November 18, 2007

Bandwidth Hogs

rmiles7721November 18, 2007Technology

Although most of the equipment in the house uses a wired connection I do have a wireless router. My phone and the wife’s iPaq are both WiFi and when the Marine is at home his laptop uses it, as well as my brother’s. I usually just leave it open and don’t worry about security. As long as my neighbors aren’t on much and don’t use too much of my bandwidth I haven’t really worried about it but lately my connection has been pretty laggy.

I logged into my router tonight and discovered seven fucking devices connected. There are only two computers hooked up in the house getting an IP address, as well as our two handhelds. I set it back to using WEP and rebooted the damn thing. Guess they are going to have to find their own Internet connection now. What a PITA.

Stressed

rmiles7721November 18, 2007Site News

It wasn’t terribly busy today but I have come home particularly stressed out. Just got here a few minutes ago and I have to go back out to pick up one of my employees in about an hour and a half.

Apparently my Area People Director (recruiter/human resources) is meeting my manager in the morning to speak with her and try to talk her into staying. Hopefully he won’t succeed as I have already lost several employees and there are several more who are going to give their notice if they bring her back tomorrow. She’s already lost most of their respect as it is and has at least one or two legal investigations that are supposed to take place between now and Christmas, not to mention the fact that she needs to sign a shortage from about three weeks ago in her food as I’m not going to pay it.

Just the thought of them not letting her quit has me pissed off and my blood pressure is going up. Right now I’m listening to the girls arguing in the kitchen and it’s not helping much.

Each shift we change out the cash till for the new shift. The drawer is supposed to be taken back to the office in the company of at least one of the waitresses, that way we have a witness if the drawer is short. It only takes about ten minutes. It used to be a shorter deal but with the addition of credit cards a couple of years ago it stretched it out a bit. Still, all you do is add everything up, subtract the shift sales and that should leave you with what the till went out at. Simple, no? The only problem with it is that she won’t do that. She counts it down herself right out there on the floor without changing the drawer, leaving them short rolled change and ones, and then runs cash register shortages on the girls that might or might not have happened. They are all pretty upset about it since most of them do not normally have shortages. I found at least one in the bookwork that she had double booked, claiming that she had mistakenly taken the 1st one out, which she hadn’t, which means that somehow I have to get my boss to sign off on another shortage on her because of that. Since she double booked it that should have left her cash over by the same amount, but the money’s not there.

I have a feeling that tomorrow is going to be a shitty day that I just want to skip out on.

Getting the Heck out of Dodge…

rmiles7721November 18, 2007Parenting/Family

Yesterday was a fairly long day. There is so much that I need to do in the store where my manager just quit and I have only so much time to get it done. I finally ended up shooting out of there around 4:30 yesterday afternoon and came home to veg for awhile, then went back in around 8.

The big thing about most of these folks is that I’ve only been there one or two days a week over the last few months so they pretty much do whatever the heck they want and think they can get away with it. I am having to seriously crack down on them in order to get things right. We are going into the busy time of the year and I have to get these people right in a very short time. I have one girl that I can already see I need to let go very quickly. I am doing inventories of the floor at the beginning and end of every shift in order to see what their food usage has been and last night they were pretty slow so the usage should have been low. When I did the count last night I noticed that seven pieces of pie had been used. No huge deal when you think about it, but if the stuff weren’t rung up I might as well take thirteen bucks out of my checking account and burn it. I told my waitresses that when they turned their tickets in at the end of the shift I need the pie tickets separated from the rest. Shortly after that the biggest thief up there comes back with seven dollars and says ‘I need you to ring me up, my daughter bought a pie and I wanted to make sure it get’s verified’. Yeah right.

So she paid for the pie, which was most likely just given away to whomever and not sold as a whole pie but at least we’ve set the ground rules and she is going to have to come up with a new way to steal from me in order to make her money. I imagine she will be quitting before the month is out anyway since now that I know for sure I am going to stay on her ass daily. I already have her replacement starting training Wednesday anyhow.

The wife is driving up to the Carolinas on Tuesday to pick our son up and bring him home for Thanksgiving. I think I’ve gotten her to break the trip up and go see our friend in Hilton Head. I means a total of a couple of extra hours but it’s better than trying to drive eight or nine hours straight. We still aren’t sure where the girls are going to be yet. She might take them with her but we may also have them with a friend of ours. The only problem with that is that I will have to pick them up at certain times and there just isn’t any guarantee that I will be able to leave at those times. Unfortunately for me as a district manager, we (and the guys above me) actually work MORE hours during holidays and make sure the store managers get the heck out of Dodge to be with their families.