Conveyable Flow

Conveyable Flow

I'm at my second week on the job. I've got a small corner office with two tiny windows on one of the Peachtree Streets. The walls are bare because I haven't had time or resources yet to hang anything, but the office is mine. Soon they'll make me one of those little plastic plaques to go on my door with my name and the title "Assistant Archivist" on it. I can stand in front of one of my two narrow little windows and look out on Atlanta, and know that outside it's February but over 50 degrees, and in the cafeteria I can have fried chicken and okra or vidalia onion rings or any of another dozen familiar foods that I missed so much while I was away.

I can listen to music while I wear my cotton gloves and document the history of the area.

And I can know that I appreciate this, while it lasts. Because I worked for it.

I'm still going to work at the movie theater Friday nights and Sundays until I get my own place. I have a lot of bills to catch up on, and I owe so many people money it's just ridiculous. So there's no reason to give up putting on a name tag and selling tickets just yet. I find the atmosphere of the theater comforting, soothing even.

Wait - I never got around to writing about Target, did I?

I should write about Target before I forget what it was like.

I was on the Price Change Team. The normal hours for the Price Change Team were 6am to 2:30 in the afternoon every weekday, but we often left early or stayed late due to the nature of the job.

When I came into work I clocked in on a digital timeclock with my employee number. Then I used my keys as collateral to check out an LRT - a laser gun with a keypad and pixilated screen on its top. Then I would walk to the back of the store into the stock room, a concrete floored place where all the merchandise was stacked in narrow aisles 20 feet tall. I always thought the store room was pretty magical - here was every type of candy and toy in little cardboard bins, and the bins had bar codes on them. The LRT gun could tell you where every piece of merchandise was in the store according to those bar codes, and the bar codes on the merchandise itself. Take a minute, the next time you're in one of these big department stores, and realize that every piece of everything...is cataloged in a computer somewhere. The error rate is actually pretty low for so many hundred of thousands of little pieces of stuff.

My job, and the job of everyone on our team, was to mark down merchandise on clearance. To do this, we had little printers (called "hip printers" because they allegedly fit on a belt around your hip, but none of us ever had one of those belts). The printers were made of the same light grey plastic as the LRT guns, and they could be loaded with rolls of tickets.

Each day, we could turn on our LRT guns, enter into the proper menu for price change, and see what sections were being marked down that day and how many items in each section were due. Then we'd hook up our printers to our guns, and scan every item in the appropriate sections until all the markdowns were done. When our guns hit a barcode on an item up for price change, the printer spit out the appropriate ticket.

And allegedly, it all should have worked very smoothly that way, except that it didn't.

The guns were often difficult to use; they ate batteries, and because the batteries drained so fast people would take charged ones and hide them for use in their own departments. The guns sometimes froze up just like bad computers, or refused to communicate to the printers. The hip printers were even crankier than the guns, and to make matters worse, there weren't enough working printers on any given shift for everyone on the team. The printers would jam, feed the sticky tickets wrong, eat their own kind of rechargeable batteries, refuse to communicate with the LRT gun.

We had a supervisor who would blame worker's attitudes for the tricky equipment's failure to operate. One girl cried in the bathroom after a particularly frustrating night.

There are a number of teams that work the sales floor at any given time; in addition to the price change team, there's the stock room team, in charge of getting everyday merchandise restocked; the flow team, in charge of unloading trucks and getting that merchandise into its proper stock location or out on the floor; the "front" team that works the registers and opens and closes the store, the cleaning crew contracted by the store that does the floors and bathrooms at night, the customer service team that works the front desk and helps out all over, the snack bar team, the electronics team and the jewelry teams in charge of their locked up merchandise, plus the management team which consists of all the team leaders and the head store managers. Workers on the floor were usually divided into "hardlines" workers or "softlines" workers. The softlines departments in the store were carpeted; the hardlines were not.

During Christmas the price changes come so fast and so many that the Price Change team stops working afternoons and goes to work 11pm to 6:30am every night except Saturday and Sunday. We pull workers from the stock team and double our size. In a typical season, the Price Change Team works a week to ten days of overnight shifts, but this week there were four weeks of overnights.

The overnight shifts are wearing to those who have to re-arrange their whole lives to make it to work. The smokers suffered the worst; because of the alarm set on the outside doors after midnight, they couldn't go outside to take their breaks. A lady in her fifties, a solid worker for almost two decades, was almost dismissed for smoking in the women's room one night the third week in.

My favorite part of the job was going into the back stock room to pull merchandise from those giant tall shelves. When you take merchandise out of its bar-coded stock bin, it's called "pull". When that merchandise is pulled, marked, and on one of the great metal sleds used to move it onto the sales floor, it's called "push". The act of putting this merchandise onto the sales floor is "pushing".

Sometimes when there weren't enough working guns, or printers, or somehow when the whole system had gone crazy, they would put the Price Change team on the flow team. We couldn't help the flow team unload trucks though, because they had a whole system down as a unit and we'd just get in the way. So we'd end up pushing flow, easy enough to do at Christmastime when the shelves could get bare in a night. We were taking stuff the flow team had got right off the truck, put on a cart, and putting it on the shelves. A lot of the stuff came off the trucks on a long conveyor belt made of many metal rollers, and the boxes were marked for the team by companies Conveyable Flow.

