The Numbnut chronicles

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

I mentioned my adventures with yesterday's truck on another thread.

I got permission to have Numbnuts work on all the detergent, paper and bulk that the unload crew left for us. The manager on duty also assured me she'd keep an eye on him to make sure he did what I asked him to. So when he came in (late, as is common with him), I paged him and gave him his tasks:

"Okay Numbnuts, when you're not doing carryouts today, I need you to backstock all the detergent, paper and furniture that is in the back room from the truck. We are not going to get to it today, so it's really really important you get it done. I don't want to see you wandering around aimlessly today. Got it?"

"Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, whatever." And he started to fill paper products from the truck and had that almost done when we left.

Get ready for the shock of this lifetime, or any other lifetime: He didn't finish it.

In fact, after the paper, he didn't touch a thing back there. Not. A. Single. Mother. F-ing. Thing.

The detergent was still sitting on pallets. So was the furniture. A pallet of bagged pet food was still back there, untouched, still in its shrink wrap.

So what obviously happened was, after we left Numbnuts went back to slacking off and as usual management lost track of him. I refuse to believe he was slammed with carryouts yesterday. And even if it was a little busy, I've been assigned to carryouts on even busier days, and yet I still managed to answer my calls after the first page, keep up with all the carryouts and still get some pulls or other work done in between.

It's a good thing that manager wasn't on today, because I think I would've gone off on her. Stupid twat doesn't do anything except BS with the people in softlines and sit up in her office diddling on her computer or stuffing her face.

Numbnuts isn't working today; somebody else is assigned to carryouts, so he'll be stuck with all the bulk, and whatever he doesn't finish I'll have to do tomorrow.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Yesterday, while filling stuff after finishing cleaning the backroom from Thursday's truck, I noticed an empty juice cup sitting on an endstand, obviously left there by some piggish person who thinks the world is his/her trashcan.

So I paged Numbnuts, told him where the cup was, and asked him to go toss it. "Sure, okay."

Why did I ask him to do it instead of doing it myself, you ask? Because it's his damn job. One of the responsibilities of his job is to walk the main aisles every hour or so and clean up any trash left there. (we used to have to check off our tasks hourly in a log kept up by the cash registers).

Came in this morning and the cup was still standing, unmolested, on the shelf.

Then later today, when Numbnuts came in, he was assigned to weed the islands out in the parking lot. Here's a rough diagram of how these islands are situated in the parking lot (I have them numbered left to right as you're looking out the front door):

1 3
2

(of course there is quite a bit more space between the islands than my crude diagram shows)


Numbnuts started out on island 2. He spent the first two hours of his shift on that island alone. Meanwhile the two of us on the floor are running our butts off with carryouts and we didn't even know Numbnuts was outside because nobody told us.

Then he took a 15-minute break at 12:30. When he got off of break he moved on to island 1.

You may be wondering why it takes him two hours to pull weeds out of one flowerbed. It may be because he had his trashbag full of pulled weeds on island 3 and was pulling out weeds from island 1 and then walking them over to the trashbag.

It will not surprise me to learn he was outside his entire shift, or had to be dragged back in by a manager because the people on the floor were too busy with carryouts.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Wherein Numbnuts punishes us all

Thanks to Numbnuts' general dipshitery and lack of ambition when doing merchandise pulls, we now have a new aggravation to deal with:

Starting today, all the carryout people have to fill out a log indicating when they downloaded pulls (it's supposed to be every hour), how many SKUs they had, whether or not they filled everything, and any other random comments they may have.

Yeah. Like this will light the proverbial fire under his ass. Knowing Numbnuts he'll probably lie and say he downloaded 50 SKUs every hour for 8 hours when he only downloaded 7 at the beginning of his shift and didn't even finish pulling all of them.

Le sigh.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Wherein We Catch Numbnuts in A Lie (Or Two)

Today Numbnuts was his usual useless self. He got assigned to water plants outside, which he again did by taking a flatbed cart outside, putting a few plants on it, pushing it over to the hose, watering, and then pushing the plants back to the display racks and putting them back. So he blew about the first hour and a half of his shift on a job that should've taken him 15-20 minutes to accomplish. (I know--I watered those same plants Wednesday.)

Later, our supervisor paged Numbnuts to figure out where he was and if he had any plans to do the 68 pull requests in the scanner:

Sup: Where are you right now?
NN: I'm at the service desk. I just got back in from outside.
Sup: Well get back here and start on your pulls then.

Supervisor hung up the phone. Just then Numbnuts came through the door.

