Do you have any talents that might surprise others? I think we all do. Someone asked that not long ago, and it got me thinking. Not so much about a specific talent, but about a job I had and did well in that was rather out of the blue. For a good two years, I was on essentially a construction team for a large retailer.
Now those who know me know that I’m not exactly “mechanically inclined”, nor am I any kind of weight lifter. I’m more inclined to be working at a computer desk, or maybe with pro photographers, processing their films (there’s a blast from the past – “film”?) or helping them pick out equipment. Or going back a ways, in parks, cataloguing birds and leading hikes than donning a hard hat. But that’s what I did for some time…and I loved it!
The situation was that I’d just moved back to my home area, and had been out of work for a bit. Back to the “film” becoming an anachronism thing; jobs working with it were becoming scarce by a few years into this century. So, a large pharmacy/small department store was building a brand new, bigger store near where I was living. I decided to apply. After all, nothing much to lose and the pay was OK for a temp job. I was apprehensive the first day, when I, and about 50 others who had nothing better to do I guess, showed up at the empty concrete shell that would be a bustling store in a month or so. We were given hard hats and a utility knife; we’d already been told we needed steel toed shoes on the site. We went in, were broken into little teams, surveyed the vast empty space, with a few half-walls here and there and stacks and stacks of metal shelves piled up, covered in shrink wrap. There was tape on the new, shiny floor, and blueprints (well, actually on regular paper but the same idea) every few yards. After a short introduction and marginal demonstration, we were to assemble the shelves, four foot by four foot section, where they were supposed to go. The shelves clicked into the supporting racks pretty easily, but there were of course different sized ones, some wider, some narrow. Some had lights built in. Some were in refrigerated sections. Some of the store was white shelving, other areas gray. The work wasn’t overly heavy, but it was a workout nonetheless. They rang a bell, almost like school, when it was time for lunch or a break, and again when we were to be back on the floor. I went home the first night tired, but not dreading going back the next day like I feared I might.
Many others didn’t feel the same; by Wednesday of the first week, only about half of us still were coming in. I learned they always hire a lot more people than they think they need because a large proportion simply won’t come back after a day or two, or will be too unwilling to work and follow rules so get let go. As the time wore on, the shelves went up, the pharmacy equipment and cash registers got put in, and then came the trucks…and the planograms. It takes a lot of products to fill a 25 000 square foot store. After a few days, there was a steady stream of tractor trailers backing up, dropping off skids (or what most people here call “pallets” apparently) of boxed merchandise. It had to be quickly dissembled, whenever possible carted right out to the floor, with overstock going on skyhigh racks in the warehouse part. And that’s where the planograms come in. Basically, it’s a map of where every single item in the store is going. Believe me, in a large national chain, things aren’t just put out “willynilly”. Everything is in its specific place and it’s planned down to the arrangement of colors of hair twirly thing on a rotating displayer. Most of it was pretty easy – if you followed the plan exactly. Which many people didn’t. And of course, those hundreds of feet or planned shelving and displayers all needed price labels. Computers were brought in, hundreds of pages of stickers were printed out and carefully applied to the shelving, again each one in precisely the right spot.
All this was being done with the oversight of a trio of Head Office people who were in charge of overseeing the company’s expansion. Head Office or not, they wore jeans and hard hats like the rest of us. After a few days, I found them all pretty approachable; liked working with them.
By about the second week, I’d been basically placed in a little team with a couple of other guys, one, we’ll call him “Tom”, a millennial and a Yankees fan (well, no one’s perfect!) and a bit of a cynic, the other an older guy, “Paul” , who’d retired from a skilled job at a factory and didn’t especially need the money but wanted something to do to keep busy and pay for his beer – of which he’d consume less with a day job to keep him occupied. We were pretty ordinary guys, but we got along fine and at least we could figure out how to stack boxes of detergent on a shelf or know it was important to attend to frozen food coming through the back door quicker than, say plastic totes full of batteries and dog toys.
The big day came for the grand opening, and of course, it was remarkably busy. Most of the crew that had made it through the month were kept on for a few days to help out; after all we knew better than anyone where everything was in the store and the stockroom.
Before we were all finished though, the Head Office types came to my little team and said we’d done really well. They had a similar store being built, a few cities over. Would we like to go work on it? We all agreed that would be cool, so why not? After a week or so to rest, we were back, duplicating the first job in a new city with new co-workers. Paul had a nice car, so we carpooled with him. I got in good because I remembered to give him gas money on payday! Tom sometimes had to be reminded “hey, hey, this car don’t go 70 miles a day on fresh air!” . That job went even smoother since we had experience by then.
And so it went. Along the way, we picked up a fourth guy, around my age too, that had a similar work ethic. We became an in-demand crew. For a couple of years, the company was growing steadily and we were brought in to help set up any new store within about a 50-mile radius. One store was open while we were doing it – they’d bought out an adjacent store and doubled the floor space. That was some fun! Moving shelves around while customers were trying to grab shampoo off them, or walk around electricians trying to run cable across the aisles. One day we went in and the wall between the two was literally gone; demolished overnight in a cloud of dust. It took about six weeks to get that one fully functional.
The Head Office people became, dare I say “friends” ; they were ordinary people doing their job and respected that we were the same. We were even cut a little slack at times. One time we were about six shelves short for an aisle, and most of the day’s work was done. The next day they sent the four of us in a big rental truck to the corporate warehouse, miles away, to pick up the six, four-foot shelves. Suffice to say realistically, it wasn’t a four man job. “Make sure you’re back before 4”, we were told, and keep a receipt for lunch so we could be reimbursed. One time, one of the REAL Head Office staff, the type who’d have an office in the headquarters and likely wear a suit into it, dropped by to see the progress of one of the stores. We’d met him a couple of times before. He came over and asked us how much we were being paid. I told him and he said … wait for it … “that’s not enough. I’m getting you guys an extra buck an hour.” And he did. If there was a down week, with no construction they’d even gotten into the habit of sending us to problem stores; ones that were very messy or with stockrooms overflowing with unboxed goods, to kind of pull a two or three day store blitz to get them back in shape. It was surprisingly satisfying work. It wasn’t complicated, and gave me time to let my mind wander a bit if I fancied, but by the same token, it wasn’t mind-numbing like some factory jobs. I’d probably go crazy if I had to stand in one place and put one screw into one piece of metal on an assembly line over and over, eight hours a day for years. This one was just different enough from day to day, just enough pressure to meet deadlines and prioritize tasks to be tolerably exciting and easy enough as to not me cause huge levels of stress. And being noticed and praised by office executives is a plus on any job!
Eventually, the growth period for that company slowed and those jobs dried up. Paul got hired on to merchandise one store, weeks later I took a job running a small department of one of the store’s we built and did that for a couple of years more.
I look back on those days quite fondly. And with amazement . That first day I showed up at that empty shell of a store in steel toed boots, I would never have guessed it would be a part of my life for several years and what’s more that I’d have fun doing so. Let alone be seen as very good at it to boot. I think there’s a message in there for all of us. Sometimes it’s good to be open to new experiences and in doing, you find talents you don’t even recognize.
(I didn’t take the above photo, but it was similar to the empty structures we’d go into the first day. Looking back, I don’t know why I didn’t take a camera in and take some construction sequence shots during them.)
Everydave Life 