Sick Of It All

Current song stuck in my head: Look After You by the Fray

Yesterday looked as though it may be a promising day at work: my first assigned area was the GM self checks. I rather like it over there; it's more laid back and much calmer than the grocery side of my store. I can pay close attention to the registers, all four of them, and keep the area clean and organized. However, I was simply covering a lunch break so I'd only be there for an hour. But as the hour came to an end, something happened.

A customer, who was purchasing a case of water along with some other items, had an accident. Her mug, which happened to be filled with what appeared to be orange juice, fell and spilled. Now, this wasn't a small mug, either--it looked as though it held somewhere around 56 ounces and it was full. How much liquid was this? Nearly 2 liters worth. I'm not kidding.

We're talking about a good sized spill, something that would require a mop easily. So I put in the action code for a wet spill clean-up, hoping that whoever's working in maintance won't be too angry. Who comes up? CSM Mary. She looks at the spill, looks at me and says, "Grab some paper towels and clean that."

Paper towels. Yeah.

It took nearly fifteen minutes to clean everything. And I didn't get up all the liquid, either; as I was walking away, I could feel the bottoms of my shoes trying to stick to the floor. Like I said, we really needed a mop. To say I wasn't pleased was putting it gently.

Here's the thing: this wasn't the first time something like has happened. When I told a few of my co-workers about the incident, they said that they too had to clean up large spills with only a roll of paper towels and no help. I was stunned. Why on earth would anyone think that this was a good idea? Then one of the other cashiers told me the reason.

During one of the safety meetings, one of the people who works at the customer service desk--Judy--claimed that all the cashiers were lazy and didn't do enough. None of us clean up anything; we're just a bunch of messy slobs.

I can tell you that this is not true. I clean up after myself. I'm more than willing to clean up a spill and have done so, but if it's huge then I need help. And let's be honest here, mopping up a large amount of liquid is faster than soaking everything up with wads of paper towels. But according to Judy, I'm just a lazy slob who doesn't want to clean up after myself. Whatever.

But it gets better.

It seems that our company has a new way of calculating our productivity. Instead of keeping track the amount of items we scan through our registers, it's now only the scans that count. Management wants all of us to crack a thousand scans an hour. One of the ways they want us to do that is to enter in quantities of items. We're now allowed to use the quantity key on our registers.

For years, we were told to never touch that button. Scanning quantities or scanning one item and hitting enter repeatedly has a tendency to mess up our inventory, especially if the items all have different UPCs. So what management is telling us now is that accuracy doesn't count anymore. Our scanning is now all about speed and nothing more. The faster you are, the better.

This is going to screw up our inventory and make things a lot harder for our department managers, but who cares? We'll be cracking 1000 on our scans per hour and that'll make the bigwigs happy. This is why I can't care anymore; the more I care about my job and try to do decent work, the more upset I become over things like this. It's not worth the tears and frustration.

--Weasel, going to curl up in bed with her Slumblebee because she could really use a hug right about now...