well then...
I work as a stocktaker/auditor for a company that deals with many high street stores, and therefore my customers are actually the store managers. Most of the time I get to deal with friendly little Scottish stores, in pointlessly small towns that are lovely and neat and warm. The customers from hell tend to occur in the bigger chain stores, where the idea of politeness seems to come second to the manager's need to waft their power hungry cocks in the collective face of humanity. I remember one shift vividly.

There were a crew of about 40 of us working a pointlessly large household store in Clydebank, Glasgow. if you know the area, it's the one just across the road from the chip shop that's a boat. Starting after driving in the pelting rain and wind for just under 3 hours, I wasn't in the best of moods. This was compounded by the fact that the store manager gave us a bollocking before we'd started, saying their last stocktake "was a load of shite, people trying to hurry work and get away early. If any of you pull that again I'll make sure you're fired." Considering that hadn't been our company, and some of the folk on our team had travelled up from Newcastle at the orders of the manager, we weren't too happy.

Having been told that the shop and stockroom were "clean as a whistle, and better fucking stay that way," we proceeded into the hell that was stock room one. It was full of manky cardboard boxes, piled about 10 feet high. Now this particular store has a policy for its stock to be single scanned - that is, if you have a pile of 5 baskets, even if they're the same, you scan them one by one, rather than the logical approach of scanning one then pressing the appropriate number. This would be fine in a small shop, but in a shop this size, scanning 3,000 single identical bars of soap was a fucking joke. Many of the crew had only joined the team after their retirement, to shore up their pitiful pensions, and seriously weren't up for this. one old boy was about 85, and was sent home at about 11 at night as he passed out. Not fun.

Add to this the fact that their "clean" stockroom had clearly not had any attention paid to it, so many boxes were filled with dust / rats / rat's shit / broken glass. the lack of attention also meant that a fair bit of the stock was no longer made any more or had lost its tags. now in a store where sanity prevailed, an item without a tag could just be scanned as a multiple of one of the 2,999 other identical items in the box, but no. We were told by the store manager to put any unmarked items at the checkouts, and duly did so. Creating 3 mountains of stock each the size of a transit van. At which point we got another bollocking from the manager, saying how we were all unprofessional shits. this from the woman who had liberally doused my lovely Latvian co-worker in shards of glass by knocking a lamp off the shelf above said Latvian, then blaming the poor woman for her clumsiness and trying to get her fired. very professional.

so you see, it's not just the general twattish public that are hellish, it's your bosses too... and, well, pretty much everyone.




length? 15 hours in a freezing shop, where the only ways of leaving were apparently a 3 hour drive home (at 5 in the morning), passing out following a mild heart attack (his first day on the job as well) or getting clobbered to death with a cheap lamp wielded by some arse hatted moron.
(DonMorte Cake is a made up drug, Wed 10 Sep 2008, 0:49, 1 reply)

I used to stocktake...
We had to do Iceland stores for a while and as you can imagine their storerooms were a selection of massive freezers.

Cold. As. Fuck.
(aroe_m0rre, Wed 10 Sep 2008, 17:14, closed)