The Meerkat Muse: 23rd of October 24
Here we are. This is the first Muse of the new Meerkat Musings, so it’s all exciting and fresh and new! At least, I hope it is! Let’s dive right in.
Closing a Chapter
No, I am not about to upend Meerkat Musings again, so soon after doing it! I am referring to the final end of a big chunk of my working life. You see, I once worked for my local Staples store. I was there for seven and a half years, made several life-long friends in that building, and literally gave blood, sweat and tears to the place. Some of the very first blog posts on the original Meerkat Musings were about my days in that store, and some of those posts were even – rather cheekily – written there. I left in 2015, having been left rather disgruntled with the company, but I remained in touch with several colleagues – as I do to this day – and my journeys would sometimes take me to the vicinity of the store.
Staples quit the UK at the end of 2016, and the building became occupied by a firm called Office Outlet, which took on most of the staff, and retained largely the same store layout. Considering the challenges faced by many retailers of their nature, Office Outlet did well to survive as long as they did, but they vanished in the middle of 2019. The subletting tenant also left, though I don’t know exactly when, but I do know the building has been vacant for years.
Back during my time there, there was discussion of the local council buying the land, and the store relocating. The plan was to built flats on the site, and now this process has finally begun (no doubt made considerably easier by virtue of no pesky tenants!). The result of this is that the building I laboured in for seven years is no more, and that is a rather surreal, faintly sad sight.
It makes me think of how now, that store exists solely in memories. There will come a time when no one will remember what it looked like. No one will recall the shelves, the tills, the warehouse or the office. It will all fade away, save for a few precious photos here and there. Eventually, those photos will come to hold only a peripheral meaning. It’s all a bit strange, and a part of me is thinking I should try and rope together the old band, and give the place a sort of farewell.
A New Chapter
I have some cause for celebration! Why you might ask? I have been promoted. Well, sort of…
I am now an ‘acting’ assistant manager where I work. Since there are only currently two of us, this could be considered a slightly pointless gesture, however I am certainly not going to complain. After all, I can place this on a CV (minus the ‘acting’ part), and this could come in handy during a job search. It is also nice to be recognised, considering I have put in nearly five years with my employer.
This promotion comes at a point where there will be a lot of lone-trading going on. It’s particularly useful to have a code to process refunds, since I’ve normally had to call up other stores to do so on my behalf, or had to inform the customer to come back another day (which, as you can imagine, usually goes down like a lead balloon). It also means a little bit more money, which can never be a bad thing.
I certainly earned my money the other Sunday, when I was – you guessed it – lone trading! This proved to be a busy day, somewhat more so than I had anticipated, and at times this was growing annoying. Customers kept bringing in these annoying little creatures, who were noisy and irritating. Still, several of them spent money with me, which I cannot argue about! It was nice to do a bit of business, and for all the potential doom and gloom surrounding my particular store, the day demonstrated that we can still take in the dough.
The Wet Stuff
Last Monday was quite simply horrendous in terms of weather. Not only was it cold, but it rained, so constantly and so hard that you’d be forgiven for thinking God was flooding the world again. Such were the thick layers of cloud that it remained dark and gloomy, well into the day. The rain pattered off my workplace, creating a non-stop cacophony. In the past this has led to nearby underpasses – underpasses that I regularly use – flooding. Would this be the case again?!
The Curious Case of the Good Thieves
In my current line of work, theft is generally rare. It is hard to walk out of the store carrying a toilet or a vanity unit under one’s arm! That said, it is not impossible to make off with a waste cover, or overflow ring, and on some mercifully rare occasions these have gone missing. I noticed a basin waste cover and a bath waste cover had both gone missing the other day, and reported it to the manager, who set about figuring out to order replacements. A few days later, I was upstairs changing point of sale, and noticed another missing bath waste cover. From there, my manager and I noticed something else: someone had returned the two originally missing covers.
It seems the thief or thieves decided they didn’t want chrome wastes, because the ones they returned were chrome, and the one they took was white. This is most peculiar, and all I can sort of say is… thank you? It’s not often you get considerate thieves!
Cutting the Crap
I’ve made a decision, a potentially bad one, but one I feel had to be made anyway. I have deactivated my Twitter account, and deleted my TikTok account. I fear I was poisoning my mind and soul with these avenues, and damaging my attention span as well. I have often struggled with concentration and focus (dyspraxia will do that to you), so why inflict further wounds upon myself? I might have blocked myself off from a means of book advertising, but if I am constantly distracted, I won’t be focused on writing! It’s a bold decision, one that I had to make, and all I can do now is see how it plays out.
The other big issue is that Twitter will soon alter the block function, meaning that previously blocked users will be able to see my tweets again. Considering some of the rather unstable people I’ve blocked in the past, I can’t say I’m too thrilled at them seeing my tweets once again.
Hot and Cold
Last Wednesday, something odd happened. The sun came out, and it got pretty warm! This unusual seasonal warmth continued into Thursday, though woven in-between was a thunderstorm with heavy rain. It seems we are truly into a strange autumn cycle. Still, it was nice for the weather to be vaguely pleasant for a bit.
Bothersome Beds
My wife ordered a new bed for our daughter earlier in October, under the expectation it would be delivered at the start of November. Out of the blue she had a message advising it was to be delivered… the next day! What’s worse is that it was due between 8am and 12pm, and when does the school run happen? Between 8am and 9am. With this in mind, we asked if there was any chance of rearranging for the following day, when I was off work. The response? Crickets. Silence.
