Terminology

These are u-boats. In the walk-in freezer.



U-boats are supposed to be used to move stuff around. They can also be used for storage. Generally you don't keep u-boats in a freezer, especially empty u-boats. But, well...

This is a pallet. In the walk-in freezer.



Pallets arrive at the store with about 5 feet worth of product on top of them. Normally you would break one down (take all the stuff off of it) and then take the empty pallet and stack it on top of all the other empty pallets in the receiving area. Or, you know, just leave that last box on there for somebody else to deal with. Whatev.

And here is a photo of an empty pallet and a manual pallet jack. I found these in the meat cooler after i had spent about ten minutes searching for the jack.



The jack is actually in the up position, which means all I had to do was pull it out of the cooler and wheel it down to the receiving area so I could put it on top of the stack of empty pallets. Yeah.

And here's me, posing seductively with a u-boat, and my work knife. I heart my work knife. I use it to cut open pallets and slice boxes and threaten my co-workers. There's also a bale and and a flat cart in the background. Fun!





So now you know what all of my little tools look like.

Shrink.

Wow. I have no idea where to begin. I guess if I'm going to bitch about work then I need to explain some shit.

So, I work for and I hate it. I'm the night receiver, which basically means I have two trucks to unload every night when I go into work. The first truck is from a company called UNFI - a "natural foods" company who supplies WFM with a substantial amount of their dry product (cereal, pasta sauce, baby food, sugar, bottled juice), almost all of the dairy product (yogurt, organic milk, more yogurt), and some frozen stuff too. UNFI usually drops off about 7-12 pallets. Then I receive the WFM warehouse truck. That truck has all sorts of crap on it - seafood, 60 lb bags of sugar and flour, cheese, milk, orange juice, more dry stuff, frozen breads and tons and tons of produce. After all that's done I go back and I break down all the pallets from UNFI and I stage them, which means I put the boxes in front of where they go on the shelf so that later on somebody else and come along and open the boxes and put said shit on the shelf. That's basically my job. It's a lot of heavy lifting and manual labor, but otherwise it's pretty fucking easy. I wait around for late trucks a lot, and since I'm in a huge store with only two other people at night I get to screw around as much as I want to. I don't have to deal with ANY customers. It's awesome.
So why do I hate my job? Ugh.

Here's one reason:



SHRINK Do not throw away OR work. (Just push it back and forth til we figure out what to do with it.) Thanks! -D

This sign was taped to a u-boat that was stacked precariously with dairy items. He's completely serious about pushing it back and forth. In order for me to receive my trucks I needed to move that stupid, heavy, oddly tilting cart four times, in and out of the dairy cooler. Each time I thought it was going to fall over and each time I was surprised and slightly disappointed that it didn't. And only god knows when anyone will figure out what to do with it. Whole Foods is so micromanaged that in order to find out an answer to any inane question you have to know exactly who the right person is to ask, and even then they probably don't know. And nobody cares that nobody knows either. It's infuriating.
So. Yeah. Hate my job. Here's my blog to tell you all about it.