The WORST Day EVER

Yesterday at work hand to be, hands down, the worst day I've ever had at any job ever.

For those of you who don't know, right now at Michaels we're going through a major remodel. It's almost done, and looks awesome. Monday night, the computer guy, Phil, came to instale the new registars. He was there all night (he was schedualed to do it then) and into the morning. They're these real cool looking registars with flat screens which are touch screens and really snazzy. We're aparently the first Michaels in the district to get these.

So, I'm schedualed to work Tuesday 5:00 until close. We close at 9:00 and normally get out between 9:30 or 9:45. 10:00 is normally late for us. Anything after 10:00 and we all get bitchy.

Okay, so I walk into the store at about 4:30 'cause I had planned on doing some shopping before I clocked in. Jack (the manager), Kate (the A&C department manager) and Debbie (the floral manager, and also the closing manager this night) along with Phil were standing around the registars...which were NOT WORKING! Poor Phil had been there all night and now all day trying to get these things up and running. He hadn't slept in at lest 24 hours. They tried to send him back to his hotel to get some rest, but he just left to get breakfast and came back.

Aparently the registars had not work all day. The cashiers had to hand write out recipets. They had to use the scan gun to check the price, then write the price and the SKU number onto the invoice sheet. Then they had to take any discounts off of the regular priced items (since the remodel is going on we're having an instore special on a lot of stuff we're trying to get rid of...so there's alot of stuff we have to manually discount.). Then they have to add up the order and figure out sales tax. They had to write down the form of payment and figure out change with the calculater if it was cash. If it was credit/debit they had to use a crayon to making a rubbing of the CC number. All by hand.

Okay, so when I clocked in at 5:00 the registars were being temperamental...but were basically working. Every once and a while one would go down and the casher would have to switch to another reg. But really, not a big problem.

So, once Phil left Jack decided to leave too. Debbie had to start the long process of putting in all those invoices into the registar so that they could be processed. Most of them went in no problem, but aparently she was having a problem with a bunch that the SKU wasn't in the system...so aparently someone wrote the wrong number down or something.

Debbie was getting very frustrated. And I don't blame her.

It was getting close to 8:45 so I started doing the closing announcments. Debbie is flipping through the "tranning book" for how to shut down the regs overnight. It's not in there.

Then she finds out that ALL of the cash invoices have to be done that night. She still has a stack of them to do, plus alot of the problem invoices were cash.

So, we close and the remodel crew comes in and starts there stuff. I have suddenly become in charge of everyone 'cause when I went up to ask Debbie a question she didn't even acknowldege that I asked her anything. So I figured it was best to just leave her alone.

So I had Jen, Maryland and Aaron under my control. They got everythig we needed done, done (bathrooms, breakroom, trash etc) and we were working on the last of the returns. Once those were done I wasn't sure what to have them do.

Delphine, who normaly works in the day shift, but is working on the remodle crew right now, came up to me pissed off and said, "I know what you need to do. You need to recover. This place looks like crap. We work our butts off every night and we come in and it looks like shit."

I too was getting very frustrated and tired at this point and I snapped back at her and said, "We work our butts off too Delphine."

Then she said, "Now that we're remodled we are held to a higher standard than we were before. Everything has to look perfict. All the shelves have to be fronted (items pulled to the front of the shelf) and all pegs too."

So I go find "my crew" and tell them what Delphine said. They weren't happy either 'cause on a normal night it might take 2 hours to do a normal recovery. We don't know how we're supposed to do this "perfict recovery" thing. But we had nothing else to do, so I told them to just walk around and fix things and try and make it look better until we hear further instructions from Debbie.

So, I'm in the craft paint islle and I hear Delphine talking to the remodle manger's assistant. She was telling her the conversation she had just had with me. Of course, she didn't know I was one asle over and could hear every word. So I poked my head around the corner and waved at her. Then I heard her backtrack a bit and say, "And it's not just her. It's everyone. They aren't taking this seriously. They're actting like it's a joke..."

So I left that asle and went to work on the wedding asle which is on the other side of the store. After a bit I hear Delphine again. This time complaining to Tonya (normally in the frame department...but temporarlly on the night crew.) This time Delphine is saying how "we're never done (in terms of recovery), that there is always going to be something to do 'cause the store has to look perfict." I was this close to going up to her there and saying "There is no such thing as perfict." But I didn't.

After that, Debbie calls me to the front and tells me to start pulling the drawers. We can't shut them down 'cause we don't know how. But we have to bag them anyway.

We used to have 6 registars...now we have 8 plus the framing drawer, so that's 9. The drawers had not been labeled yet, so as I took each drawer out I had to take some recept tape and write the registar number on it and stick it in the drawer so that when we got back to the office we'd know which was which.

When I got that done I took Aaron, Jen and Maryland back to the office. Once there I realized we hadn't gotten new bags yet to put the money in. The bags are all labled for the old drawers. We had a total of 6 bags, and luckly we had a total of 6 drawers to bag up. I had them make new lables for their bag and had them slide it inside ontop of the old label. Then I went to print reports. The reports tell us how much cash we did in each drawer. We then take that number and write it down in the log.

Well, I went into the computer room...and the computer was missing. So, I paged Debbie and she told me to just write our plastic bag number (differnt from the bags we only had 6 of) and innital it like normal but to leave the cash amount blank.

Finally, we got all of that done. We went back up to Debbie, who, along with Barbara (the remodle crew manager) were still working on the invoices. I told her we were done and she said, "Did you clock out?" and I said no...and she told us to clock out.

We clocked out at 10:30pm that night.

I later found out that Debbie didn't leave until 11:30. And she had to be back at work at 6:00am today.

And thus concludes the worst day of work ever.

I have to close again tonight. I hope to god things run smoother.