Blog #173  I talked about The daily routine at Target. In this blog I want to talk about The good the bad and the sad.

The Good

If you know me, You know I am the type of person who likes to learn new things. I also like machinery, so learning how to work a forklift was a lot of fun. A forklift has a gas pedal like a normal car and a brake so that was easy. It has a reverse lever if you had to back up. There were three levers for the forks Up, Down and tilt. So all of it together was pretty easy to learn but there were safety issues also involved. If you weren’t paying attention it could lead to disaster. Using the Forklift also gave you an opportunity to be outside on occassion. For all these reasons I would volunteer. 

The Bad

One time,  I saw someone dump a whole pallet of liquid Tide once and it was a mess. And no it wasn’t me…

This person started it out right, The liquid tide was on a pallet and the employee drove over to the pallet. The forks went into the open spaces of the pallet just right. When he started to lift the pallet you are supposed to tilt the pallet ever so slightly. Ever so slightly was missed on this one. He tilted it way too far and all the containers came tumbling down. This also could have been avoided if he used “Shrink wrap to keep the Tide all together. It was a mess but I sure learned from that.

Sometimes when the overnight team had two trucks it would be a lot of work for the day team as well, getting it all processed. This was where teamwork really came in. The items the overnight team didnt have time to finish would be staged in the back. The daytime team would first run everything they could on the shelves then scan into location when put into back stock. We would help each other as needed or otherwise it would be a snowball effect that would cause the whole store to be is disarray. Everyone was pretty good at helping each other out. Two trucks usually meant a tough day and exhausting one.

The Sad

One sad day George announced he was leaving. An empty pit developed in my gut. He was leaving Target for Best Buy. He was the reason why I’ve stayed, because I liked him so much, he can’t do this to me… I started thinking of what my next move would be. Everyone in the store loved George. We threw him a nice send off with cake and party favors in the lunchroom. We had a lot of laughs that day even though it was sad.

Charles and I kept giving each other the look on “What’s next?” We would most likely get a new store manager even though I felt Charles was capable. All the ETL’s were a little rattled on what kind of STL we would get. George kept it fun and was awesome to work with even when he was mad. I started doing some soul searching and wanted to be ahead of this in case it went south. George was not your typical STL so this would be interesting.