Hardware stores during a hurricane.

[ShadowTiger]

Okay. So Sandy (Yeah, that link won't be relevant for more than a week.) is bearing down on the North-east coast. I'm somewhere in the red region, right in the path of the hurricane, and almost right on the beach, no less.

One of the people who works in the stockroom with me is a football field's length away from the beach itself. We're terrified for him. He was fine during Hurricane Irene last year, as was most of the people, (I didn't even lose power, oddly enough. I'm quite grateful.) but people are worrying, oh yes.

So the Hurricane is expected to hit roughly between Monday and Thursday. Last Friday was one of our truck days, (The truck itself was a few hours late.) and we were scrambling to get as many storm supplies up as possible. We took down an entire Halloween display shelf set in favor of lanterns, duct tape, tarps, and whatever would work as all of those as well.

When the truck came, we didn't bother sorting it out or anything. We looked in each bulk pack and took all the storm supplies out of it that we could find and just left it all for the birds. We're understaffed to the point where this is a serious setback for us into the weeks to come, to be so backed up.

Even before the store opened, there were calls requesting a generator. There was a waiting list by the register for anyone who wanted one, though no promises were made.

All the while, I was also unofficially on carry-out duty, simply being that I was out front at the time. We went through six skids of 50 pound bags of sand, 60 or so per skid. That's 18,000 pounds, mind you. We also went through two skids of topsoil for the same purpose. A truck with 800 bags of sand was ordered for the same day. I was long gone at that point, though.

Then, an hour and a half from the point my stockroom co-worker and I had to leave, we were called into the office to be told that at some point between Sunday and Monday, a truck with 144 generators. That's 36 skids of 4 generators each.

I don't have room for 36 skids. I don't have room for 20 skids. I don't have room for 10 skids. I don't have room for 5 skids.

I have no idea what they're doing today. When I left, we were all tending to the storm-related goods, ensuring they were stocked with whatever would help from whatever we happened to have. We couldn't get any of the christmas skids out to the seasonal aisles to put them into overstock because people kept bugging us in the middle of working why we don't have any more flashlights or whatever.

I'm the only one in the top half of the store on Sundays. I do all the keys, of which I get a flood of people for keys in, (Pun unintended, though appropriate for a beach-based hurricane in a shore-based store. :-/ ) The guy in paint doesn't leave paint for anything, (He makes the best income on a department by department basis, generally, and is constantly busy.) and the Electrical guy is busy covering the other half of the store because the seasonal guy is put on the register. So I'm the guy who does the carry-outs anyway, key line or not.

So yeah, I'm not looking forward to Sunday. I don't know what I'm going to do with the generators. I really don't. They're so heavy...

[csquared]

Stack the generators in the parking lot. Put someone out there with a big sign "CASH ONLY". They will be gone before you close.

Good luck with Sandy. Stay safe.

[emax4]

...and put "NO RETURNS ON GENERATORS. REMEMBER TO KEEP THEM OUTDOORS WHEN IN USE."

[ShadowTiger]

Considering the amount of generators that we tried and failed to fix from last year on Friday, I doubt we'll be allowing returns. It'll be enough of a hassle to bring them back in the first place. They're VERY heavy!

[Seshat]

Good luck.
Read up on storm prep, even if you already know what to do.
Keep an eye out for evacuation suggestions, and if it's suggested that folks from your area evacuate, DO SO as early as possible.
If you can't evacuate early, batten down the hatches and stay put.
Remember that if you're in the eye of the hurricane, it's nothing but a chance to check that your shutters/etc are still secure, and you'd better be inside before the other half hits.

(I used to live in cyclone territory. Now I live near-but-not-in bushfire territory.)

And once again: good luck, stay safe.

[ShadowTiger]

So hi. I'm just going to post what I wrote on some other forum I go to. The spoiler tags don't work, so I'm just going to substitute lines for them. I'm too tired to edit much out to make it "work" for the context of .. whatever. God I'm so tired...



I'll divide this post into two parts. Part 1 is that there is a hurricane. Hurricane Sandy, specifically. Part 2 is the craziness I just had today. I'll put that into a spoiler because I'm uninteresting.

But I don't have much to talk about for part 1 because I'm uninteresting. I'm sure you see the conundrum here. Go google it or whatever if you'd like. Oh also I wrote these two paragraphs last, so don't hate me for something or other.

-----------------------------------


... ... god damn it. Ugh.

I am soooo tired. Ffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuungus.

See I work at a Hardware Store. One of the kinds in between Home Depot and a Mom 'n Pop store. We're the only one in the area that's open more often than not, I guess, so people flock to it for stuff. We were also the only store in the whole region that was able to get generators for this upcoming Hurricane Sandy that many of you have heard of. Go look it up. I'm exhausted; so much that I can't lift my googling fingers to link you to the damned hurricane.


I just spent nine straight hours hauling .. let's see .. .. fifty pound bags of sand, forty nine on a skid, eighteen skids, ... 18*49*50 = 44,100 pounds of sand hauled into peoples' cars as they snaked their way into the parking lot. About a sixth of the people in that crazy line didn't know they had to pay at an actual register first, then come by the back of the parking lot where the sand was offloaded, because, y'know, we have a register in the parking lot. What hell.

