Thursday, 17 November 2011

• Ow.

  This has been a hectic week. Allow me to elaborate. What, you don't want me to elaborate? Well then, go away.

  Monday evening I had doctor's appointment with a new doctor. The reason I had the doctor's appointment was to get $100 off the cost of my health insurance. If you go and have a physical, your cost is $100 less. You also get another $100 slashed off for not smoking, which you have to prove by having a blood test. But anyway, I hadn't had a physical, and the last time I went to the doctor I wasn't thrilled, so I looked through the insurance company's website and found one relatively close to me. Yay.

  Except that the first appointment is just a consultation and then you make the physical (why they don't do it on the first time I dunno whatever). So apparently the latest they had available was 4:45. So I left work a little after four and got there right on time. I then waited in the waiting room for about an hour, during which the uber-friendly-to-the-point-where-it's-kinda-creepy receptionist apologized several times for the wait and told me that Monday was their busiest day.

  The actual appointment went pretty quickly, unsurprisingly considering that it wasn't really an appointment. The doctor was this nice lady who was very young (I was expecting some old lady of Indian descent) and she asked some questions and listened to my heartbeat (Yes, it's still abnormal) and asked some other questions and then asked me when the last time I had a tetanus shot was. I didn't remember, so they gave me one since they figured I probably needed one. She asked when the last time I ate was (around 1, when I had a salad for lunch) and then figured that was good enough to draw blood and that was about it.

  I then made my next appointment for December 8th at 8 in the morning. I figure that way, if I need to I can go to work a little late that day, or I can just take a personal day since I have two left. Okay, done.

  I got home and saw I had a voice mail, which was from the eye doctor telling me that my sunglasses were ready. I got the regular glasses the same day, but they were going to reuse the same frames for the sunglasses so those took some more time. So, Tuesday night I stopped at the eye doctor on the way home to get my glasses.

  Wednesday night I planned to go to the supermarket to buy some toilet paper that was on sale this week for a good price (plus I have an internet coupon, woo-hoo) but when I got to work Wednesday morning, Matt said that we were to take a field trip into Manhattan. Since he had meetings in the morning, we couldn't leave until 11:30. At first I was going to drive but then he said that he would, so we took the GPS out of my car and headed south down the parkway to route 80, and over the GW Bridge.

  All things considered, the traffic going over wasn't awful. The store we were going to is on the Upper East Side, so we jumped on some other highway (the FDR, I think, my geographical knowledge of NYC roads is pretty minimal; I've always gotten around by foot/subway) and were there in under an hour. We drove around for about 20 minutes and found on-street parking about 3 blocks away. It was drizzling lightly. There was construction on the road right outside the store, but we had no trouble getting in.

  Inside, all was insanely hectic. NYC supermarkets are generally pretty small and, like everything else in the city, cramped. Every available square foot has product in it. There were about a bazillion people in the store, since the Grand ReOpening is set for Friday (tomorrow, 11/18). We squeezed around, introduced ourselves to a few people, and got to work.

  My job was to look for pricing errors. I had a list of things I was supposed to check for. One was for rounding rules. See, the Overlords of the Company don't like prices like $6.19 or $7.09 or some other things because they think they look wrong, and if said Overlords noted such prices in this store they'd probably start yelling. Well not literally yelling, I'm talking EMAIL YELLING IN ALL CAPS, which might be worse.

  I started in the cereal aisle, which I was shortly after informed had not been "reset" yet (which means they hadn't yet reorganized this aisle) which surprised me greatly because the store was set to open in two days, but ok whatever, doesn't change my job. I wrote down about a bazillion UPCs of items that didn't fit the Approved List and then Matt came over. He said to stop writing those things down because there were a lot. So he was going to call Frank and tell him to run a Query to look for Unapproved Prices in The System and they'd fix them back at the office.

  Cool, so I just wasted my time. All righty then.

  So I moved on to the second task, which was to look for price tags that were store-printed, instead of printer-printed, because the Overlords think that the store-printed tags don't look as nice and want them replaced with Printer-Printed tags. Last week, the Reset Team had sent me and Frank a ton of such items, and we had sent them to the Printer and they had FedExed them to the store and then the team promptly lost them. Or something. I dunno exactly what they did with them but they called on Tuesday at 4:45 claiming that they never got the 7,000 labels they were supposed to receive on Monday morning. Well, Frank called the Printer and the Printer sent over the tracking info and they were signed for, so YES you did get them and he was pretty dang mad. (As was I, since that was the thing that I was worried that I did Wrong last week, and now it turns out I did it right but someone else did it wrong.)
  

  Anyway, I went through about three aisles of writing down items that needed new tags, while the Reset Team worked around me and a few customers squeezed through and they painted the walls over my head. Then Matt came over and said that I didn't need to do that anymore because the Reset Team was going to Scan the items and send the file to Frank so he could order them. (They wouldn't get there by Friday but whatever).

  Also, he was soaking wet because he had to run outside to feed the meter because you can only pay for an hour and it had already been two.

  So after that I went through looking for the other issues like if the store brand and the national brand were not priced accordingly or if different flavors of the same item were different prices, or if the size parity didn't match up and stuff like that. THOSE issues, there weren't many of.

  Around 3:30 we left and miraculously didn't hit too much traffic except at the part where we were getting on the FDR drive, and made it back to the office by 4:45.

  Of course, by this point, my feet were soaked from walking through three blocks of puddles in November Rain in shoes that are not in the slightest bit waterproof when walking through puddles. They also hurt from standing on them all day (instead of sitting on my fat ass in a cushy chair looking at my two flat-screen monitors) but not as much as my legs hurt. Of course all the items that I was writing down were on the bottom shelf and of course I can't read the UPC off the tag without squatting or kneeling or sitting or crouching down on the floor so for three hours I was going down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and oh my thighs hurt so much.

  By the time I actually left the office it was after six. I was in no mood to walk anywhere near a supermarket no matter how much I needed the toilet paper. Thankfully, I still had two rolls left. I got stuck in traffic on the highway and went to the drive through Starbucks for a hot chocolate to warm up. I'd eaten a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich at about 10:30 that morning, figuring I wasn't going to get lunch, and by this point my stomach was growling. I got off the highway, took some back roads around the traffic, got back on the highway, stopped to get gas (since I was running almost on fumes), and then went to the McDonald's because there was no way I was cooking, I didn't even have the energy to microwave something.

  I got home, ate my Chicken Sandwich, finished my hot chocolate, read some email, went on Xanga for a bit and then at 9:00 I took two acetaminophen (store brand Tylenol) with Sleep Aid and went to bed. 

  At 10 I was still awake, so I got up and waddled over to my iPod, which I then set on Enya and tried again to sleep.

  I expected to wake feeling rested and somewhat refreshed but that didn't happen. Instead I am sore and tired today, too. My legs are still killing me, so I am waddling slowly around. Stairs, up OR down, are not fun. Oh, and my arm is still slightly sore from where I got the tetanus shot (which she said to expect).

  Despite that, I managed to waddle into a supermarket today and buy my on-sale toilet paper, since today's the last day of the sale. I didn't buy anything else. I got stuck in traffic on the way home (of course) because there was an accident and then there was more traffic going past the mall.

  Christmas season is really going to suck, because there is almost no way for me to get from work to home without having to go past a shopping mall.

  Anyway, that was my week. Shortly comes the weekend, and then next week I'm only working 3 days.

  And no, I'm not going shopping on Black Friday. I hope to stay home (at my mom's) and maybe get some writing done.
  

   

   

   

  
  

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