Sup: Gee, it sure didn't take you long to get back here from the service desk, didn't it? (The service desk is on the opposite end of the store from this door). Where were you really?
NN: I told you, at the service desk.
Sup: You obviously weren't. Now quit lying and tell me where you were.
NN: At (phone by household chemicals, a couple steps from the door).
Sup: Well, I better not catch you lying to me like that anymore. Now where's your sheet? You're supposed to be keeping track of all the pulls you download and pull.
NN: In my cart over there. (walks away and pushes cart with him)

He left it down one of the backroom aisles while he disappeared again. I looked inside and he didn't have his sheet in there like he said. And he didn't get any of the 68 pulls in the scanner done when I left an hour later.

I think for the remainder of that time, he really was at the service desk, chatting up one of the girls behind it. Seems Numbnuts has a thing for bookish-looking blondes.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

I am told that sometime last week, when I wasn't at work, Numbnuts got assigned to weed the flowerbed islands again and went missing for 6 hours.

Seriously. Nobody could find him inside the store or outside. He either went and hid somewhere or he's some kind of a ninja if he can slip away undetected and be gone for so long. So of course everybody else got stuck with his carryouts.

Instead of doing his work, he'll wander throughout the store like it's a maze. He'll go to the backroom, go up the stairs, walk to another stairwell, go down, go back out to the floor, bob and weave through the aisles. return to the backroom, wander around back there, go back up the stairs and back down again, back out to the floor, etc.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

I do know the manager on duty was looking for him.

We do report Numbnuts' shenanigans as they come, but the manager he reports to, and the only manager who can fire him, won't do so, preferring instead to laugh off his monkeyshines.

"Oh, he pulled 3 SKUs in 3 hours. Ha ha."
"He does all his carryouts--he takes all day to do them, but he does them. Ha ha."

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

This is seriously horrifying

Seriously, it is. Also very funny. Wanna know what it is?




Well, do you?












Okay. Get this--Numbnuts apparently is going to join the National Guard. At least this is what he's started telling people.

I'm scared. Hold me.

I mean. he's a 98-pound twig of a man who would be doing long marches with big heavy packs on his back, who doesn't take orders and do what he's told, and just a general waste of a human life.

And he's going to be given guns to use! ("Duhhh, which end of the gun do you point at the guy you want to shoot?")

Well, if nothing else, his cohorts in basic training will be able to beat a little sense and discipline into him when he screws up, something that's kind of frowned on for us to do.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Evidently, he is serious about this military thing. He asked if the truck unload supervisor was working yesterday (he wasn't), so he could ask him about what the military was like.

He also claims if he makes it into the military, he isn't coming back to the store.

I may have a new nickname for him,l created last night: Major Malfunction.

Oh, here's some LULZ--yesterday Numbnuts was assigned to help us unload truck and while he was "helping" us one of the other guys started taking the DC labels off of boxes and sticking them to the back of Numbnuts's shirt. He managed to get about 5 labels on his back without him knowing, and he walked around with those labels stuck to his back most of the night until we finally told him they were there.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

It is now early September, and that means time to set up Christmas things!

To prepare the seasonal department for all the Christmas chotchkies we will begin setting up this week, all the school supplies that aren't going on clearance were taken out of there, brought to School and Office and filled up there, and then the excess was sent upstairs for backstock.

This amounted to two heaping flatbeds and a shopping cart full of stuff. Numbnuts was assigned to backstock this stuff Friday and told to keep at it until he finished.

He hardly even touched it. He must've been super busy with carryouts--and by "carryouts" I mean "wandering around with his shopping cart doing nothing." As a result all that crap was still sitting upstairs Saturday morning leaving us hardly any space to put our housewares backstock.

When Numbnuts came in on Sunday he was again told to backstock the school supplies and keep at it until finished. He got halfway through the shopping cart before choosing to wander again.

So guess who got stuck backstocking all that shit after he finished his furniture audit this morning?

Also, Numbnuts is still with us, a couple weeks after telling me he'd go off for basic training "in a couple weeks."

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Last night I asked him when he was going in for basic. He told me "I dunno."

So yeah. he's totally blowing smoke up our asses.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

The Numbnuts Strikes Back. Or Something

Gotta this one yet again.

On today's Truck From Hades (1713 cartons, almost all of it hardlines, and lots of piddly little boxes of HBA, housewares and Christmas ornaments ), we got in some cases of holiday print Viva paper towels. They come in special holiday wrappers too I guess.

The SKU for the holiday Viva towel is different than the normal Viva towels we have year-round, and as such CANNOT go in the same space as the normal Viva Towel. This is because fairly soon, probably at or before the beginning of next month, the holiday Viva towels are going to be on an SSP (special planogram for endcaps) along with holiday boxes of Kleenex that come in special boxes that look like Christmas ornaments. This may be all we get for those particular paper towels, so if they sell out too early half an endcap will go empty and the suits won't like that.

