An insane day

I apologize in advance for any grammatical mistakes I stayed up all night typing this up.

I promised myself that I would never do a Blog or video rant about my work since I rarely have anything good to say about my job. And I hate to hold onto the negative things in life. It's just that I had the most insane day at work. Of the nearly eight years that I've worked at this grocery store (I don't want to say the name of the company for various reasons) I have never had to handle the challenge that was thrown at me yesterday. It started out normal enough, I was scheduled to be a cashier for the first half of my shift and the only complaint I have about that is that I couldn't watch the storm that had rolled through. (Although everybody else seamed to be able to.) I did have to run through the cold ass rain to get to my car to go home for lunch.
As I was coming back from lunch, and this is the funny part, I remember thinking to myself that the rest of the day should be rather slow. I had guessed that from previous experience with working in the store after bad weather. The second half of my shift was scheduled to be the Front End Supervisor. I'm really not fond of this job, but it is a heck of a lot better than a lot of other people’s jobs. Well anyway I had stepped outside to check on the weather because it looked like another storm was moving in; unfortunately it was only a little rain. But as I was coming back in I heard on of my cashiers call "Mark, my register isn't working!" Well there is a million and one meanings as to what that phrase could be. So I went over to see what was wrong. First I noticed the little screen on the keyboard was out so I looked up at the main monitor, and that was out. And just before I could start to figure out what was wrong with that register I heard, "Mark, the U-scan isn't working!" I told the cashier to hold on because I am more experienced with fixing the self-checkout stations than the regular registers. But when I got over there all of the screens were off. Very soon I found out what was going on; all of the registers had lost power. And when I mean all, I mean ALL of them lost power at the same time. The U-scan, the five registers, Customer Service, Pharmacy, and Deli. They all lost power. And what's more the phones and intercom were also out so I had to physically go find the only manager that was there at the time. It was kind of funny to watch them scramble for cell phones to call the relevant people. I was really impressed how the manager in charge yesterday handled the situation. She seams to go into a panic at the smallest things, but I guess she handles bigger things better than smaller ones.
It really took a long time for us to convince people to leave the store, there were quite a few people determined just wait it out. But what we were trying to convince them was even if we coerced the power to come back online it would take another fifteen to twenty minutes to reboot the computers so they could check out. Instead of going to any of the other stores in town which were working just fine. I over heard one person telling one of the carry-outs to grab their "handy dandy calculator" I guess that would work in theory, but then they could only pay in cash with exact change and wait for us to look up the price for every single item. But once we did convince them to leave I had to convince some of the younger workers that they couldn't follow them. There must have been more than twenty cart loads of merchandise to put away in the front of the store alone. After the mad rush of putting everything away and dealing with the perishables in the various departments I heard the sounds of explosions and roars coming from the seasonal items area. The Avatar DVD was still playing on the display. Of all the things that had went down the TV still worked, some of the front end workers and I had a good laugh about that.
After about an hour and a half down the registers started to come back online (much to the dismay of the carry-outs) But some of the managers were smelling smoke so they called the fire department. I would really like to know what she told them, especially when the third Fire engine showed up. Seriously there were three of the large trucks, two of the smaller ones (the ones that are about the size of pickup trucks) and a guy in a SUV showed up. And that was only to see if there was even a fire at all.
So after an hour and a half of total insanity the registers came back online and we could resume business as usual. Like nothing at all had happened. What really tops it all off is, I had to go back to the store for stuff for supper. And it had started all over again.