I’ve been working in the pricing department as the pricing manager in my store now since June of last year. The old pricing system was a DOS based system running on an old computer that was running Windows 95 even though it wasn’t advanced enough to be running Windows 3.1. Well, my system that I use is running on Windows XP Professional and my pricing program is a Windows based operation. I’ve been working on Windows since it started back in the days so I’m very familiar with it. My first Windows based PC had 3.1 on it and I remember upgrading it to 95, then the next computer I bought had 95 on it and I upgraded that to 98 and the next computer had 98 on it and I upgraded it to Me… which in hindsight was the biggest fucking mistake I ever made. I upgraded that computer again to Windows XP because I was sick of getting a fucking kernel error every time I tried to do something complicated; like move the mouse. Anyway, what I’m getting at here is that I’m familiar with my computers and with this pricing program. In fact I’m so familiar with it that ever since it has started I have kind of become the pet project store for the corporate office.
Whenever there is something new that they want to try they just install it on my computer and then give me a call the next day and ask me how it worked. It usually goes like this:
“Hey Dave, yesterday after you left we dialed in and installed a fix that will allow you to export a batch quicker than normal; how’s that working?”
“Um, its working fine I guess, although if I had known something had been updated I would have actually paid attention earlier when I was using that function.”
This has been going on since roughly a month after I took the pricing manager job. Now the real fun begins because I was recently asked to do some training for the new stores that will be going to this program from the old one. I will be tapped to do four training sessions between April and November and I may even get to go as far as Rapid City South Dakota (which is one of my favorite places anyway) and even Omaha Nebraska which I’ve never been and probably will never want to again from what I’ve heard. I will get set up with a laptop computer and a cell phone from the office so I can be on call and I will be able to dial into other people’s computers and work on them from wherever I’m at. Hopefully they won’t call my ass at home.
Hey, let’s get away from my job and talk about my old job there. I did HBC for over 10 years at that store and although I didn’t think it would bother me too much to see how much the department has gone to hell, it does. Some of the Christmas stuff wasn’t put out until about a week before Christmas. When I left the department all they did is put one of the cashiers into there. I was in full swing with pricing so my ability to train was zilch. I still get asked to do some shit and I’ve made mention that I have my own responsibilities and this is no longer my concern or responsibility. Most of my days are booked so I don’t have time to baby-sit my old department at all. I do see it while I’m out hanging tags and I hate seeing all of the holes on the shelves and the way some of the shit looks but what can I do? I think enough of the department to be concerned but not enough to do anything about it anymore; it has been 8 months since I stopped doing it for Christ’s sake. Oh the tales I could tell.