Conveyable Flow was mostly ordinary dry goods that were not breakable, like giant boxes of toilet paper or detergent or cereal. Sometimes Conveyable Flow could also be stuffed animals or panty hose or waffle irons. But by in large it was that stuff that you could find in a lot of houses at anytime, the stuff of ordinary life. hundreds of boxes of Conveyable Flow would pass through my hands some nights, and my mind would reel with a million thoughts about my own life and the stuff in it. Luckily, I've never been terribly materialistic, but I understand my own needs better after spending all that time up all those nights.

Cookie Smell

Maybe I Smell Like Fresh Cookies

In the past week I have been contacted by a number of former romantic interests, I got a fabulous new job doing work I love, I was praised by a former boss in a way that made me feel shiny and special, and a nineteen year old redhead hit on me.

A nineteen year old redhead punk boy thought I was cool.

Woah.

Also, this guy who won't be named had a two hour conversation with me on Sunday. I'm not going to say who it was, but I will reveal the fact that I used to break out in a sweat every damn time he happened to be on an elevator with me. Every damn time. Did you ever have one of those crushes on someone who just slayed you, who knocked you down with their mental beauty every time you talked to them, that person who you liked so much that inevitably the most stupid, inane, idiotic things would pop out of your mouth when you tried to respond to their brilliance? That crush that you had so deep and profound that you couldn't do anything about it, while at the same time you knew how totally obvious you had to be?

Yeah, so that guy called me. He was worried I might be getting married. And for some reason, I forgot to ask him why he was worried. Because I'm a complete and total idiot even on the phone with him.

Maybe I should nearly get engaged more often. It seems to scare up other suitors and life prospects. Not that any of these guys have any possible means of actually dating me or anything, but it's just funny - I let everybody know I'm thinking about settling down, and suddenly I get a job, and the guys come a-callin'. Maybe it's that huge breakthrough I had in my personal artwork. Maybe success sends out secret pheremones that can be detected thousands of miles away.

Or maybe it's just Elizabeth season. I seem to recall a jump in romantic activity this time last year as well.

Of course this year I'm living with relatives, so there's no chance of any actual...activity. Which is a positive thing anyway, because I seem to have painted myself into a romantic corner of sorts. I have no idea what to do next, so maybe I'll just sit in this corner by myself a bit while the paint dries...I'm intersted as to how the artwork will look, after the light shines on it. In truth, I've no bloody idea what the floor I tried to paint looks like. And that's enough vague English-major-type insinuation for this blog entry.

In other news, I have my very own office with a window. They're gonna give me business cards, and I get to write my very own policy manual for archivists with this institution. My cousin Ruel's 4th birthday is this weekend. My cousin Eleanor said my name last week (a feat for her tiny mouth). I'm renting my cousin Karina's wood-sided station wagon until I get my first check, with which I'll buy a car, beating my own deadline for car ownership by a good 15 days.

I still haven't processed all this yet. Last Friday, the day after they told me I had the job, I went in for a physical. Afterwards, I drove to Little 5 Points and opened up an account with the local store. That's when I noticed there was an Indian restaurant across the street. The sun was shining, I had a job that started Monday, and I had comic books and somewhere new to eat. I drove around the neighborhood noticing all the rental houses available, and I thought, I'm going to make this happen, this life that I want.

Everything is going to be good again. Better even. And now, just because I finally fucking can, I think I'll quote John Hodge's script for Irving Welsh's Trainspotting:

I'm going to change. This is the last of this sort of thing. I'm cleaning up and I'm moving on, going straight and choosing life. I'm looking forward to it already. I'm going to be just like you: the job, the family, the fucking big television, the washing machine, the car, the compact disc and electrical tin opener, good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance, mortgage, starter home, leisurewear, luggage, three-piece suite, DIY, game shows, junk food, children, walks in the park, nine to five, good at golf, washing the car, choice of sweaters, family Christmas, indexed pension, tax exemption, clearing the gutters, getting by, looking ahead, to the day you die.


right on, Rents.

Snowed In

Snowed In

When I woke up this morning, it had snowed for the first time in Atlanta this year. About an inch of the stuff was around, with grass peaking through. But the important part was that the snow had stuck to the street, so everyone stayed home.

My cousins were still in their bed when I woke up. "Cobb County schools are closed!" said my cousin Audrey gleefully. Colin was running around the room in a 3-year-old's state of joy at the unexpected day home with both parents.

"You're naked." I said.

"Yes, I am." he said matter-of-factly.

Audrey and Jamie smiled and put him in the bed between them.

