A Wonderful Day At Work

I manage a grocery store, I have become accustomed to problems developing of every type. Today however, was a once in a lifetime thing. A garbage truck was emptying the dumpster at the business next to my store. The driver lifted the dumpster up to dump it in the back of his truck. Said dumpster gets hung up in power lines and pulls the electrical mast off the side of the building. This event required that pull out my cellphone and snap a picture.

The guy in the yellow coat is the driver of the truck. He is lucky to be alive. That was 10,000 volts he stumbled upon. He was also not happy that I laughed at him for being an idiot.

This event occurred about 12:15pm today. The damage was so significant, the electric company said it would be days to get it fixed. We can't go a few days to get electricity, we have perishable items (meat, deli, dairy, frozen, etc.) So we request a generator to power the store until the electricity can be fixed.

We are told it would be 2 hours to get the generator there and have it hooked up. In the meantime, the business next to us was on a different transformer and had power. We run extension cords from next door, through our store, and to the cash registers. We had no lights so each customer had to get a flashlight to shop.

Two hours go by and no generator. The electricians tell us it will be another 30 minutes. We were told it would be 30 more minutes every time we asked. Seven and half hours later, the generator arrives and is connected. Everything was working perfectly, except for the cash registers. The surges caused the memory to fry in the registers.

So, if the day wasn't long enough already, I have to call tech support to come out and help fix the registers. That meant sitting around and waiting some more. At 9:30pm, we have the registers up and running correctly. It was also this time that we noticed that there wasn't enough power going to the compressors that run the refrigerated meat cases. All the meat had to be pulled out of the cases and put in the big walk-in cooler.

After that, I locked the store and ran out before anything else happened.

Of course, during this whole time, we had no heat. It around 20 degrees outside today, by the time the electricity was turned on, the store was 51 degrees.

 

P.S. No, the guy didn't lose his job despite costing his company thousands of dollars. I talked to one of his co-workers, a customer, and he said the guy was suspended for three days.

We will be sending a bill to the garbage company demanding payment for lost sales, payroll expenses, the generator, electrical repairs, cash register repairs, and product that was lost, along with anything else that should come up.