I've decided to concluded the reader poll. I'm a little surprised to see the turn-out to be substantially less than anticipated. Only four votes, and two of them went toward an option I wasn't even going to consider, no change at all. So basically I'm tossing out the two do-nothing votes and accommodating the other two by making a new hand-drawn logo for the Grid Gnomes blog and profile pic on the Facebook page. And I will also be making a cover picture using polymer clay characters for the top of the Facebook page. For those who were worried about losing the old logo, don't be. It will still be stored in the history of the Grid Gnomes picture album.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Attention: Future Site Update!
I've been using the same hand drawn picture for a few years to represent the Grid Gnomes logo. I'm offering up a chance for readers to voice their opinion on what they think the new picture should be.
Go here to vote! http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Grid-Gnomes/401826318618
Go here to vote! http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Grid-Gnomes/401826318618
Friday, March 2, 2012
Ye of Too Much Faith
I suppose it should come as no surprise that a week long pow wow by the governing district managers came to a decision on the freight process that has the rest of the working class in the Company yet again scratching their heads in utter confusion. The goal, as we were told, was to improve the truck day operations by streamlining bottlenecks and adapting the goals to realistic measurements.
If you were to ask anyone in any Store what would be the best way to tweak the program of putting away stock from the truck, they would probably say that on the first day you unload and put out the case pack goods; seasonal merchandise would be set aside and sorted into workable piles, and the boxes of miscellaneous freight would be sorted. Then on the following day the seasonal merchandise and the miscellaneous standard freight would be worked. This is realistic. This makes sense. This is not what the Company decided to do.
No, instead they wrote an all new procedure that redefined what we had already been doing before the warehouses started meshing everyday and seasonal freight together. They want us to put out all the standard stuff (including the miscellaneous after sorting through it all) on one day and then on the following day work out all the seasonal. The one and only change they've made is to add an additional buffoon onto the freight line to stop everything up during unloading so that every case pack coming off the truck gets cup open.
Every employee is supposed to have a cutting tool on them anyway, so how this is supposed to speed things along during the stocking process is something that eludes us all. What's going to happen is that the unloading will now take at least 30 extra minutes because of a brand new bottleneck which will thus cause the second and/or third stops for the delivery trucks to expect late arrivals.
Words cannot fully articulate just how defeated I'm feeling over this brand new declaration. I try not to think how much money was spent corralling all these figureheads together so they could hash out yet another procedure that WON'T WORK! I really should have known better than to expect something good to come of their reevaluation of the freight process.
If you were to ask anyone in any Store what would be the best way to tweak the program of putting away stock from the truck, they would probably say that on the first day you unload and put out the case pack goods; seasonal merchandise would be set aside and sorted into workable piles, and the boxes of miscellaneous freight would be sorted. Then on the following day the seasonal merchandise and the miscellaneous standard freight would be worked. This is realistic. This makes sense. This is not what the Company decided to do.
No, instead they wrote an all new procedure that redefined what we had already been doing before the warehouses started meshing everyday and seasonal freight together. They want us to put out all the standard stuff (including the miscellaneous after sorting through it all) on one day and then on the following day work out all the seasonal. The one and only change they've made is to add an additional buffoon onto the freight line to stop everything up during unloading so that every case pack coming off the truck gets cup open.
Every employee is supposed to have a cutting tool on them anyway, so how this is supposed to speed things along during the stocking process is something that eludes us all. What's going to happen is that the unloading will now take at least 30 extra minutes because of a brand new bottleneck which will thus cause the second and/or third stops for the delivery trucks to expect late arrivals.
Words cannot fully articulate just how defeated I'm feeling over this brand new declaration. I try not to think how much money was spent corralling all these figureheads together so they could hash out yet another procedure that WON'T WORK! I really should have known better than to expect something good to come of their reevaluation of the freight process.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
A Word Diet
Speculation in the air as of late has been the notion of whether the morning manager is going to throw in the towel and let someone else handle the ardurous (i.e. impossible) responsibility of handling the shift requirements. The district manager caught wind of this and immediately proceeded to backpeddle on his apparent ultimatum about cutting the person loose if improvements weren't made in 30 days. He said that wasn't what he "meant." I'm not sure what anyone is supposed to think when they're told to get something fixed by a certain deadline. Demands like that usually have consequences attached them that pay off in either the negative or positive/neutral depending on the context of the direction. So that's one thing. The true status of the morning manager's decision on staying or resigning is still anyone's guess.
The next insightful pearl I discovered was during a truck day freight working. The morning manager called over the P.A. to everyone busting their humps trying to make the impossible possible. She said that the district manager was out for the week at headquarters to confer with other colleagues on improving the truck process which would thusly turn the process into a two-day event rather than a single day blitz. From what I can tell, it's probably the closest I've ever heard anyone from Corporate come to admitting they were wrong (without actually saying it).
