A week after I had filled out my RGIS application, I attended my
first training session at the same office. The training session was
run by Dean, a genial, slight man in his sixties. Dean was bland and
a rather harmless sort, or so I thought until a few years later when
RGIS would end up firing him after they learned that he had lied on
his application about having a criminal record. It turns out that he
was a registered sex offender, but that's a tale for another day.
There were about 10 of us sitting around a conference table. First
we watched a couple of videos explaining the inventory business and
how it works. These videos of course extolled the virtues of working
for the wonderful company that was RGIS. They made it sound as though
we were about to embark on some fantastic adventure, instead of
ending up in some dingy drugstore counting bottles of aspirin and
boxes of condoms.
Everything else about the videos was so dull that the rest of the
contents completely excapes my memory, except that when they were
over the office secretary, Betty, said from her front desk, "Those
new videos were much better than the old ones, right Dean?"
The other people at the training session were unremarkable, and
half of them didn't even show up at the second training session a few
days later (And those that did return for session #2 I never saw at a
single inventory. Apparently I was the only one stupid enough to
stick around).
During the second session we were given black webbed belts to
wear. These belts had two hooks that the audit machines
(micro-computers that we would use to count and total merchandise)
would be hooked up to. Later that year I would see and request one of
the leather belts that some of the veteran auditors had. These belts
were much nicer-looking than the cheap nylon webbed ones. When I got
my leather belt, I asked one old man auditor, Jeb (who had been with
the company forever but could never progress any further than team
leader due to the fact that he was as dumb as a rock), why weren't
the leather belts the norm, instead of the nylon ones. Jeb said that
they used to be, but the company had hired so many fat people (like
Moby, another team leader who weighed around 400+ pounds and smelled
like a clogged toilet) that they had to switch to the more adjustable
nylon belt. We were also given burgundy polyester polos with RGIS
stitched in gray on the short sleeves. Dean explained that we always
wore these shirts during an inventory, along with black trousers and
solid black shoes. No jeans allowed. He said that we also weren't
allowed to wear anything over our RGIS polos, nor could we wear
anything but all-black shoes. Of course, this was another 'rule' that
virtually everyone ignored, as lots of people wore jackets or sweat
shirts over their polos and one girl, Ellen, would wear her fuzzy
bedroom slippers to inventories.
Dean explained that the belts and shirts were ours to keep (yay).
Then at each inventory we would receive one audit machine and one
laser gun (if we weren't doing a financial inventory, which doesn't
use laser guns). At the end of each inventory, we would return the
machine and laser gun to the team leader or manager or whoever was
running the inventory.
The audit machine looked like an oversized calculator. It had a
numeric keypad in the center, surrounded by other function keys and a
small LCD display screen at the top. The thing took 8 AA batteries to
run and weighed about 8 pounds, so that it felt like you had a big
tumor hanging off your right hip. They were pretty sturdy little
computers, as I would find out in the years to come. I witnessed
these audit machines get dropped on cement floors, thrown against
walls and banged on a Kmart shopping cart. The latter act was done by
a team leader named Ethan, when he couldn't get his audit machine to
transmit to the Ray 2000 (another audit machine that we would
periodically transmit our machine's info to). He tried several times
to transmit (99S to 99R) without success, and then in complete
frustration he slammed his machine onto a metal shopping cart. He
claimed that this was what you had to do when your audit machine
froze up. I guess he was right, because after that his machine
transmitted the data perfectly.
The laser guns (looking like overgrown water pistols) plugged into
the audit machines, and we would be using it to scan bar codes on the
store merchandise. Dean showed us how everything hooked up, machine
to belt, laser to machine, etc. Since I'm left-handed, I started to
fix my belt so that the audit machine would hang down at my left
side, and I held the laser gun in my right hand. Dean saw me doing
this and immediately told me I was doing it wrong. He said the
machine should always hang down my right side, and I should hold the
laser gun in my left hand. "But I'm left-handed, I need to key
with my left hand," I told him. "Well, my son is
left-handed, and he keys with his right hand. WE ALL DO," Dean
said pointedly, and I got the message and switched the machine to my
right side. Dean was satisfied.
After we were all hooked up and connected to Dean's approval, he
showed us how to turn the machines on. Dean explained that when we
flipped the 'on' switch, a buzzing noise would occur but that we were
never to hit the 'clear' button. This would stop the buzzing but
would also erase the program information in the machine as well. No
matter how many times this was drilled into our heads, at every
inventory at least 2 or 3 people would immediately hit the 'clear'
button when they turned on their machines and that dreadful buzzing
sounded. You couldn't blame the idiots too much, as the noise was
eardrum-piercing, and upon hearing it your first reaction was to just
make the damn thing stop. RGIS auditors would quickly grow to hate
that sound so much that when someone would accidentally bump their
machine's keypad against something in a store, the machine would
start buzzing and half a dozen people would scream "Clear! Hit
the damn 'clear' button!" (It was okay to use the 'clear' button
once you had started entering data into the machine.) Sometimes when
Kenny, our District Manager, would give the crew our pre-inventory
speech in the back room of a store, stink-bomb Moby would secretly
press a bunch of buttons on his machine so that it would start
buzzing loudly, interrupting the DM's speech. Kenny would look around
angrily at the group and say, "Damn it! I told you guys NOT to
turn on your machines until I'm finished talking!" Moby would
quietly hit his 'clear' button and look innocently at Kenny, with a
"Who me?" expression on his mottled face.
Once our machines were on we practiced scanning bar codes on
sheets of paper. Then: excitement! We scanned wall posters that had
photos of cans of soup, boxes of cereals, etc. We would scan the
product's bar codes, count the number of items, and enter the
quantity in our machines. When we finished counting all of the items
in the poster, Dean showed us how to take a reading of the totals in
our machines. We then wrote the totals (# of items and dollar amount)
on an RGIS area tag, along with our last name and our worksheet
number. Dean explained that at every inventory we would be given a
worksheet on which we were to record every area (shelves and sections
in the store were numbered) that we had counted in that particular
store. No one ever did this, except for the newbies. Most of us just
put a big 'X' on the worksheet and turned it in (when we bothered to
turn them in). Once beached-whale Moby wrote in big letters across
his worksheet, "REDRUM". When Team Leader Marcia showed it
to Kenny the DM, he said only, "Well, some people have issues
with me."
After we had practiced scanning a couple of the posters, Dean
explained that next we would be given a schedule of upcoming
inventory jobs. He also said that there would be no work until after
New Year's Day (this was in December). When the five of us looked
surprised, Dean said, "Oh, didn't you know that there are no
inventories going on in December? No stores want to have an inventory
going on during the holidays. But you'll be busy enough after January
1, and don't forget, you ARE getting paid for these training
sessions." Yeah, at $1.00 less than the starting wage ($7.50 at
the time). This amounted to a whopping $39.00. Wow. Merry Christmas
to me.
(Coming soon: I meet Kenny the DM, he of the Play-Doh pink skin
and Coors-Light-beer-can-decorated-office.)
