Ooooops.

Yep. Totally screwed up there. Kinda forgot to post my final post here.

Sorry haha.

Quest Officially Completed.

While the acquisition of my holy foldable silver oblong of wizardry and spellcraft marked the “end” of my quest, by definition, it is the end of my employment which is more salient as a full-stop. And there’s where I am today: today I closed my locker, clocked out, and walked out the security exit for the last time. The alleged fourteen hour shift devolved to a meagre (!) twelve, in light of some plan-adjustments and the realisation that Tim actually couldn’t afford to pay me until 10, only until 8.

I have only recently returned and am, understandably, exhausted.

I think I’d put better stock in my eloquence at a later date, where I am not so physically depleted. I will say, however, that I’m not nearly as tired as I thought I would be. (That said, that may just be the after effects of the Relentless “Shot” I chugged not long ago, to push me through the last hour or so.) In any case, I’m afraid a more in depth reflection of Friday, Saturday, and today, will have to wait a few days. I’m tired, and busy.

I didn’t really anticipate this, though: I’ve walked away with some quite good friends.

Good times!

Just realised.

I haven’t actually updated the last day or two. Whoops.

I’ll give a monster rundown as soon as I am able – right now I am just too tired, and am in dire need of recuperating as much as possible so as to not make tomorrow as deadly as it will probably be.

Goodnight.

I can’t think of a title for this one.

This is it – the beginning of the end.

Straightforward Thursday today. To my dismay I saw that I had been allocated four sections – Fish, Sandwiches, Cream Cakes, and Sausages & Bacon. Fortunately, however, it turned out that each section had only one cage of products to its name, so my work was actually quite swift. Once those were done, I went on my lunch, before assisting a coworker with Cooked Meats and Ready Meals. Then it was Rumble – I was doing Longlife (Juices, Butter, and Cheese), until Craig whisked me away to the Chocolate and Sweets aisle, of all places. Apparently that particular department was so low on staff that they were struggling to complete their Rumble in time, and as a result were enlisting anyone and everyone they could to help them out. So that was a bizarre change of scene.

The only item of note today is the situation for Sunday: I have agreed to some overtime.

8 – 10.

Let me rephrase: 8am to 10pm. That’s fourteen hours of overtime. Which should be, taking potential breaks into account, somewhere in the region of £100-120. Which isn’t too shabby for a last day. What’s happening is that there just so happens to be a significant move planned for that day, after the store closes at 4pm, wherein the Ready Meals aisle will be rearranged. All the products need to be taken off the shelves and the price labels moved.

It will, most likely, eradicate any remaining energy stores hidden away in my system, chewing me up and spitting me out as a drained husk of a man. Apparently 10pm is the latest it should finish, with a more likely finishing time being nearer 8/9pm. Either way, it’s a hell of a lot of overtime and a sizeable amount of pay – and considering this “month” I’ll only have been working about half what I would be were I staying on, it’ll bump up my next payslip nicely. Here’s to the magic of overtime!

It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this!

I just realised I sort of glossed over a rather significant fact in my last post.

I have purchased a laptop.

That’s it – job done. Purpose fulfilled. Achievement unlocked. The whole blog incentive is over. My Quest for Tech is, in essence, completed. I had been working at Tesco purely to be able to afford new laptop, and after much deliberation (PC or Mac? Awesome or mediocre? Cheap or expensive?) I made my decision and splashed out. It’s a 13″ MacBook Pro, 160GB HDD with 4GB RAM and 2.26 GHz processor. It’s quite lovely. The price breakdown was roughly as follows: the MacBook itself was £900 but with the student discount it dropped to about £760. On top of that I bumped up the RAM to 4GB, took out an extended warranty/protection plan (£200 reduced down to about £40, I love being a student), got the Apple equivalent of Office, and a slick little skin to keep it all safe. I also bought an 8GB iPod Touch for £20 thanks to a Back To School rebate offer. Technically, I have paid full price for it – but I’ve sent off the rebate form to get most of it back. Also, it’s really for my sister – but she’s young enough to not be sure she really wants it so for the time being it’s sort of the “family iTouch”. It was such a good offer (and isn’t around much longer) so I thought I’d just get it anyway, regardless of how much people are going to use it. Also, last night I ordered the external HD to fully complete the QFT. I was going to buy one alongside the Mac from the Mac Store, but the prices online turned out to be much cheaper.

