With two more weeks of nothing growing because Persephone Days are still here, I have decided to make filler posts. With 40 years of work experience, I have a lot of stories that can be used as posts.
My last job before moving to Kansas was picking orders at the Petsmart warehouse* in Phoenix. I was there when the name was changed from Petsmart to PetSmart. I used a two-pallet pallet rider to pick what the voices in my headset told me to, and how many. When I was done, I took them to the staging area, wrapped them, labeled them, then picked up the next pallet(s) as a forklift driver put them on a truck bound for several stores. In other words, this is trained ape work.
A guy from the neighborhood needed a job and PetSmart needed help, so I put the two together, with a temp agency in between. “Rick” had no car, so I gave him a ride to work. Rick was a good worker when sober. Unfortunately, he would get his paycheck, get drunk all weekend be broke Monday morning and call in sick on Monday afternoon.
When Rick was down to his last strike, I went over early to get him sobered up enough to go to work. His daughter said he wasn’t that drunk. He was. He had three stages of drunkenness. The first was a mellow stage with the catchphrase “It doesn’t matter”. The second was an angry “LEAVE ME ALONE”. The third was “Lalalalala”. By the time we got to work, he seemed almost okay ,although the workers looked at him funny. My shift started a little earlier than his. I left the breakroom and heard this voice saying “LALALALALA” as one of the foremen* was walking in.
I didn’t see Rick at work, so I used the payphone we had to use at work for personal calls to call home. I could hear my roommate, but he couldn’t hear me at all. When I got home, I told him what happened. He told me that Rick got on the bus, went to the liquor store, spent his last dollar on beer and came to our house. If I had come home a few minutes earlier, I would have seen him. Rick was a good worker, but he just couldn’t do Mondays.
* I speak and write English, not HR. I use terms humans would use, not what human resources people would use.
Footyfried 