The truth is that regardless of how early you schedule the delivery truck to arrive, and how many inexperienced newhires you throw at half a semi-trailer load of merchandise, getting it all done before customers set foot in the building that day is impossible. The work hours are unnnatural. The quantities are too high. The logistics of sorting the thumb-sized merchandise is too tedious. And the Corporate heads are once again completely out of touch on the reality of the procedure.
This leads to my third discovery. During this pilgrimage to the Corporate mecca, my district manager physically participated in a truck process (albeit in the Company's show Store which hasn't a thing out of place nor a speck of dust on a single shelf in the whole bulding.) Even then, his pride got taken to the cleaners. His follow up message to all the Stores in his district was that he "now understood the workload that the employees in his Stores had to handle on a weekly basis, and that he has come to realize changes need to be made to the Company's freight working procedure."
So if anything can be taken away from this revel in humilty, it's that sometimes the squeaky wheel does get the grease. There's a lot of red tape and general mistrust on behalf of the people who know what they're talking about, but nonetheless changes do get made when something stays broken too long making sparks big enough to start a fire.
The next insightful pearl I discovered was during a truck day freight working. The morning manager called over the P.A. to everyone busting their humps trying to make the impossible possible. She said that the district manager was out for the week at headquarters to confer with other colleagues on improving the truck process which would thusly turn the process into a two-day event rather than a single day blitz. From what I can tell, it's probably the closest I've ever heard anyone from Corporate come to admitting they were wrong (without actually saying it).
The truth is that regardless of how early you schedule the delivery truck to arrive, and how many inexperienced newhires you throw at half a semi-trailer load of merchandise, getting it all done before customers set foot in the building that day is impossible. The work hours are unnnatural. The quantities are too high. The logistics of sorting the thumb-sized merchandise is too tedious. And the Corporate heads are once again completely out of touch on the reality of the procedure.
This leads to my third discovery. During this pilgrimage to the Corporate mecca, my district manager physically participated in a truck process (albeit in the Company's show Store which hasn't a thing out of place nor a speck of dust on a single shelf in the whole bulding.) Even then, his pride got taken to the cleaners. His follow up message to all the Stores in his district was that he "now understood the workload that the employees in his Stores had to handle on a weekly basis, and that he has come to realize changes need to be made to the Company's freight working procedure."
So if anything can be taken away from this revel in humilty, it's that sometimes the squeaky wheel does get the grease. There's a lot of red tape and general mistrust on behalf of the people who know what they're talking about, but nonetheless changes do get made when something stays broken too long making sparks big enough to start a fire.
Friday, February 3, 2012
When the Streams Cross
You ever wonder what it's like to be caught in the crossfire of a pissing contest? It's not pleasant to say the least. You don't know which way to look, how to act, nor when it's going to end. This is a long-standing conflict that could (and I stress could) end very soon and very badly. In one corner we have the Big Man who is in charge of a store that failed two corporate inspections in a row. If he fails one more, his ass is looking for a new job. In the other corner we have the morning manager who has been given four weeks to improve the delivery truck process or else she too gets to be shown the door.
The result if this bizarre situation is that we the workers get to hear the exchange of blame jibes and gossip about which whom lies most recently responsible for under-bus-thrown antics. In fact, I even opened up and fully confessed that everyone on the morning team was getting a little frustrated by the high level of angst that filled the air with regards to this omnipresent drama. It's one thing to be rattled over the pending visit of corporate agents. It's another thing entirely to feel like there is no end to a constant state of unease. That is not a healthy working environment, and I really doubt that anyone in the upper crust of the Company truly understands this. As far as they're concerned, we're just a bunch of lowly grunts too lazy to carry out their impossible-to-meet conditions.
It should be a fascinating discovery over the next few weeks as these pending deadlines draw near. I wouldn't doubt the arrival of dead pools cropping up. Whoever guesses right is sure to land a win fall of epic proportions.
The result if this bizarre situation is that we the workers get to hear the exchange of blame jibes and gossip about which whom lies most recently responsible for under-bus-thrown antics. In fact, I even opened up and fully confessed that everyone on the morning team was getting a little frustrated by the high level of angst that filled the air with regards to this omnipresent drama. It's one thing to be rattled over the pending visit of corporate agents. It's another thing entirely to feel like there is no end to a constant state of unease. That is not a healthy working environment, and I really doubt that anyone in the upper crust of the Company truly understands this. As far as they're concerned, we're just a bunch of lowly grunts too lazy to carry out their impossible-to-meet conditions.
It should be a fascinating discovery over the next few weeks as these pending deadlines draw near. I wouldn't doubt the arrival of dead pools cropping up. Whoever guesses right is sure to land a win fall of epic proportions.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Year End Rear End
I'm sure it's tradition for most people this day and age to celebrate Christmas several times to accommodate all family gatherings. I'm no exception. This week I had three separate engagements, two of which took me an hour from home. One fell on the weekend which didn't require any special arrangements. The other one however was the evening before a 3 a.m. I knew this a month ahead of time, so I had the opportunity to weigh my options: cut short my visit with family I scarcely ever see to get to work on time or take the following day off.