Anyway, when Numbnuts came in, we told him to take the holiday Viva towels straight to backstock. What does he do instead? Fills them on the shelf.

So we had to take them back down and backstock them our damn selves.

Fuck, the only time in a long time Numbnuts has felt like doing stuff around the store, and he does something he isn't even supposed to.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Wherein Numbnuts, that little assface, again makes a ton of work for me:

When Numbnuts came in today, we asked him to stack the empty repack totes on pallets, and shrink-wrap them, so they could go outside because the trailer had to be sent back empty.

The DC has specific rules for how they want the repack totes to be sent back:

• Stacks can be no higher than 15 totes high.
• Totes must be stacked on a pallet
• The pallet of totes must be shrink-wrapped.

If any of these are not done, the DC sends us a snippy memo informing us of any "issues." Real cute how the DC gets to bitch at us about how we send stuff back, but we really have no means to complain when the DC workers do stupid shit like stack a bunch of furniture on top of boxes of liquid laundry detergent, or a pallet of bottled water on top of a pallet of paper towels. But anyway....

Numbnuts stacked the totes about as shittily as possible--he made 4 stacks, so that each stack was hanging half on the pallet and half off. And he barely ran the shrink wrap around the totes.

On the dock, there is what I affectionately have called "the Nutcracker"--a huge-ass crack that has developed over the years between the asphalt and the pavement. When you drive the forklift over it, you bounce--violently.

So I had the pallet of totes on the forks, and I was backing up, and I bounced right over the nutcracker and--you don't need a very vivid imagination to figure out what happened next, but here it is anyway: Empty plastic repack totes scattered all over the receiving docks.

And Yours Truly got to restack them as best he could onto two pallets, and re-wrap them. I yelled back inside for my coworkers to find Numbnuts and haul him outside to help me, but they couldn't track him down.

And once again I had to resort to mentally drawing and quartering Numbnuts.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Peeeee-yew!

I found out something new about Numbnuts today: He stinks.

I only figured this off because somebody tipped me off about it. Everywhere he goes he leaves this stale, stagnant, vaguely ass sweat-ish odor that just hangs in the air and clings to everything he comes in contact with.

Like the forklift, for example. I hopped on it after Numbnuts finished using it to send some stuff upstairs, and his stink had been ground into the seat.

I'm thinking of telling him that in the military they make you take showers, just in case that turns out to be a deal-breaker for him.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Funny how you never notice those kinds of things until someone points it out.

I know. I wander in and out of various odors every shift at work and never think to connect them with certain people who may be around.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Wherein Irv nearly causes a rule 1 violation at work

Numbnuts came in at 10:30 this morning and was told to get a scanner and help put away paper products and clean up the backroom.

He spent half an hour looking for a scanner. And by "looking for a scanner" I mean "hanging out in electronics talking to the blond girl working back there who he has the hots for."

I really pity that poor girl. Either she's critically hard-up for male attention or she can't smell the Eau de Fail coming off him in sheets.

Meanwhile, he was being paged for carryouts and ignoring them, so the salesfloor people had to drop everything and do them.

Also, in the hour-and-a-half in between him coming in and us stock monkeys going on our last break, he was paged to bring in carts from the parking lot 5 times.

Five. Frasking. Times. And he didn't respond to any of them. I brought back some empty carts we had been using for the truck, and the corral was totally empty and there was a micro-stampede of sorts for the carts I brought back.

On break, I asked nobody in particular "Can't we just put a bag over his head and beat the crap out of him, like a pinata?" My supervisor, who was sitting across from me, said "Don't say funny stuff like that when I have hot coffee in my mouth."

As for the paper he was supposed to put away? He took one pallet of Bounty towels and pushed it over by paper backstock, but didn't put it away properly or locate it. He left a pallet of Kleenex sitting right in one of the aisles--big no-no, store manager gets antsy if we have even one pallet on the floor after 9:00 or so.

Bonus:

Last night I was helping unload today's truck. We all saw Numbnuts pull an artificial Christmas tree, put it on his cart....and then push it to the other end of the backroom, instead of taking it TWO STEPS OUT THE DOOR to the Christmas tree display to fill.

When Numbnuts returned to the backroom, we asked him "Why did you go take that Christmas tree all the way to the end of the backroom like that?"

"I had to pull some other stuff."

"Like what?"

"Well...uh....I had...paper, and apparels (yes, he did actually say 'apparels') and toys."

So once again, rather than making things easy and being efficient, he chose the most inefficient, time-consuming way to do things.