Day for Night
Not expecting my first entry after a long absence to be a particularly informative or cohesive one, so I'd ask that you come in with low expectations as well. I'm very sore and very exhausted.
I'm currently in a hotel room in Calgary with Zach lightly snoring on the pull-out couch behind me whilst I type on his laptop. I got a call from him Wednesday morning that went something like this:
"How are you for coverage at the store for the next few days?"
Me: "Uhhhhh... okay?"
"Wanna come to Calgary?"
Me: "... the fuck?"
We've been having some horrible turnover issues out on the west end of the country, and there are eleven stores in the Calgary area that are just not ready for primetime... let alone Christmas. So, with that in mind, the head office asked a couple of district managers to put together a SWAT team to hit all of those stores and bring them up to muster, and they did so from Ontario primarily because it's harder to find the bench strength out west.
I agreed to come because I've never been asked to do something like this before, and it's hard to turn down something that comes from as high up as this did. I thought it'd be a good chance to network and to work with some west-coast folks I've never had the pleasure of working with.
It's been an experience, alright. We were pretty woefully unprepared for what was going to be waiting for us when we arrived. The idea was to do one store a night for five nights, but so far it's taken two nights to finish our first stores, as two six-to-seven-person teams, and we've scratched the surface on two more stores after completing our initial tasks. For those of us coming from Ontario, specifically London, that means that we had to wake up somewhere in the neighbourhood of 4 a.m. on Friday morning to get transport to Toronto for our noon flight, since that was the only airbus available. We then flew to Calgary, losing two hours in the process and arriving at 2 p.m. local time, before having dinner at 5 p.m. and hitting our stores afterwards.
Our arrival time back at the hotel after working the first night was 8:30. SATURDAY MORNING. Needless to say, we're exhausted, still trying to catch up on sleep with we shift to a daytime sleeping schedule, and fighting off illness; there's a cold going around that's already knocked Zach on his ass, and being that I room with him I'm probably next.
That's not even mentioning waking up with the fire alarm about an hour ago. And then I get to fly home and move. Cripes.
I'm going to hit the shower and see if I can't feel slightly more awake. Be well, all.
I'm currently in a hotel room in Calgary with Zach lightly snoring on the pull-out couch behind me whilst I type on his laptop. I got a call from him Wednesday morning that went something like this:
"How are you for coverage at the store for the next few days?"
Me: "Uhhhhh... okay?"
"Wanna come to Calgary?"
Me: "... the fuck?"
We've been having some horrible turnover issues out on the west end of the country, and there are eleven stores in the Calgary area that are just not ready for primetime... let alone Christmas. So, with that in mind, the head office asked a couple of district managers to put together a SWAT team to hit all of those stores and bring them up to muster, and they did so from Ontario primarily because it's harder to find the bench strength out west.
I agreed to come because I've never been asked to do something like this before, and it's hard to turn down something that comes from as high up as this did. I thought it'd be a good chance to network and to work with some west-coast folks I've never had the pleasure of working with.
It's been an experience, alright. We were pretty woefully unprepared for what was going to be waiting for us when we arrived. The idea was to do one store a night for five nights, but so far it's taken two nights to finish our first stores, as two six-to-seven-person teams, and we've scratched the surface on two more stores after completing our initial tasks. For those of us coming from Ontario, specifically London, that means that we had to wake up somewhere in the neighbourhood of 4 a.m. on Friday morning to get transport to Toronto for our noon flight, since that was the only airbus available. We then flew to Calgary, losing two hours in the process and arriving at 2 p.m. local time, before having dinner at 5 p.m. and hitting our stores afterwards.
Our arrival time back at the hotel after working the first night was 8:30. SATURDAY MORNING. Needless to say, we're exhausted, still trying to catch up on sleep with we shift to a daytime sleeping schedule, and fighting off illness; there's a cold going around that's already knocked Zach on his ass, and being that I room with him I'm probably next.
That's not even mentioning waking up with the fire alarm about an hour ago. And then I get to fly home and move. Cripes.
I'm going to hit the shower and see if I can't feel slightly more awake. Be well, all.