Inventory: (n) 1. a detailed list of all items in stock
2. a sadistic ritual in which hapless employees are forced to count
items that outnumber them quite literally a thousand to one
Well, it's the middle of April and I've been in hiding for the past 3 weeks. That can mean only one thing: our store Inventory has just finished up. And I have to say, I'm glad it went as smoothly as possible, but it's still not necessarily worth all the exhaustion.
We had the added bonus of contending with two Inventories as a matter of fact. With Mel working at the Kitchener store, she had to help/contend with their Inventory for this past Tuesday morning. And with me at the Waterloo store, our Inventory was the day after (Wednesday). So between the two of us, we've clocked in roughly 80 hours a week for the past 3 weeks. Quite frankly, I'm amazed we managed to get anything else done, like chores or cooking meals, considering how flat-out exhausted we've been by the ends of our shifts. But amazingly the apartment doesn't look like a disaster area...mostly...and we have been eating a very healthy share of home-cooked meals. Not the most extravagant-to-prepare meals, mind you, but at least they haven't all been fast food.
The admitted downside to all this was that Mel, being a full-timer, ended up working a lot of evening shifts. She worked opposite the Kitchener manager, who works primarily days, and it's not surprising to have the store manager working days--especially with an impending Inventory count. Of course...me being the manager of my store meant I was needed to work primarily days. As a result, there had been a week or two where we only saw each other for a few hours at the very end of the day...and I was already nodding off by the time Mel got home. Not the best situation, but at the very least it's over and done with now.
And the Inventories themselves coasted along with relative ease and simplicity, probably due in part to the fact that both Mel and myself have done these for more than a few years running, so it's a bit old hat, so to speak. (And sadly, we did have to count a few hats.) I can't say I was thrilled to be up at 5:30am, just so I could make it to mall for the 7am start time, but I survived. My brain was the equivalent of Shake N Bake by the end of that day, but I managed to still sound mostly coherent by the end. Mostly. Kind of.
The only hiccup occurred when Mel came back from her Tuesday Inventory, and proceeded to gloat about how their crew managed to count everything in an hour and a half. Naturally this galled me. This galled me a lot. So when our Inventory started the next day, I announced to my crew the slander they'd put against us and stated my expectations that we'd have to beat the pants off them! And what do you know...we beat their time by 5-10 minutes. An hour, twenty. Ha!
Though oddly enough, Mel didn't exactly share in my overt celebrations when I got home that day. One punch to the arm later, I stopped gloating.
In other news, I am vastly amused by the "daily question" up on LiveJournal's homepage at the moment: "Would you be upset if a long-term partner confessed that s/he'd committed a serious crime before you met? How do you think it would affect your relationship?"
The reason I find this amusing is that it's a ridiculously broad question, and anyone's answer would ultimately vary from one detailed situation to the next. I mean, if Mel took me aside and admitted she'd stolen a car or two when she was younger, I'd in all likelihood shrug off; what's in the past is in the past, and if I ever locked myself into a car, it'd be handy to know that I should call her first to get me out instead of calling CAA. On the other hand, if she were to confess that she'd had four other husbands before me, and ended up viciously murdering them all, I might be inclined to worry about where our relationship was headed.
I'm also being amused as Spam trends, as the penis enhancers have all but vanished from my Junk Box, only to be replaced by ads for imitation-brand watches. Apparently cool watches are the new, shiny penises. "Ha! My shiney new penis can go from zero to a minute in sixty seconds! Wait...does that sound right?"
Labels: love means not asking why your wife is burying a corpse in the backyard, the inventory in which I won by five minutes and then gloated and then got thwapped for it
posted by Phillip at 8:08 AM