The Quest may be over, but my employment is not. At least, not yet; I have one more full week (Thursday-Saturday), plus some potential overtime on Sunday (my notice outlined this as a possibility). Yesterday was quite peaceful – I was allowed to listen to my iPod while rotating Ready Meals before the store opened, so that was nice. Although I am now getting a little bit sick of the Ready Meals aisle. I then rotated Yoghurts, had some lunch, then emptied one cage of Ready Meals and one of Barbecue Meat. And that was my day – £70 in the bank. Not too shabby.

Now to enjoy my free time – video editing, Heroes, sister’s Wii, playing on my Mac, and generally being a Cool Guy.

Finances, Fundays, and Eggs

Look. I was going to update yesterday but in all honesty I couldn’t. I had come home, all ready to go online to book coaches and suchlike, only to discover that somehow my dad had managed to disconnect our internet. You know, the way that fathers do.

The last few days are quite condensable. Thursday was essentially a Cheese and Yoghurts day, bar one interesting item of note. Following on from the miniature waste-rant the other day, I personally had to stick two hundred and sixty-four labels onto some on-today’s-date Müller yoghurts. The number is a slight exaggeration as about half way through my task I was informed that I had done enough, and they would only put out the ones that I had done. What had happened was that an entire cage of special edition individual yoghurts had been discovered in the chiller, apparently taken from another Tesco which couldn’t sell them (?) before being entirely forgotten about until Thursday. Incidentally, they had been reduced down to 10p so I bought four for my family to have that night. Yum!

Friday was a Ready Meals day. I can’t recall my exact movements – I think I started off with some Fish, with some Tip and Fill thrown in for good measure. The worst thing was that I had a massive energy dip by about 5pm, despite having plenty of cheese (? – protein?) at lunch. So I felt exhausted and unmotivated. Tim, who left some time before the end of my shift, parted with instructions for me: finish Ready Meals, do a bit of Eggs. Pretty straightforward, right? Obviously, with a sentence setup like that, it wasn’t. Ready Meals went off somewhat unproblematically, although I was pretty slow because by this point I was running on empty. I went in to lethargically make a start on Eggs, when a coworker ask I check on Milk for him, fill a couple of dollies [Tesco jargon alert! A dolly is small shelved trolly used to transport milk and cream, and are what you see milk stacked on in your typical Tesco supermarket] or whatever. I went over to Milk, condensed a few existing dollies down to make room for some new ones, but before I could do anything else, the call for Tip and Fill echoed out over the tannoy. Great, I think. Even less time for me to fill Eggs. I trudge over to the back doors, to discover that the number of Tip-And-Fill-ers (?) that evening amounted to: myself, a chap from produce, an ex-dairy-now-non-food worker, and two regular warehouse workers. Normally, we’d have one or maybe two more – the starting number, however, was not the problem. The problem was that as the tipping and filling progressed, the numbers somehow dwindled. The ex-dairy guy disappeared when his shift ended, while the others just vanished without explanation. Eventually, it was just me – with a good dozen or so weighty produce carts to drag. This ate up a considerable amount of time, leaving me with barely twenty minutes to do eggs. And it gets worse. Now, as a food, I love eggs. Can’t get enough of them. Scrambled, poached, fried, whatever. Egg-fried rice. Boiled eggs, hot or cold. Egg mayonnaise. All good stuff! Raw egg, on the other hand… I went to examine the egg situation on the shop floor. This didn’t amount to much as I didn’t really understand how it worked, what could go out, or what was in stock. So I went back into the warehouse and chose a cage to pull out. The one I chose, I noticed, had a cardboard box on it full of cartons containing broken eggs. The telltale dampening of raw egg seepage gave it away. There was also an open packet of stir-fry vegetables, so I presumed it was a box of waste ready to be chucked away. So, being the conscientious and considerate employee that I am, I thought I’d save whoever it was who put this aside the trouble and dispose of it myself. Foolhardy decision. This box contained, if I recall correctly, at least three full cartons of a dozen eggs, plus two or three half-dozen cartons, the stir-fry, and a bottle of HP sauce (?). I wheeled the cage over to the chiller door. I open the chiller door. I open the cage. I grab the box. I slide it forward off the top shelf of this cage. Half way off the edge, I attempt to pick it up. The bottom opens, and the eggs fall on the floor.

All of them.

I still don’t know how they missed my shoes, but they did. But oh god – oh god the mess. The yellow, snotty mess. It was catastrophic.

Cleaners walked past, luckily, within minutes of this disaster – this egg-splosion – and I managed to take a break from my repeated swearing long enough to ask for help. They swooped in with their magical pushy-R2D2-sweepy-sucky-shiny cleaning device, and the whole debacle was rendered somewhat melodramatic. By this point my shift was up. End of a great Friday.

