all that and a box of crackers
Okay, I'm ready for things to just get back into the swing of business as usual again. With a few distractions (including that health scare with my mom), the past two days have been pretty uber-focused at work on finalizing the ad retails for August -- something that, had I not been in Yellowstone, would have been done last week, as technically the deadline was Friday. But, sometimes the price optimization schedule is such that I can't clean up the ad retails until the Monday following that technical deadline, and that's basically what I was forced to do this month due to the vacation. The problem is, this time, in focusing on the ads for the past two days, I also had to disregard a rather long backlog of other things until now, most notably 250+ unread emails (probably half or more of which can just be deleted thanks to just being on multiple email aliases and the like, thank god), and a thick stack of receiving discrepancies I have to reconcile. I do have an invoice compare report I process every Monday and Friday that I was unable to do either day last week, which meant a larger than usual report that I spent most of Monday morning on before lunch. Basically, I was only able to finish up the first-half August ad on Monday afternoon, and could only finish up the second-half ad yesterday afternoon.
So this morning gets dedicated to the receivers, this afternoon probably will be totally sucked up by sifting through email. And I already got an email from Scott this morning about this other huge project he's eager to get moving on but I have to finish my part first -- this new vendor he wants to get all our bulk items from, but is starting it as basically a pilot program at one store. So, I'm adding duplicate records of every single bulk item in our system (for Grocery, this amounts to over 500 items -- it's a lot of keying, as, unlike regular packaged items, these have the added work of typing out text that goes on bulk bin signs). The week before I left, I calculated an estimate of 11 solid hours of work still left on that, and that's only if I did it uninterrupted -- and doing it uninterrupted is a literal fantasy. Anyway, Scott's email I saw this morning was like, "Okay, ads done, time to get on to the SuperValu bulk items!" And I was more diplomatic than this, but my response was basically Slow down there, Sparky. I've still got plenty of other shit to catch up on that even he understands is a higher priority.
And all of this isn't even to mention the project that Chris is eager for me to finish up on, as my department is the only one not yet finished, where we correct any and all retails that end in 0 or 5 and make sure they now only end in 9 (but none in 09 unless it's a retail below $1.99). Bear in mind that I already have plenty of regular work to fill up a full time job without either of these projects. In the middle of all this a few weeks ago, all of us "Support Specialists" were tasked with now being responsible for acquiring and logging and saving and organizing all of the images we need for every product we have, for use in online shopping with InstaCart or Amazon Fresh! We were each given lists specific to our departments, of which items we already have that still need images, and we need to contact brokers to get them. Jesus fucking Christ! I wrote back to that to ask if that was a higher priority than the SuperValu bulk items or the price rounding projects, and Chris responded that it was lower priority than either of those. So basically it's going to be many months before I can even touch that shit.
You know, whatever. Job security! "Feast or famine," indeed. And to think a few months ago I had a couple of days there when I literally ran out of things to do, in an off week in the middle of the promotion schedule. I won't have that problem again for some time.
Yesterday I took myself to see American Animals. I quite liked it. Somewhere around the middle I became temporarily unsure of how much I liked it, but it really won me over in the end.
The showing was at 4:50, so I rode my bike straight downtown to see it. Unfortunately I forgot it was at Pacific Place and not at the Meridian, and so after I locked my bike up on Pike Street, I had to walk back over to Pine. Then, to my confusion, after checking in to the 4:50 showing on the MoviePass app, the only showing on the kiosk was . . . 5:05? It was now past 4:50 so maybe the kiosk was really strict about it, so I went to the window -- same scenario. The ticket lady told me there had been a projector error earlier in the day that delayed the showing by 15 minutes. I was afraid this would keep my MoviePass from scanning properly -- it almost certainly would have complicated it at the kiosk -- but it swiped just fine with the ticket lady. So in the end, it all worked out: I got into the theatre itself about ten minutes late, and not even the trailers had started yet.
I rode the rest of the way home after that, wrote my review, watched another episode of Westworld with Shobhit, and then we also watched an episode from two weekends ago of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver -- with a news comedy show like that it was already a little dated (he talked about how the Tump "summit" with Kim Jong-Un was about to happen) but that show is still always worth catching up on.
I just finished eating my lunch out on the patio. It's so warm already, about ten minutes out there was enough. Plenty of other people were out there too but no one I'm exactly "work friends" with, so I still pretty much just ate by myself. I checked the temperature on my weather app when I got back inside and it said 76°. I was surprised it wasn't warmer. It will be warmer when I am biking home, though. Yippee.
Shobhit made a truly delicious garbanzo bean and rice dinner last night, and there was enough for both of us to pack lunches of it for work today. There were some multigrain crackers out on the pantry table, so I grabbed the last three or so of those, and crumbled them into my bowl for lunch. It wasn't a lot of crackers, but it gave it just the perfect amount of subtle crunch to it. My lunch was so good!
[posted 12:36 pm]