind legs in very odd positions. My wife and I have talked frequently about how they seemed to be out of socket (some of her joints I mean) while she is casualy laying on the floor. She is back to laying in exactly the same manner now. My wife wants to give her Glucosamine for joint flexibility, but I am starting to think that we probably shouldn’t do that since she likes to sit in postions that would likely break the legs of most canines.

The Glucosamine, as well as children’s aspirin, helped her to get past the pain of her injury, but giving her the drugs to promote joint flexibility will only make her lay in ever more awkward positions. The fact that you only have ten or twelve years to live with a dog should really make you want to make sure that they are happy and playfull for the entire time that they are with you. If she(Zelda) thinks that she is flexible again, she might injure herself again. There is no worse feeling for a pet owner than to see their pet suffering, and she did suffer considerably when she was stricken with her…problem.