Doing Closing

3rd week at Safeway now, and I'm doing closing :-) Most people hate closing, because it means a lot of extra work and stress, and you're responsible for the completion of a lot more tasks. If someone else screws up, it just means more work for the people who do closing-- if the people closing screw up-- they get in trouble with management, who will see all your mistakes and things you neglected to do, when they do morning inspections. So basically, if you don't do closing perfectly, your boss(es) will definitely know, and you'll get called into the office if you slack off too much.

But for me, who is a perfectionist to begin with, I see this as an opportunity to demonstrate my strong work-ethic, and to get more much-needed experience doing go-backs. Perhaps after a couple of weeks doing closing, I will have nearly the entire store down-- that would be good.

The biggest problem I had with doing closing today (other than the go-backs-- which sadly I am still having way too much trouble with, although I'm fast improving!) was with sweeps, which I had to do twice as fast (the whole store in 15 minutes) in order to have time for all the other closing duties stacked onto the regular stuff. I had to work really fast, and tried my best (but somewhat failing) not to cut corners to get everything done. All the other courtesy clerks cut corners, but not me. I need to stay ahead of the pack if I want to be successful here.

Closing duties consist of turning off the power to the secondary entrance (to optimize traffic) at 9pm, taking out all the trash and recycle, both in and out of the store, replace all the garbage bags, refill all the plastic bags for the checkstands, pick up all the trash around the checkstands, wipe down the barcode scanners and food belts with windex, put away all the carts, and....of course go-backs. There are also other closing duties that need to be done from time to time, but these are the ones you do every day (if you're closing).

First day of closing, I did everything right, except I didn't know I was supposed to refill the checker's bags, and I still had a lot of go-backs leftover when I had to check out. I'll do better with closing tomorrow, hopefully.

Almost Payday!

Today's the last day of work until Saturday, but more importantly, it's the last of work until I get my first paycheck in 3 years! I get paid tomorrow (Thursday), and I'm very much looking forward to it!!!

Honestly, although my duties and the incessant traffic at Safeway keep me occupied, I spend every spare moment anticipating tomorrow morning, when I can finally collect that check. It's been a surprisingly fast couple of weeks, and it feels like I could have done so much more, but nevertheless I am overall very satisfied with the job I've done thus far.

I've gotten the whole work schedule down now, memorized just about everyone's names, and can bag, push carts, and clean the whole store (well, the parts of the store I'm permitted to) with ease. Particularly with cleaning-- a little while ago I had some difficulty sweeping the whole store in an hour-- now I can do so in 15 minutes if necessary, or in 30 minutes with ease.

I can also now handle transitions between different tasks with grace and composure, with even the most sporadic of transitions being done smoothly.

The past week has been thoroughly productive ;-)

The Situation: (schedule-wise!)

I went to find out my schedule for next week today; here's what I found out:

* Schedules are not finalized until after 4pm (I found this out from the 2nd Assistant Manager on duty).

* When I came back after 4, I found out the schedules were finalized but wouldn't be posted for another hour (at 5).

* I talked to the Assistant Manager (1st), to get my schedule, and was called into the admin office to discuss the details. He gave me my schedule on a post-it note, and told me about how the courtesy clerk schedule worked:

* The schedule for Safeway courtesy clerks is divided into sweeping (cleaning), carts, and "default" (regular duties such as bagging groceries, helping customers, assisting with getting groceries into the car, and "go-backs" (putting a stray item back where it belongs), represented on the schedule as "S", "C", and "D", respectively. My hours are broken down as these letters dictate.

* There is also an "L" for lunch, but at the Safeway I work at, I'm supposed to ignore that and find out my lunch based on the time given at the beginning of the schedule posted.

Now that I've got that out of the way, I have a few days of until Tuesday, where I do Computer training, and begin my official first day of work (the first day I get paid for).