why i love inventory....

so... it's been another week of 14 hour workdays, long van rides in rediculous road conditions that serve only to maximize our time on the road and delay us for the next trip, keeping us from doing regular things like sleeping in a bed or eating on a regular basis...
good times, good times.

the day from hell struck this friday. fresh off of a long week of london drugs counts that involve counting from 7 in the morning to about 4 in the afternoon with 2 15's and a 45 lunch, then going to a different london drugs and counting again from 6 to 10, and occasionally cramming the odd van ride in between, we felt we could do better to prove that things can always get worse.
travel advisories be damned, we decided that we could, nay, must tackle the formidable obstacle of snow, ice, and giant sea turtles masquarading as semis in our undauntable and relentless pursuit of counting more stuff.
so we're off to wadena to count co-ops. it's usually about an hour and 45 minutes, but because of the weather, it took us about 3 hours to get there. a few people skipped work, so our crew was only 6 instead of the 9 it was supposed to be.
it begins...
we counted the co-ops on relatively good time, considering being short-staffed. we were done by 6, and even stopped for lunch at 2. of course, we were supposed to already be at the saan in melfort at 6, busily counting, but there was another crew of 5 there before us, and they were already hard at it. so we headed off to melfort, taking another 2 hours of travel, in which we were almost driven off the road by a climactic combination of ice and moose. undaunted, we press on.
we get to the store at 8. and count.
and count.
and count.
our first break was 10 minutes long at about 9:45 in the evening. the next break we got was at 2 in the morning, for another 10 minutes. we finished counting at 6 in the morning. we'd been counting for 10 straight hours, more or less, with about 20 minutes of break. the store was a mess, we had to key in most of the tags rather than scanning, nothing was on file, etc. not to mention that it was now 6 in the morning, we were trapped in melfort, and none of us had eaten anything since 2 the previous afternoon.

i'm sure that there are labor laws against this type of thing. but i'm equally sure they don't matter... after all, what was i going to do? stop counting? i'm trapped in melfort anyway, and the fewer people count, the longer the others have to count, and they're suffering every bit as much as i am.

didn't help that i woke with a cold and a headache the size of a buick parked in a cavalier fasion in the handicapped spot in the middle of my forehead.

so... it was a good day. the only good thing i can say about it is that, as we pulled back into saskatoon at 9:30 (yes, it took us just over 3 hours to get here from melfort), our crew was told that another crew was going to count winners on 8th (the one we were supposed to begin counting at 7 that morning, and hence, were very late for), and we, in turn, could go home and actually get some sleep.

on the plus side...
because i can't work monday, and because both of our crews are leaving town on monday before i'm free, and not coming back until wednesday, i'm off until thursday. most of the time that monday thing is an aggravation, but this week, it's my salvation.

i swear i will never be part of another january inventory.

ever.