I've survived another weekend.
I'm having some real issues at work these days. It seems that someone at corporate decided that every store that has self-scan registers should have a select group of people manning said registers. Not just anyone is qualified for the job. The select people have to be patient, helpful, kind, courteous, knowledgable - I'd say they'd have to be real Boy Scouts, but I'm the only male on the crew at our store.
(Don't go there, I know what you're thinking.)
We've only got six people on our crew (myself, Kerri, Gail, Danielle, Rachael, Terry... well, Brenda as a back-up, sort of) out of a much larger cashier pool. The self-scan registers are open from eight in the morning until ten-thirty at night. This means that the six of us (plus Brenda, sort of) have to man those registers for one hundred and one point five hours every week. That comes to seventeen hours each week for each of us, if everything were divided equally. Which, of course, they rarely are.
The problem is, working self-scan is a real killer. It doesn't have the person-to-person contact that working a regular register has, but it requires keeping the same level of people skills up.
The best analogy I can come up with relates to Jose. Sure, he could play keyboards in the pit by just jumping in every time, but to be really good at it, he's got to practice, practice, practice, or the skills just aren't going to be there. The same thing applies to working a register - if I don't keep honing my people skills, they aren't going to be there when I need them at self-scan.
And the same applies to the rest of our select crew.
So, I'm having to protest whenever I'm assigned to self-scan for more than twenty hours a week. And, to be perfectly fair, I'm going to protest when any of my cohorts gets assigned more than twenty. This isn't just about me.
Maybe management will get the idea that they really do need more than six on the team. Plus Brenda, sort of.
And that is the end of my news.