Today was 100% Ready Meals. I think the only thing I did that wasn’t was Rumbling Cheese at 4pm. Other than that I – along with one or two other colleagues – had to work through 11 cages of pre-made, partially-cooked dishes sealed in microwaveable plastic containers. (Well, to be precise, this also includes pizzas, fresh pasta, sausage rolls, scotch eggs, pork pies, actual pies, quiches, steak/chicken/etc slices, Quorn and tofu, soups, and pasta sauces). The only remarkable event is what had happened on my return journey home. I cycle in and out of work, you see – a journey which lasts approximately 7 minutes. I only know this because it’s not quite 10 minutes but it’s definitely more than 5 minutes, and invariably a song and a half. Anyway, on my particular cycle path (psychopath?) there are periodically (three in total, so not quite periodic I suppose) special let’s-piss-off-the-cyclists-and-slow-them-down barrier-esque obstacles. I’ve tried and failed to google a photo of this annoyance so I’ll have to make do with words.

Picture two posts about a yard apart, and each about a metre tall at most. Now, extend from the top of each post inwardly a hollow triangle. Each triangle’s “top” length should be perpendicular to its post (i.e. parallel to the ground) and extend only a third of the distance between the two posts. This should now look like an odd capital “P” facing its own reflection. I suppose another way to think about it would be to picture two upside down Ls whose top bars also connect with the posts to form triangles. GAH. Anyway. The point is to slow down cyclists so as to minimize collisions. The gap between the two posts is just enough for your bike to fit through but not far apart enough for you to cycle aimlessly through. Ordinarily, I slow enough to waddle through quite safely, and I complain little because I a) see the logic behind it b) was saved from a potential crash when both myself and another cyclist were slowed down by such an obstacle coming from different directions on a corner. But today, after several days – perhaps even a week – of managing to smoothly glide through one particular Cycle Killer by timing the release of my hands long enough for the bike itself to slide under the Triangles of Death while my upright body slips through the gap between them. No such luck today. I was probably going too fast to have been properly controlling my direction, but one of the Triangles of Death clipped one handle, knocking my bike’s balance, resulting in a rather acrobatic dismount on my part. I only came out of it with an ankle grazed through the sock and slightly scraped hands (miraculously my sunglasses stayed on?). I think the bike came out worse – the front brakes are now disconnected from their squeezey-pressey thing on the handlebars, due to the cable snapping somehow in the scuffle.

Tomorrow I’m working 8am-4pm. It’s the longest overtime shift I’ve done to date, and the second time I’ll have to get up this early. I’m so tired, but I need the money – especially having spent almost £1000 on my shiny new MacBook Pro. Which is gorgeous, by the way.

Now I just need to try and get to sleep with a riotous party going on over the road. Bloody neighbours.

Bakery Breaking Me

I know. I’ve fallen a bit behind. But I’ve been busy! Work on Thursday was particularly awful, Friday was bearable but I was still tired from Thursday, Saturday was my sister’s 13th birthday and we’d just bought a Wii – we had more siblings round and played on that all night. Then I did overtime Sunday morning (8-12, my earliest shift to date) then went to Go Ape – a treebound, climbing-with-carabiners-style adventure park thing – that afternoon. Today has been my first day without anything particularly stimulating going on and I’ve been using it to try and make some headway through my mountain of “stuff to sort out”.

1. Register for my third year at Uni. [done]
2. Print, fill in, and send off application for the university’s Erasmus grant. [not yet done]
3. Set up an account with Nationwide (because they offer free cash withdrawals abroad). [in progress!]
4. Have a chat with the guys over at the Mac Store about getting a laptop. [done]
5. Purchase abovementioned laptop. [not yet done]
6. Send off phone to be repaired. [done]
7. Inquire about Student Loan schedule. [done but not sorted]
8. Arrange travel to France. [not yet done]
9. Tidy room [not yet done]

GAH!

Anyway. This blog is about Tesco! So on with the good stuff!

