…are just fooling themselves. This might be long…
Yesterday did not start well. 3 a.m., long, stressful discussion with my son that ended at 5:30 a.m. I decided to go back to bed for an hour, and then overslept and didn’t have enough time for a pie I was supposed to bake. Raced out the door only to forget something and have to come back. An email I expected didn’t come until 5 minutes after I left, so I never saw it and missed the chance to get paid for another pie…and I need the money. Zoomed up to the West Side Market, after sitting at a light for forever behind someone who didn’t want to turn right on red when the next light (four car lengths away) was green, but waited until it was red and we all had to sit through another cycle of the light. Found a good parking spot, got right in and out and got to work early…and then that tiny streak of good ended.
I’m still stressing about my discussion with my son, and first thing, my boss hits me with a problem with an order. The name engraved on the item was wrong, she couldn’t find the receipt or the original order, but somehow did manage to find another order for the same name from two years ago, and she’s upset because the customer wasn’t nice about it and I should have done this, that and the other. I walk over to the files for the customer and pull out the original order, right on top where I left it…she’d been looking in the wrong file. I show here the original receipt…he’s placed a phone order and spelled the name to me over the phone…he’s the one who left out the middle initial and spelled the last name wrong, not me…we weren’t working off the two-years ago order she’s managed to dig out and flap at me. And his receipt was stapled right to the front of his workorder, where it belongs. So, not my fault, but she’s deep into stress mode and while she’s not angry, she’s clearly not going to be calming down soon.
Then she takes an order for our biggest and favorite customer. There’s an unusual spelling involved, and they are joking about it. Both me and another coworker peek over her shoulder to take a look. She proceeds with the order, tells us a story about him ordering a bracelet for a woman whose husband was killed in a freak accident on his son’s 22 birthday…my son’s turning 22 soon… she engraves the order and leaves. When I go to put the order away, I can’t find the bracelet that’s written on the workorder, the spelling of the weird word is different, in fact, it’s a whole different workorder. So I call her to ask about the bracelet’s whereabout’s…and her cell phone keeps hanging up after one ring. Customer comes in to pick up his order…the word is wrong…but that’s what is written on the workorder! Both coworker and I are saying, “but we saw it written right!” Can’t find another workorder, boss calls, says she did not rewrite the workorder and the bracelet was picked up last month, wasn’t I listening to her? The customer leaves to get ice cream while we re-engrave…but the only other frame of that type we have is flawed, so I have to wait for him to come back in to pick another style or see if he can wait one day. Meanwhile the order we’re already engraving is popping out of the vise, so we misengrave one piece, and then when she puts the other pieces in they are a bit offcenter, but not badly, and then Big customer is upset that he has to wait even longer for his re-do…and on, and on
Another customer yells at my coworker for talking too loud. I refund a woman her money for a misengraved watch they brought in, and then she says her fiance wants the watch back, too. I have to tell her that if we pay her for it, we own it, but if he wants it back, she can just hand me the money I just gave her back…no, she wants both, so I manage to put her off by telling her the manager will call him personally to explain the policy. Then she demands a receipt for her parking, so I put the register in training mode to give her a fake receipt. I forget to take it out of training mode, and we ring up the next three customers in training. By the time we discover this, they’ve all left, so we have to rering everything without their actual credit cards, so I don’t have the little confirmation numbers…these type of rings get flagged by the auditors. No biggie, because I can explain it, but still…incredibly stupid of me.
And on, and on…not enough money coming in, too many errors going out, grumpy customers, weird customers, customers who we can’t understand, customers who can’t understand our new sale, coworkers from other stores calling and whining, missing orders, and then I’m left alone when my coworker leaves for an interview for another job. Two hours after she leaves, I walk into the back room, and the bathroom is flooded, and it’s not just water, it’s sewage. I call mall maintenance, they say it’s not their fault, so they call us a plumber, who will be there before closing. Good, because I really have to leave on time to get to a meeting. I drag everything out of the bathroom, clean up as much as I can and wait. An hour goes by, no plumber. I really, really need to use the bathroom, so I have to lock up the store and leave. Panera has closed early, so I have to search for another bathroom, way far away. Get back and reopen store ten minutes before closing…finally a call from plumbing company saying they will be there in an hour. So I call the person I’m meeting with to tell them I will be late and to just start without me. I close the store, I vacuum, I go take the deposit up to the bank…still no plumber. Ten minutes to nine, they call…can’t get there for another hour! We reschedule for the morning, but now I have to do even more cleaning, without water, because I can’t let that mess sit overnight.
I finally get outside to wait for the shuttle to take me to my car…and there it is. The full moon. Just sitting there, smiling away, laughing at the big joke he’s played on us all day. Did I mention I’m PMS’ing during all this? I started laughing, and then I start crying while I’m driving home. I haven’t eaten for hours, need to pee really bad, have no money and have missed the meeting totally, plus it’s too late to work on the pie I put off from morning. It’s been the day from hell, and all I want is my bed. As I crawl in, not only is the moon shining in my window, but it’s reflecting in the mirror, taunting me.
So don’t tell me that the full moon doesn’t influence things, or that scientific study proves just as much goes wrong on non-full moon days. Retail workers know better.
So. Did anything happen to you yesterday you’d like to blame on the moon?