Then three hours later that was all done, and I had coffee for blood, thank Poseidon. Great fella. Then the generators came in on a truck of their own. Since Friday, people were lining up at the registers, putting their names on the list for people who want to get a generator. ($750, 5500W, and we make almost no profit off of them after transportation costs and whatnot.) What happened is that because we're the largest store in the chain, they sent all the generators to our store, and all the people in the whole chain buy it at the chain closest to them, then drive over to our store to pick it up.

But when we were unloading the truck, there were half the total number of generators that we needed!! Oh no! Seven people off the bottom of the list for each store had to be cut. Every single customer had to be manually phone-called to let them know their generator came in, and one manager devoted to nothing but those phone calls.

So I spent 12:00 to 5:00 doing nothing but staying in the back room hauling 225 pound generators into peoples' cars. Let's do the math. 225 pounds per generator, 6 generators per skid, 16 skids. 225*6*16 = 21,600 pounds.

44,100 pounds of sand + 21,600 pounds of generator = 85700 pounds. That's 32.85 tons divided between me and the other person that was helping me carry all this, so let's assume that 16.425 tons were lifted and handled by me today over the course of nine hours.

I'm tired.

I'm so glad my fingers are still working for the most part. I don't want to wake up tomorrow to feel 98% of me being too sore to move. I also don't want to wake up tomorrow, but then I forget there's a hurricane barreling down in the Northeast region of America.

I have work on Tuesday to take in a truck early in the morning in the hurricane rain. I will be swimming to work. The tides are already VERY high due to the Full Moon, and I dread how high they rise from 8+ inches of rain.

If this were a blizzard, that would be 8 feet of snow. That's like ... an octopus. Made of snow.

I'm tired.


---------------------------------

So tired.

yay

[Dark Psion]

When Oklahoma had a big ice storm about 10 years ago, the Hardware store I was working at was a disaster of its own making.

We got a semi-load of supplies a day, and we still sold out of stuff.

The store was in "Grey mode" with minimal electricity. In fact if you turned on the lights in the storeroom, the store lights dimmed.

This also means no computers. We had to get out the old credit card machines that slide back and forth and do written tickets for store charges. This caused problems later on when we declared a disaster. Emergency supplies purchased within a certain window could be reimbursed. Of course the date we processed those hand written tickets was just outside that window.

And then there were all those generators. I guess they were stored on the docks a little too long because every single one of them had salt corrosion. Our small engine repair guy had to clean each and every generator that came in before we could sell it. And of course we had people trying to return them and other emergency supplies two weeks later.

[Seshat]

Why return emergency supplies? There'll be another emergency later!

<hugs her hand-crank rechargeable-battery radio/torch combo>
<I wrote the number for our emergency-info radio station on that baby>

[wolfie]

I just spent nine straight hours hauling .. let's see .. .. fifty pound bags of sand, forty nine on a skid, eighteen skids, ... 18*49*50 = 44,100 pounds of sand hauled into peoples' cars as they snaked their way into the parking lot.

So I spent 12:00 to 5:00 doing nothing but staying in the back room hauling 225 pound generators into peoples' cars. Let's do the math. 225 pounds per generator, 6 generators per skid, 16 skids. 225*6*16 = 21,600 pounds.

44,100 pounds of sand + 21,600 pounds of generator = 85700 pounds. That's 32.85 tons divided between me and the other person that was helping me carry all this, so let's assume that 16.425 tons were lifted and handled by me today over the course of nine hours.

Holy shit! The sand alone is about the maximum I can haul (in a 53 foot dry van) and still be legal in weight - and you and one co-worker had to hand-bomb it. As for the total that you handled personally, it's time to channel Tennessee Ernie Ford. "You load 16 tons, and what do you get?..."

[ArcticChicken]

"You load 16 tons, and what do you get?..."

Goddammit. If the power goes out before I can crowbar something else into my head, I'm sending you my psychiatric bills.

[TheSHAD0W]

44,100 pounds of sand + 21,600 pounds of generator = 85700 pounds.

Wow, you *are* tired. You didn't even notice your math wasn't right.

<TheSHAD0W runs away!>

[dalesys]

Wow, you *are* tired. You didn't even notice your math wasn't right.

<TheSHAD0W knows!>

Old fart fix.

[TheSHAD0W]

I know notheenk! Notheenk!!

I hear notheenk, I see notheenk.

[Food Lady]

Wow. I can't even lift more than 10, generally. Note to self: never, ever work in a hardware store.

[ShadowTiger]

Wow, you *are* tired. You didn't even notice your math wasn't right.

<TheSHAD0W runs away!>

Aack. That 8 should have been a 6. It's not so much math, but me just reading from the calculator incorrectly. It was literally easier to misread than to ... uh ... mismath.

That is my new word for the day.



But hooooory SHEET is my hardware store a mess now. Three-some weeks later, it's just horrifically messy and almost unsalvagably stuffed. I can't even move in the back room anymore.

I don't know what we're going to do. I just don't.

:|