Immediately upon my arrival on Thursday Tim sent me to the Bakery department. Apparently their produce had suffered a visitation from our friendly neighbourhood fruit-flies, which resulted in an increased demand for staff to clean up/clean out/tidy up the department. I was one of those people. But my job was not interesting, or physically appealing. I had to scrape crusty baking trays. Repeatedly. For about four hours. “Fun” is one of those words which has no business in such a scenario. The sheer monotony, infused bleakly with black-stained fingers and an aching back, was so benumbing I almost started hallucinating. The corner of the bakery in which I stooped carried an odour not unlike hyper-sterilized incontinence pads too soaked with urine to ever be entirely clean. Reminiscent, if you’ve heard me talk of him, of the Scary Old Man. [Those who do not know will not get an explanation, I'm afraid.] The floor was slippery. My hot soapy bucket quickly cooled into a brown sludgy soup. The constant ducking and straightening really began to hurt my back. The trays themselves varied between partially encrusted, highly encrusted, or not-quite-set encrusting which bordered on sticky, half-baked grease. My scraper was a rectangle of metal, about A5 in size, with a plastic handle. It wasn’t long before my uniform was smeared with blackened, oily marks and flaked with crusty crumbs. I looked like a mechanic. Fortunately, by the time my lunch rolled around, the manager of the Bakery – Simon – said I could call it a day since I’d bitten a significant chunk out of the workload. I had feared my entire day would be filled with scraping.

From then on my day continued as normal – rotation, emptying cages, etc. I can’t remember if anything remarkable occurred, but clearly if anything had, it can’t have been that memorable. People did comment on how tired I looked – I think it must have been the cumulative effect of a semi-late night with my friend the night before, him leaving the following morning, and me leaving the house later than usual and having to cycle double time to avoid tardiness – to be greeted by Bakery Scraping. As I said to one coworker, “It’s just one of those days.”

On Friday I stacked eggs for the first time. Not particularly noteworthy, other than that it is depressingly frequent to find broken eggs. The waste levels are quite disgusting, both in quantity and in substance. I found one box in which every single carton – bar two – contained at least one broken egg. The whole lot had to be disposed off. Some effort, apparently, was made to salvage a few complete boxes by combining the surviving eggs.

Speaking of waste – during my Sunday overtime, Craig whisked me over the Compactor. This appropriately destructively-named device is essentially a big square metal door, not unlike a furnace hatch, behind which descends a chute of several metres into rubbishy nothingness. Once waste has been recorded from each department (i.e. for Stock Control purposes), it is then transferred here to be disposed of. The procedure is simple. Chuck. And that’s what we did – with several hundred loaves of out-of-date bread. What was most frustrating was that, by and large, these loaves were absolutely fine. They weren’t mouldy, or broken, or unappetising in any way. They were simply beyond the scope of their mechanically produced sticker. There were many, many, many baked goods headed down that hatch. Rolls, croissants, doughnuts, petit pains, baguettes. However, to distract ourselves from the ethically and economically upsetting levels of decadent waste, we turned it into a game of how hard, fast, and far we could throw the bread into the Compactor. It was a surprisingly effective stress relief, and great way to spend a Sunday which had been hitherto 100% Rotation Checks. (“What am I rotating today, Craig?” “Everything.” “Right-o.”) At one point Craig hurled a loaf with particular vigour, and it missed the door by inches and was impaled on a spike-like latch on the side. You had to be there, really, but at the time it was hilarious.

I’m sure there are more things of note to report, but I’m really far too tired right now to summon them from the murky aether of my brainstuff. Goodnight!

Man Fairy

This’ll be a brief post because I have a friend at my house and we have far more productive (?) things to do.

Today was a typically exhausting Saturday. I barely need to mention that I was inundated with idle, braindead customers who seem set, distractedly, on getting in my way. Although I will mention that today – and, in fact, yesterday and the day before, though I forgot to mention – involved a new (!) activity known as Tip And Fill. This activity seems to involve very little in the way of “tipping”, and slightly more though still very little in the way of “filling”. Essentially, if one is labelled as a “Tip And Fill” person for the day, you are subsequently on hand for unloading a lorry. The lorry comes in, docks with the warehouse like a spaceship, and spits out cages of produce. It’s then up to us to escort these cages to their relevant destinations within the warehouse. It isn’t, in retrospect, particularly interesting. But as it’s something “new”, and that I have nothing else to talk about, I thought I’d mention it.

