The Jello Gelatin Disaster

It all started innocently enough. My nephew Charlie recently started following a Weight Watcher's point plan diet and to be supportive I promised him I'd bring down a large supply of Jello for him. Jello's perfect for a diet because it fills your belly without many calories and all you need to make it is water. So saturday I stopped by the local Wal-Mart and loaded up my cart with 12 boxes of Jello in various flavors and a few other things I thought he would enjoy and would be useful. Then I proudly delivered the goods to him and he was very excited. But after a few mintues we discovered I had made a mistake. I had bought regular Jello gelatin instead of sugar-free Jello. And where sugar-free Jello is only 1 Weight Watcher's point for the entire box, regular Jello (the kind I bought) is 8 points for the entire box. Way too many wasted points. So guess who's going back to Wal-Mart to return some Jello? That's right, I made my mom. No not really. I went back to Wal-Mart to exchange my 11 boxes (we opened one before we realized the mistake) for 11 boxes of sugar-free. And I learned a very valuable lesson... I WILL NEVER DO THAT AGAIN.

So here's what happened. Back in the old days, A few short years ago, when you walked into Wal-Mart with a return, the greeter at the doors would put a pink sticker on the item or the bag to let the Customer Service Desk know that he did see you walk in the door with it. Now they have an inventory scan gun called something that I can't remember. Dang, sidetracked. I worked at a Wal-Mart Distribution Center for 7 years in Bentonville, Arkansas and I can't remember what we called these freaking guns. Gah. Anyway, so now they have to scan each UPC code and print out a little sticker to put on each item. So the old man at the door grabbed my bag of 11 boxes and started scanning and tagging. Not only was he very slow, but he ran out of room on his little table to place the stickered vs. non-stickered boxes of Jello. So it took some extra time while he juggled them and moved them around over and over again. But finally he prevailed and I had a bag full of stickered items. Off to the service desk.

Silly me. I had assumed that basically I was gonna dump the Jello boxes out on the service desk counter and then run back to the Jello aisle and grab 11 boxes of sugar-free Jello, bring them back to the service desk for verification and then walk out the door. I was wrong. At the service desk they told me they needed my receipt. Luckily I still had it in my purse because I hadn't entered the amount into my checkbook yet. Then they went through the process of writing up a defective tag FOR EACH BOX. Now Jello is not expensive to begin with, but the ones I bought were the Great Value brand and were $0.38 apiece. So finally we had a seperate tag on each box of Jello. And she's ringing up the total so she can hand me my money back. I guess they don't do exchanges anymore, only returns. I don't know. In the meantime, because all of this has been such a lengthy process I'm bored and begin making idle chit chat with the service desk clerk.

"I'm really sorry about this. I know returning Jello is a little unusual. I just grabbed the wrong kind accidentally."
"Oh that's okay, people return food all the time. We'll just throw these away with all the rest"
"Excuse me?"
"We have to throw this Jello away. Ever since 9/11 we aren't allowed to re-shelve food items of any kind."
"Excuse me?"
"Yep, it's all going in the trash."
"I could have thrown it away and saved myself these last 20 minutes. Heck, I would have eaten the Jello myself. I could have donated it to someone who has little kids. I know plenty of peope who would have eaten that. I can't believe it's getting thrown away."
"Yep, that's our policy. Here's your $4.67."

I pocketed the money and hung my head as I walked to the gelatin aisle to pick out 11 shiney new boxes of sugar-free Jello. I can't believe they throw all food returns away. There was absolutely nothing wrong with that Jello. I mean, I understand that food can be tampered with, but.... crazy. And I do realize that by returning it and getting my money back I didn't have to spend additional money to buy the right items. But still the whole thing just really bugged me. The $4.67 was not that big of a deal. I wish I would have given the regular Jello to someone. What a crazy policy.

It's Funny How Unaware I Can Sometimes Be

Lately I have been abnormally grumpy, especially at work. And since my bestest work buddy got fired back in October (major downsizing in my office) and then my next-in-line work buddy decided to change shifts so that I no longer see her, I've just gotten grumpier and grumpier. Actually, I'm not sure grumpy is even an acurate description of it. I'm pretty much an ass lately.