Did I mention before I happy I am to be in the South for this winter? Have I explained how nice it is to be back where people stay sensibly indoors when the weather is the slightest bit unpleasant? Today may be the coldest day Atlanta has had in ten years, but it's still not as cold as Boston on a warm day in February. Today I will lounge around the house in my PJ's, and maybe take a walk around the neighborhood with Colin so he can see what might be our only snow of the year. Jamie is making Venison stew. I have sweet potatoes in the fridge, along with some pear tarts I made with vanilla creme and hot fudge sauce.

Oh, and while I was writing this, I got a job as an Archivist

18 months after I started sending out resumes, a year after I got my degree, a move cross country and months despair and rethinking and sort of feeling like it would never happen...I got a job, doing what I went to school for.

Amazing, man.

What a nice week this was.

Practicality

A few words on Practicality

I pride myself on my own practicality. I know that taking pride can be considered a fault, but I can't help it. I grew up around a lot of irrational people, and as a result I have often taken some pride in how stable and sane I manage to be 80% of the time. I'm very big on Keeping My Shit Together. For 5 years now my secret battle cry, the one I wouldn't share with many people was simply "MAINTAIN!"

side note: My friend Ford's battle cry was alternately: "I don't want to die!!" or "Not in the face, not in the face!" but of course, she stole the second one from Arthur on 'The Tick'.

I dislike change as a rule, although in the past year I have grown to accept it as the only constant in my life. I have changed so much in the past six weeks alone that I can't even begin to express all the differences.

But that's not what this update is about.

This update is about how much I hate journal entries like this one. For me, the point of my online blog is to record events and processes in my life. I should be writing about what it's like to work at Target, or about how half the people I work with at the movie theater with have at least a Bachelor's degree. These flat and rather mundane details of life are what really matter in the long run, and what are ultimately interesting to read - not only for people who have never worked at Target or a movie theater, but more interesting even to myself as time goes on and these everyday processes and details fade away to new ways of doing things.

It's the flat facts that matter most. Not little pieces of drivel like the last thing I wrote, which while interesting to a select group of people, will fade in importance as time goes on. Remember when E accepted the idea that marriage was a good thing, and wrote cryptic poetry about it? Yeah, that was funny. Next subject, please. No one will be interested in my personal dilemmas 40 years from now. But my Nashville stories are likely to be read for some time, because they are a reflection of more than just my own bellybutton lint.

So I'm writing this entry to let people know that I'm not going to write stuff like that anymore on this page This is my last personalized entry for some time. Just the facts, ma'am from now on. I have other places where I can express myself artistically; and those forms of art are bound to be more productive.

If anyone who reads this wants me to change my mind, drop me a line either on the guestbook or by e-mail. Somehow I doubt anyone will argue with me.

I love reading other people's blogs where they talk about how they feel - for instance, Alestar's writing is so knock down drag out good that I'll read anything she writes. Devon right now has a post up where she says that she wants her words to be like mescaline. And if I couldn't find out how Aral was really doing on her blog, I'd be really sad. But that's not me. I'm E, and I like being practical in this space. I'll save up my inner rants for other work. And I think more people will enjoy this space in this way.

Practicality

A few words on Practicality

I pride myself on my own practicality. I know that taking pride can be considered a fault, but I can't help it. I grew up around a lot of irrational people, and as a result I have often taken some pride in how stable and sane I manage to be 80% of the time. I'm very big on Keeping My Shit Together. For 5 years now my secret battle cry, the one I wouldn't share with many people was simply "MAINTAIN!"

side note: My friend Ford's battle cry was alternately: "I don't want to die!!" or "Not in the face, not in the face!" but of course, she stole the second one from Arthur on 'The Tick'.

I dislike change as a rule, although in the past year I have grown to accept it as the only constant in my life. I have changed so much in the past six weeks alone that I can't even begin to express all the differences.

But that's not what this update is about.

This update is about how much I hate journal entires like this one. For me, the point of my online blog is to record events and processes in my life. I should be writing about what it's like to work at Target, or about how half the people I work with at the movie theater with have at least a Bachelor's degree. These flat and rather mundane details of life are what really matter in the long run, and what are ultimately interesting to read - not only for people who have never worked at Target or a movie theater, but more interesting even to myself as time goes on and these everyday processes and details fade away to new ways of doing things.

It's the flat facts that matter most. Not little pieces of drivel like the last thing I wrote, which while interesting to a select group of people, will fade in importance as time goes on. Remember when E accepted the idea that marriage was a good thing, and wrote cryptic poetry about it? Yeah, that was funny. Next subject, please. No one will be interested in my personal dilemmas 40 years from now. But my Nashville stories are likely to be read for some time, because they are a reflection of more than just my own bellybutton lint.

So I'm writing this entry to let people know that I'm not going to write stuff like that anymore on this page This is my last personalized entry for some time. Just the facts, ma'am from now on. I have other places where I can express myself artistically; and those forms of art are bound to be more productive.

If anyone who reads this wants me to change my mind, drop me a line either on the guestbook or by e-mail. Somehow I doubt anyone will argue with me.

I love reading other people's blogs where they talk about how they feel - for instance, Alestar's writing is so knock down drag out good that I'll read anything she writes. Devon right now has a post up where she says that she wants her words to be like mescaline. And if I couldn't find out how