Then, on Thursday morning, shortly after 6am, there is a knock at the door, and lo and behold, the bed was there! I guess the delivery team decided it was easier to be earlier. In fairness, everyone was already up (my alarm is set for 6am every morning), but it was still a bit disconcerting.
Next up was the assembly of the new bed. To be fair this wasn’t overly difficult, but there were no instructions of any kind. This meant we struggled to figure out the headboard! On Friday my parents came down with a new desk for my daughter, and a new chair, so my dad and I sorted the headboard, and assembled the desk and chair. This was a fairly lengthy process, and a tiring one! I had certainly earned my sleep come Friday night.
Latent Misogyny
Certain things should not be a part of 21st Century society, yet they have persisted. Last Thursday, whilst I was at work, I took a call from my manager, who is friends with one of the women working next door. She asked me to pop round there, because her friend had messaged her to say she was alone with a creepy guy. With keys in hand, potentially poised to use as a weapon, and with phone ready to call the police, I nipped into the showroom. The young lady there was having a conversation with an older man, who after a few minutes left the shop.
It transpires that he had started asking her questions that he had no business asking. ‘Are you married? Do you have kids? What time is your lunch break? When do you finish work?’ This guy was a fair bit older than she was, she was merely doing her job, and yet this man felt he could ask questions not at all relating to what the store sold or offered. This type of personal questioning (to say nothing of the questions around the timing of things like lunch) can be deeply unsettling when put forward in such an environment.
It speaks to a sense of entitlement. What right did this man have to ask these questions of her? None, yet he did so anyway. He believed he could ask these searching, probing questions, quite possibly in the hopes of pursuing something that was never appropriate to pursue. The presence of a woman in the workplace is not an invitation to pry into her personal life, nor to learn her schedule. I am reminded of a recent Meerkat Prompt post I wrote along these lines, which feels all the more relevant.
Gammons Fume
A few days ago, the Football Association of England announced Thomas Tuchel will become the national side’s next permanent manager. Tuchel brings with him an established record for winning trophies at club level, across several major European leagues, including the Premier League. It is said that he can be a bit prickly with his players, but on the other hand he has proven he can motivate his teams to win games and major honours, so perhaps we can let that slide! Despite all of his accomplishments, there is a small crowd who are questioning why the FA have appointed him as England’s manager. You see, Thomas Tuchel is not English. He is German.
This has led to some hand-wringing from the gammon brigade. The hard-line Brexiteers are up in arms, and one in particular, Nigel Farage, is venting on social media:
It is ironic that Farage wishes for the England manager role to be filled by an Englishman, when he once had a German wife! Surely the best choice to lead the national team to success is someone with a proven record of this, and right now, there are no good English options to fit that particular bill. I am utterly cynical when it comes to football in general, and England in particular (I don’t think God could win trophies with England), but what is wrong with appointing the right person to the job, even if they’re not English?!
Stressful Slumbers
The other night a dream came to me that initially involved designing a bathroom. What sticks out about this is that the customer’s name was some incredibly long, hard to spell name, and that the computer system kept crashing on me. Over the course of the dream, the setting shifted to my Staples days, and the store rapidly got very busy, with both myself and colleagues frantically trying to serve everyone, and deal with all the stress. Meanwhile this customer was still trying to do whatever it was they wanted to do, and in the end, after much fuss, they were able to… print off the t-shirts they had designed.
My current employer certainly doesn’t offer t-shirt printing, and from memory, Staples didn’t either! It was a very random direction for the dream’s final act, but also very typical of my mind’s nocturnal adventures.
As a case in point, I had another dream which combined elements of sci-fi shows with a creepy, dangerous, mind-invading/eating octopus-like-creature. The crew of the ship it was on had trapped it in a forcefield, but it was threatening to escape and cause chaos. As with most of my dreams, I have very little context for this!
It gets even better. What does a smelting plant and a Chinese takeaway service have in common? I am willing to wager very little, so why did I dream I was working a job where I had to melt down rocks and metals, and after that do a shift, for the same company, signing people up to a takeaway service?! After that, I dreamt I broke my parents’ toilet! My subconscious mind is clearly a churning, seething mass of strange.
The Formatting Issue
It hasn’t taken me very long before introducing a new theme to Meerkat Musings! I had managed to format everything how I liked, except for two pages, and try as I might, I could not figure out how to make these two pages work as I wanted! The solution is a soft reset, and new theme, and now everything is consistent!
More Work Woe
Ours is a small showroom, especially when compared to other branches. We don’t have acres of spare for new products, and yet we are expected to take on lots of new tiles in the immediate future. The company doesn’t factor in the circumstances of individual stores when making decisions, and this is a problem affecting not only us, but bigger stores as well. There is finite space for products, especially large tiles, and combined with long stints of lone-trading, this is sure to add to my stress levels.
There isn’t anything to be done about this. My boss consulted the regional manager and asked if we could be exempt, and the answer was a flat no. Corporate choices, made in an office by people without true experience of our showroom floors, never tend to benefit the showrooms, an experience I went through at Staples.
So, there we have it, the first Meerkat Muse of the new Meerkat Musings! What shall the next two weeks bring for this meerkat?