Well, I've overextended myself more than a fair amount of times this year so I was finally going to do myself a favor and get some well needed rest. The result of my actions were finally recovering from a chronic backlog of sleep deprivation. Sometimes you don't really know how much you do until you stop doing it. That never proved more true than when I went back to work the next day.
Being the one who usually sorts through the muli-SKU freight packs and puts them in their proper bins, I anticipated that whoever else they picked would do a decent enough job. That ended up not being the case at all. Coming in to work two minutes before the lights kicked on, I saw a dimly lit smattering of metal, cardboard and plastic in the receiving area that could cripple even the bravest and most hearty of folk. After the light came, I saw that not only did the truck freight not get fully worked (as is usual), there was also a surmountable pile of boxes that still hadn't even been touched, much less sorted.
With priorities skewed in their usual sense, I was made to build a grid for Valentine's Day craft stuff rather than help attack the pile of carryover. I cringe to think what progress could possibly be made over the weekend what with minimal staff on the floor and a slew of holiday shoppers hungry to spend their Christmas gift cards on freight that isn't put out. Things won't be improving much in the new year. Hours across the board have been slashed, mine included. And with the amount of stock that has to be replenished from our holiday bombardment, I don't see how anything productive is expected to occur.
Well, I've overextended myself more than a fair amount of times this year so I was finally going to do myself a favor and get some well needed rest. The result of my actions were finally recovering from a chronic backlog of sleep deprivation. Sometimes you don't really know how much you do until you stop doing it. That never proved more true than when I went back to work the next day.
Being the one who usually sorts through the muli-SKU freight packs and puts them in their proper bins, I anticipated that whoever else they picked would do a decent enough job. That ended up not being the case at all. Coming in to work two minutes before the lights kicked on, I saw a dimly lit smattering of metal, cardboard and plastic in the receiving area that could cripple even the bravest and most hearty of folk. After the light came, I saw that not only did the truck freight not get fully worked (as is usual), there was also a surmountable pile of boxes that still hadn't even been touched, much less sorted.
With priorities skewed in their usual sense, I was made to build a grid for Valentine's Day craft stuff rather than help attack the pile of carryover. I cringe to think what progress could possibly be made over the weekend what with minimal staff on the floor and a slew of holiday shoppers hungry to spend their Christmas gift cards on freight that isn't put out. Things won't be improving much in the new year. Hours across the board have been slashed, mine included. And with the amount of stock that has to be replenished from our holiday bombardment, I don't see how anything productive is expected to occur.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Rest Before Recoil
I heard an interesting comment a couple weeks back regarding the manner in which the Company cleans house with the employees and managers it feels is not fit for the jobs in which they sustain. I gotta say it's kind of Dickensian in how they go about their low key proceedings. It's much like how anyone else is canned any other time of the year. What they would do is get a decent amount of work out of a person on the very day that they are let go. I've seen it happen too often for it to just be a fluke. The last person I saw fired was made to unload a freight trailer before the axe fell.
So now that the pre-Christmas season has finally wrapped, and all the Corporate hordes are now enjoying the spoils of their year-end harvest, there is to be a calm just before the grand exodus of employees who didn't make the cut. I hesitate to imagine what will happen with my own Store considering just how much of a savage beating we've received lackluster management taking us into the season with one less head and a complete lack of supervision on closing procedures.
My final Friday was a test of tolerance for the disdainfully insightful. I had to attempt to put away backlogged freight whilst at the same time putting up with a pair of aisles that saw no recovery efforts at all for the last two weeks. I'll have to check in with my therapist in the new year to find out if maybe I have a touch of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, since I was ruing every moment I had to spend in the paint and adhesives aisle. The amount of disarray was literally paralyzing my efforts to stock the shelves.
So after we come back on Monday, the day after Christmas . . . at 3 a.m. . . . I will probably get an inkling as to just how fiercely the Company is going to pounce on our Store. Who is going to be tossed to the wind? They've gotten us to perform and dance to the best of our abilities. Now let's see how lucky the lesser qualified will be wrapping into the following year.
So now that the pre-Christmas season has finally wrapped, and all the Corporate hordes are now enjoying the spoils of their year-end harvest, there is to be a calm just before the grand exodus of employees who didn't make the cut. I hesitate to imagine what will happen with my own Store considering just how much of a savage beating we've received lackluster management taking us into the season with one less head and a complete lack of supervision on closing procedures.
My final Friday was a test of tolerance for the disdainfully insightful. I had to attempt to put away backlogged freight whilst at the same time putting up with a pair of aisles that saw no recovery efforts at all for the last two weeks. I'll have to check in with my therapist in the new year to find out if maybe I have a touch of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, since I was ruing every moment I had to spend in the paint and adhesives aisle. The amount of disarray was literally paralyzing my efforts to stock the shelves.
So after we come back on Monday, the day after Christmas . . . at 3 a.m. . . . I will probably get an inkling as to just how fiercely the Company is going to pounce on our Store. Who is going to be tossed to the wind? They've gotten us to perform and dance to the best of our abilities. Now let's see how lucky the lesser qualified will be wrapping into the following year.
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