I was winning with the five pound clear plastic bag of dill pickle slices and Squirrel Underpants, but since they didn't come in the same box, I was kind of disqualified. But I am a winner in my head!
Here is how our facility works, you google something. A truck magically rolls up behind the building with your Three Headed Purple Bunny DVD Player in the trailer. A forklift takes lots and lots of boxes off. The boxes get cut open, and all the miscellaneous crap inside gets scanned into the computer. The stuff then gets dumped into a plastic box and put on a conveyor belt. The conveyor belt carries it to one of the multiple floors in the building where it gets kicked off the belt and put on a cart. I grab that cart, zap it with a handheld scanner, scan the item again and put it on a shelf.
Someone ELSE grabs that item from the shelf, scans it, throws it in a plastic box, puts it back on the conveyor, it gets scanned again, put in a box, loaded in a truck and shipped out to you. And... Voila, you have your Three Headed Purple Bunny DVD Player in a matter of minutes at your door.
Since we are so used to getting the damnedest things on a cart, we all have a tendency to take things as they come. Whatever is in a box, and on a cart gets put on a shelf. Because of the higher volume of items being shipped in, the company has brought in a number of new hires that are just finished the training stage, and are now being thrown to the wolves.
They have instituted a new way of directing the flow of goods onto the floor, and it involves traffic cones. Initially done as an attempt to make sure the first in first out rules were put in place, it has now become a relatively effective tool for controlling the flow of work onto the floors. They had placed the bright green traffic cones onto the next cart you were supposed to take, and the idea was to take the cart, and place the cone on top of the cart behind the one you took. Simple right?
An adorable young Spanish girl was extremely agitated one day. She was grumbling about all of the issues she had with her cart. Unscannable barcodes, missing items, entire boxes of items that were actually filled with customer shipments, and she kept mentioning how it was the third time in a row where she had the same item that she just couldn't put on a shelf. This is a daily occurrence, and we all just kind of roll with the punches.
She said she just kept dropping the boxes that had the item, but she was convinced that someone was messing with her, and how aggravated she was becoming. "Every time I grab a cart, it is right there, and I keep scanning it, but I can't put it on a shelf. How many green traffic cones can we possibly sell?" she complains. "And why are we getting The Elf on a Shelf? Christmas is OVER!"
The poor girl had obviously not paid any attention at our meetings, and kept walking away with the traffic cone. Dutifully she scanned the cone and tried to put it away, time after time. Not a single person said anything to her. We watched as she walked away grabbed a new cart, Picked up the traffic cone, looked at it, shook her head and headed into the shelves to put it away. The look on her face was priceless.
Needless to say the traffic cones are now on the floor in FRONT of the carts, stopping you from taking that row. I haven't had anything remarkably strange in my carts of late, but one man quit because he had to put away porn, some poor woman was completely confused by the fact that she had four different glass dildos she had to put away, none of us understand why ANYONE would buy 4 two pound boxes of Cheerios that are duct taped together online, and I had a HAZMAT issue last night. It was a lemon oil based cleaner that had leaked all over yoga ropes. What exactly a yoga rope is, I do not know, but now it is clean.
Since we have 40 new people starting this week, I wonder what fun today will bring.
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