One of the things I'm being an ass about is the fact that my few remaining co-workers are getting on my damn nerves. Before I go on, let me assure you... I do like these people. Or at least 99% of these people. They are perfectly nice, normal co-workers and I don't have any issues with them. Except for the 1% that I don't like of course. I think my main problem is that aside from all the extra work and the fear of losing my job... I just don't have any friends left here. And by friends I mean people who hang out at my house, invite me over to their house, and know me well enough that we can spend hours not talking about work. I don't have anyone to bitch to when I've had a bad call (or 10). No one to take breaks with or go to lunch with. You get the picture.

So anyway, my point is that I'm grouchy with the people that are left. Not on purpose, but grouchy nonetheless. And when one of them gets off a call and says "That guy sucked" or "She was a moron" (YES, we totally talk shit about you after we get off the phone) it just pisses me off that they are disturbing me by talking out loud. I roll my eyes. Why do they think I give a rat's ass about their phone calls? Who made them think we all needed to be disturbed while they attempted to be funny? See.... I told you I'm an ass these days.

I'm confessing this because today I realized that even though I dont' want to hear them, I am guilty of doing the same thing after every other phone call. And I feel bad for being so hateful to them (I've only been hateful in my mind, I don't say anything to them) and then I do the exact same thing I don't want them to do.

And I guess I just need the world to know that this is not Charlie's fault because he didn't want to be downsized... but you can totally blame Kim. She didn't have to change shifts and leave me pissed off and all alone.

Why Are Things So Difficult Sometimes?

How can you only have seven people working in an office and not be able to organize a “pizza day”? I seriously do not understand. Local joint selling pizzas half price this week to all employees at our company and people here can’t agree to just order 4 large pizzas and split the price. Instead, apparently we are supposed to all tell one of the girls what pizza we want and give her the money and she will call in everyone’s order tomorrow. WTF? Why would I want to order my own large pizza? Other coworker says “It’s because we all want different things”. But there are only seven of us. And I know that myself and at least 2 other people aren’t that picky. We’ll eat basically any type of crust or toppings. Which brings me back to how can ordering 4 large pizzas and splitting the price be a problem?

Then I hear them discussing that the best time to call it in would be at 11:00 so that it could arrive between 11:30 and 12:00. I guess no one cares that my scheduled lunchtime is at 11:00. I guess it’s a good thing I had already decided I wasn’t going to participate in an office lunch by ordering my own large pizza. Does any of this really make sense? Gah!

I Really Don't Understand People

I work at a computer helpdesk for a health care organization and answer calls all day long about software and hardware issues. Some of these calls are from people who are at home and are using our remote portal website to login to the system from home and either check their email or do some work. When we get these calls from remote users the first thing we determine is if they have a company owned laptop that we built and sent home with them or if they are just using their own personal computer to connect. Obviously we are responsible for making sure the remote portal is working, their login and password is working, and once they are connected we support everything on our side of the network that they are doing. If they are using a company owned laptop that we sent them home with, then we are also responsible for figuring out what settings on the laptop may be causing the problem they are having. If they can't use our pc to connect to their home wireless, for example, that's our problem and we need to work on resolving it. However, if they are using their own personal pc we are not at all responsible for anything at all that happens prior to logging in to the remote portal. Your laptop won't find your own network? Not my problem. It's your pc and your network, you figure it out. Call Dell. Call your ISP. Call your dad. I don't care because I am not responsible for your stuff.

The reason we operate like this is simple. One, we are being paid by our company to answer the phone for issues affecting the production of our co-workers. The fact that you can't get to www.google.com on your home pc is not something I am getting paid to take care of. It's a waste of company time and money. Second, we simply can't be responsible for perhaps accidentally messing up your pc. I'm sitting in a cubicle in town. I can't see anything about your pc. I don't know what version of Windows you're running. I don't know how your husband setup your wireless router or who your ISP is. I am clueless. So when I get a call like I did this morning I usually just explain that because it's a personal pc and the issue has nothing to do with connecting to our system remotely then I am unable to help. The lady that I told this to this morning, however, did not take kindly to it at all. AT ALL.

She called in because she is continously getting a pop-up dialog box saying that her Adobe Updater has failed to install the latest update. We went through several minutes of conversation involving me explaining that Adobe had nothing to do with connecting remotely, so the message was more than likely related to settings on her personal pc. She accepted that but still wanted to know if I could help her. I explained I could not because I knew nothing about how her computer was configured. She stated that she had called in before and someone had helped her get rid of this message. A) Fucking Whoopty Do, Goody For You. And B) Too bad you can't remember what they did you moron.

