8.17.1992

Mr. Temper Tantrum gave me a promotion of sorts last week and I started my first night crew shift two days ago. It's almost full time and the best part is I don't have to work with customers anymore. No more checking, well hardly any checking anymore. My first shift on night crew was from midnight until eight in the morning. During my first shift I only took two fifteen minute breaks and no lunch. I put up 240 cases of "freight", as Jonesy likes to call it. Jonesy is the guy showing me the ropes. The whole night we talked about his cars, most of which sound to me like they don't run anymore. He likes to wear a store smock that must have been the company's uniform twenty years ago. It's a light yellow color and reminds me of a doctor's lab coat. We all have to wear light grey aprons and I've never seen this yellow one before now.

Jonesy carries a notepad in the pocket of his labcoat and refers to it whenever we talk about a specific car part he likes alot. He can't stop yapping at me about Ford 400 engines. Some of the pages of his well worn notepad have ads from the used auto section in the newspaper. They've been meticulously cut out of the paper and carefully taped onto the pages of his notepad. I guess there's something significant to him about the ads but I haven't been able to understand why yet. We've been working together throwing cases of freight up on an aisle and he will begin talking about some random car model or auto part without any prompting from me. It's odd but harmless enough. I'm going to have to find some other stuff to talk about with him though because this is going to get old fast.

His method for getting the freight up on the shelves works well enough. The load comes off the truck shortly after midnight and they bring the pallets out onto the sales floor at the back of the store. Each pallet is full of products that are mixed up so we have to break them down by aisle location and reorganize them. Once that's done we work in teams of two opening up the cases and getting them up onto the shelves. Jonesy and the other night crew veterans are amazingly fast at opening up everything with their boxcutters. Must have come with alot of years of practice. If the freight we're throwing happens to be food items with a sell-by date on them we have to rotate the existing stock on the shelves to the front and put the new stuff in behind it. Rotating all the soup cans is tedious work.

The main advantage of working night crew is not having to deal with customers anymore. We close the store each night at ten and we don't open up again until eight in the morning. Without having customers in our hair all night long we can really make the store look good and spend the majority of our time on stocking items. I don't know how the 24 hour store chains can pull it off having drunks and freaks show up at all hours of the night interrupting their work. Seems like a really bad way to operate to me. Not to mention that's the best time for people to come into your store and shoplift. We don't have to worry about any of that junk. It's just us versus the freight, and the freight is always gonna lose.