The social networking within my “crew” at Tesco is reaching a critical stage, whereby any contact between us results almost invariably in several minutes of hilarious but useless banter. It has reached the point now where Tim has told us off on a few occasions for chatting too much – which must be a bad sign, given how lenient my manager usually is. Anyway, nicknames have been allocated (by some sort of higher authority, I can only assume): Lucas is “The Polish Tiger”. Ben is “Frodo” (an allusion to his stature, I think). Mike is “Big Mike” (again, some reference to height). I, however, have been left with the dubious “Man Fairy”. Occasionally this is interchangeable with “Fairyboy”, to which I usually respond with an insistance on the former moniker, due to its less (but still considerable) camp overtones. Unfortunately there’s no active effort which I can undertake to eliminate this label, so maybe I’m stuck with it. Ah well – I’m only here for another three weeks.

yadsruht

I finally received my name badge today. It gave me a short-lived saccharine buzz before I readjusted to the fact I simply had a slightly shinier method of identifying myself. It’s still pretty nice though. I feel more official – even though I leave in three weeks.

Today was the first shift I’d done since leaving for my “holiday”. People keep saying “How was your holiday?” and I assume they’re using “holiday” to mean “time away from Tesco” and not to refer to an actual holiday abroad they all think I went on. Just trekking around the country isn’t exactly an exotic overseas excursion. (Incidentally, my time away from Tesco was glorious.)

I feared I would be out of the swing of things – even though “things” encompasses a very limited selection of thoroughly untaxing tasks. Of course, the techniques required of this job are now too deeply engrained in both my psyche and my muscle memory. I rotated Cooked Meats (in 15 minutes, due to the majority of the stock being on “codebook”) and then filled/rumbled Longlife (cheese, butter, juice). That was essentially my day. It mostly unravelled in lethargic slow motion due to a still-recovering-from-previous-week exhaustion that hadn’t quite gone away just yet. At one point Tim mentioned some sort of extra “training” that I needed, but I ended up actually receiving it after Tim had finished work from his underling Craig. It was an almost frustratingly straightforward, obvious, and arbitrary assessment of yet more “Tesco Stuff That Happens”.

“Explain the Clean As You Go policy.”

Do I really need to?

Even Craig – not the hottest of coals at the best of times – thought this was ridiculous and a completely unneccessary regurgitation of what laymen tenderly invoke with the label of Common Sense.

Sandwich Saturday

Not a lot to report – as I feared some days would bring. A busy Saturday, several thousand trillion customers getting in my way and forcing me to resist the urge to kill, the usual. I probably spent most of the time chatting idly to coworkers rather than actually getting on with my job, but I wasn’t too bothered since once I walked out that door at the end of my shift, I wouldn’t be back for another 10 days or so. Time off, here I come!

Probably the most exciting thing to happen was one involving sandwiches. This isn’t to say that it was exciting, but comparatively speaking, it was an adrenaline rollercoaster ride. I returned to the warehouse with an armful of sandwiches on today’s date, which I had discovered whilst rumbling said section in the afternoon. I handed these to Lucas who was busy reducing various products. Tim was hiding in the corner, and suddenly grumbled something at me. The conversation was as folows:

T: “What are those?”

M: “Sandwiches on today’s date.”

T: “From where?”

M: “Sandwiches. I didn’t find them when I filled them earlier.”

T: “So is that all of them then? On today’s date?”

M: (not thinking) “Yes.”

He then turns to Lucas and, quite resolutely, tells him, “Don’t worry about checking Sandwiches now, Lucas, George has done them all.”

I shrinked away, slightly scared. I had found those sandwiches accidentally and I knew for a fact that more were left on the shelves. I ran back to the section, and to my horror, found several more – at least a dozen and a half, if not more. I clutched these to my chest and sneaked as clandestinely as possible back down aisles, occasionally darting in a different direction when I saw Tim making the rounds. I hid with Ben down the Cheese aisle, and put the sandwiches down, unsure as to what to do. I knew they needed to get back to the warehouse but I didn’t want Tim to see and ask the inevitable questions. So I embarked on some brief reconnaissance: the coast was clear. I made a slightly-limping run for it, and made it cleanly back to the warehouse. I noticed Tim on my tail (or at least walking in my vague direction, depending on whether I acknowledged my paranoia or not) as I entered the warehouse, but there were no followup questions later so I think I was okay. I handed the sandwiches in question to Lucas, with the panting utterance, “I gave these to you originally, okay? You didn’t see me just now.” I think his English was good enough to understand what I meant.

As an aside, I treated myself to a proper lunch today, instead of the questionable stuff served in our behind-the-scenes canteen. For under a fiver I feasted upon: a Southern fried chicken sandwich, a packet of salt and vinegar McCoy’s, a £1 box of fish sushi, a bottle of Tesco’s Finest Wild Strawberry flavoured milk (made with Real Cornish Clotted Cream – Tesco’s Finest loves its longwinded titles, it makes the products sound more delicious), and a Galaxy Ripple. It was heavenly.