Monday's are always hard, and as I always tell new hires, "there is no such thing as a typical day at the bookstore." However, today was just kind of nuts.
I came in this morning to an certain amount of expected chaos that was compounded by pages and conference calls and alarms, followed by a calm lunch hour, followed by the eruption of chaos once again.
This morning I was expecting to have to do payroll, it is a regular thing and it is the most important Monday task, otherwise my employees don't get paid properly and riots erupt. Riots are bad! I also knew that I was going to have to train a new employee in the book department today, and that this would take extra time because NN had to work in receiving because his receiver was going to be out for the week. These were parts of the planned chaos, these things I could handle. The unplanned pieces started falling into place as soon as I got into my office and turned on my computer (or tried to turn on). My computer was in some sort of locked in state and it took me 20 minutes to wake it from its weekend coma (and you thought humans were the only ones that could get hung over.) I managed to get things started when my phone rang telling me that my trainee was here 30 minutes early. Early is good but it did not give me enough time to finish payroll, so I go upstairs greet my trainee and get her started on her paperwork. We methodically complete all 14 pages plus documentation necessary to get a job (damn litigious Americans) and I begin walking her through the store giving her an overview of the areas and introducing her to all of the people. I am about 3/4 of the way through the store when I am paged to the textbook department- I pass of the trainee to a supervisor and run downstairs to see what they need. It appears that my CO manager did not know how to accept a scholarship check so I need to complete this transaction, but while I am doing so the power on the lower level goes out. I mumble under my breath, bring the customer upstairs, complete her transaction, and then go try to figure out why my power is out. I am able to fix the lack of juice issue fairly quickly, but then it is time for the Monday conference call, so i go to the conference room and listen to the call without contributing for 45 minutes all the while trying to get payroll completed and sent to the home office. After the conference call things seem to have settled down and are moving in the right direction, so I check in with my trainee to see how things are going, finish up some paperwork, and then decide to take lunch.
I usually take lunch in my office with the door opened because I like to make sure that my employees know that I am approachable and they can come to me whenever they want with whatever issues they may have. Logistically I find it difficult to have an open door policy if ones door is always closed. But after the morning I had, I went to the food court grabbed some soup, and went down to my office, turned off half the lights and sat at my desk with the door closed and ate. While on lunch, instead of reading my regular celebrity gossip, I went to read some of JCH's reviews on www.yelp.com/boston. Yes, the same JCH with the Robo-bird issue! He works for Yelp, which is a site that people use to review businesses in different areas around the country. It is definitely a cool site so I added it to the blog roll on the sidebar of my blog- check it out!
After lunch I felt somewhat revitalized and ready for the remainder of the day, until the ADT man came in to fix our alarm. He didn't know what was going on and I had trouble explaining the issue to him, when he finally understood, he continued to set off the audible alarm in the back room, the audible alarm is really F#CKING LOUD! While this is happening, I am being paged to the front of the store because I have a gentleman who is interviewing for an open position waiting for me and then I have a phone call from a manager at another store who is pissed because one of my managers transferred things to her that actually belong to another store. Shit this day really sucks. About 20 more minutes of chaos follow until I finally make it upstairs to interview the "man" who is waiting for me. During the interview I ask "him" about a couple of the gaps in his employment history and "he" tells me that those are the times that "he" went out on MATERNITY leave. I am totally confused by this answer, maybe he means PATERNITY leave but I am not sure, and I can't press the issue because "he" is not qualified for the job anyway, and I don't want "him" to feel like I am discriminating against "him." Once again with that litigious American culture.
And like i always say, "no typical day in the bookstore," and today was the perfect example!
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