Of course, I did not say either of those things and I apologized once again but kindly declined to help her. I did suggest that maybe her user account didn't have enough rights to let the install complete and that whoever set up her pc might be able to give her administrator rights to see if that took care of the problem. But then she wanted to know if I could just tell her how to get into the task manager and do that herself. Uh... NO. It's not done in task manager and for the 4th time WE DO NOT WORK ON PERSONAL PC'S BECAUSE WE CANNOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ACCIDENTALLY MESSING SOMETHING UP. At which point she said "Well what if I just call back and someone else answers the phone and they help me?"

My response? "That's a great idea, you should do that." CLICK. Yep, I hung up on her. Which I never do with customers. It got that bad. I don't understand people. Oh well, only thing left to do is hope she doesn't remember my name. Because if she does, I'll be hearing from the boss in no time. Sigh.

Just tried to upgrade my Alltel account to a new Verizon phone & learned im not eligible until January. How very disappointing.

Yuck, it's Monday

Back in the day, when I worked in a factory doing manual labor on a production line, I knew that Mondays sucked because it meant a return to the grind. The weekend was over, no more relaxing on the couch. My time belonged to "the man" once again and since my time had just been my own for two days in a row, Monday was always the adjustment period. The day I was grumpy about being stuck indoors making widgets instead of sitting on the front porch at home and sipping some iced tea. But I was never one who hated Monday's and threw a big fit about them. They sucked worse than the rest of the week, for sure, but it wasn't a huge deal.

However, I am now officially declaring that Mondays suck and I hate them. Let me explain - I now work in a customer support environment on a computer helpdesk. In case that statement alone doesn't make you guys realize how bad my head hurts on Mondays, then let me give you a couple of examples of how every Monday around here works:

1. Did you know that every Monday at least 73% (not an actual statistic, but it's gotta be close to accurate) of all employees in my company forget the password they have used every day for the past 2 years? And when they call in, they make sure to let us know how stupid we are for doing whatever update we did over the weekend which would cause this login issue. Every Monday. Seriously.

2. Did you know that even though our pc tech's only work a normal 40 hour / 5 day work week, people are angry to discover that the broken monitor they called in at 6:00 pm Friday evening was not replaced before 7:00 am Monday morning? Seems as though our hardware department needs to hire additional magic fairies to secretly do the work over the weekends when no one is here. Because the magic fairies everyone believes we already have are just not pulling their weight anymore.

But I think the worst part about working in any type of customer service environment on a Monday is the fact that the majority of your customers are suffering from their own Monday crankiness and taking it out on you. Not only do I dread Mondays on this job, I almost always get a tension headache on those days. It sucks having to apologize to people who are pissed off that "you guys did something to my computer over the weekend" when "we" didn't do anything. But I do apologize. Over and over again. And it gets to me. It really does.

Me having a bad Monday no longer has anything to do with me... it's all about taking abuse from everyone else who is having a bad Monday. I know I'm not the only person who has this problem. I feel sorry for all of us who deal directly with customers. Luckily, Monday only comes once a week.

*THIS SPACE HAS BEEN EATEN BY WEBSENSE*

I had a really good post here a mere hour ago. A post that was a good 5 paragraphs long. And funny, man was it funny. There was even dialogue. Real, honest-to-goodness dialogue. And when it was finished and I realized it was one of the most glorious posts I had ever written, I clicked "Publish Post". And WebSense ate my words.

What's WebSense you ask? That's the internet filtering software that monitors the company network at my place of employment. This is not a post against monitoring company internet usage. I understand why they do it and even though sometimes it seems a bit extreme, it is very necessary. What I can't understand is why, if you are going to block me from posting to blogger, why would you even allow me to log in to blogger, click on the "create new post" button and spend 30 minutes typing it in. Why not just block blogger as a whole?

WHY DO YOU TORTURE ME WITH YOUR RANDOM BLOCKING? YOU ATE MY WORDS AND NO MATTER HOW HARD I TRY I CANNOT GET THEM BACK.

p.s. this post brought to you from my unfiltered home network