Fat Man And Lil' Hitler (Part One)

In a district (and well, let's face it, a company) where there were a lot of obnoxious, detestable people, there were two RGIS employees who personified the words villainous, wretched and abominable. Their names were Moby and Leo. They were brothers, they were Team Leaders, and they were despicable.









Moby, in his late thirties, was older than Leo by a couple of years. He stood about 6'2" and by his own admission weighed close to 500 lbs. His personal hygiene was deplorable. Besides his mottled, crusty skin and greasy salt-and-pepper hair, he sported a body odor that was NOT to be believed. Oh my God, nothing that man or nature has ever created smelled as bad as Moby. I am unable to precisely describe his stench. Try to imagine what a 500 lb. dead, rotting skunk would smell like, and you might be pretty close to the truth.









Moby blamed his rank odor on the fact that he only had a bathtub in his apartment, but no shower. He said that he was so fat he couldn't fit into the bathtub, so therefore he couldn't bathe. I maintained privately that this was bullshit. For one thing, how many apartments nowadays have only a bathtub, and no shower? And another thing, even if the 'no shower' thing was true, if he has some form of running water in his home then there's no excuse for him to smell like a crap-filled toilet. I mean, he could stand by a sink filled with hot soapy water and take a sponge bath, right? And maybe wear some deodorant once in a blue moon, or aftershave, or SOMETHING to mask his malodorous reek. Please, for the love of humanity!









A perfect example of his horrible stink occurred one day during an inventory at a mini mart at Two Rock, a Coast Guard training base in Petaluma. Since it was such a tiny little store it only needed two people to count it, and I was the lucky one who got to work with Moby.









We did the perimeter of the store first. Then Moby told me that the two of us would work the gondolas from the outside in. That is, each of us would start on opposite sides of the store and, doing the gondolas, work our way towards and meet up at the center of the store.









All morning long I was aware of a foul odor permeating the store. For a while I thought that it was some food in the store that had gone bad. I kept intending to ask the store clerk if maybe one of the refrigerated cases had maybe gone out, lost its power and caused some cheese or other dairy product to spoil. I never got around to asking him, and once Moby and I finished counting and met up in the center of the store I realized that I wouldn't need to ask. The smell was Moby. Imagine hot, rotting cheese on a 90 degree summer morning. Gross! You could smell him from 4 aisles away. It was all I could do to keep from vomiting.









During the busy times of the year, like January and February, our district would have several of us auditors do a lot of back to back to back stores. We were always short of people to staff these inventories, so these back-to-backers were absolutely necessary for the veteran auditors like Moby to do. As I mentioned in a previous entry we would often only have enough time between stores to rush home, freshen up, grab a quick bite and get maybe 40 winks before we had to head out to the next inventory.









Well, with Moby being so unconcerned with his hygiene as he was, naturally he would skip the freshening up part, and just inhale a cold pizza or two and crash for a long nap, then wake up and drive to the next store, without bathing or changing his clothes and underwear. He would do this for weeks at a time. Can you imagine someone who never showers wearing the same pair of underwear for 2 to 3 weeks? Is your stomach churning at this moment? Then you know how any auditor in my district felt when they had to work next to Moby. Think of what must have been gathering in his shorts. Picture what a 500 lb, sweaty, unwashed man might be producing and collecting in the folds and crevices of his body, and then depositing into his underwear. Vomited yet?









We knew this about Moby and his undies because he told us. He knew he reeked, he knew we were disgusted by his reek, and he didn't care. During the hot summer months, when his foul stench was particularly pungent, auditors would walk right up to him in a store and tell him flatly, "Dude, you stink." Moby would only smile and say, "Yeah, I know." He would then explain about his no-showering policy, and his fetid drawers. His outer clothes needed no explanation. We could tell that he never changed his RGIS polo and khaki pants, because he would show up at inventory after inventory with the same stains in the same places on his clothes. The dark patches on his crotch and seat of his pants were particularly noteworthy.









AAM Dean told me one time that Moby's personnel file was an inch thick with complaints about his personal hygiene. The complaints came not only from us, his fellow employees, but RGIS customers as well. Several stores, like Bath & Body Works for example, banned Moby from ever doing another inventory for them because they were so offended by his smell.









You may wonder why, if there were so many complaints about Moby's horrible odor, he wasn't fired by RGIS. Well, as in the case with Moby's equally distasteful brother Leo and also psycho Ethan, AM Jeff and DM Kenny heavily depended on these three Team Leaders to run a majority of the smaller inventories that my district handled. They were the only TL's trusted by the managers to run most of those inventories. The other TL's, Jeb and Douglas, were both in their 60's and not highly regarded by either Jeff or Kenny. AAM Dean ran a few inventories himself but Moby, Leo and Ethan handled the bulk of the non-department store inventories. If any of those three were let go (and believe me, all three deserved to be fired for a number of reasons), that would mean Jeff and Kenny would have to run more stores, and the both of them were looking to do fewer inventories, not more. Jeff said that his goal was to eventually have enough TL's to ensure that he and Kenny would only need to put in an appearance at a really big inventory, like a Macy's or Target. Then they could spend most of their time back at the office, doing God knows what. I think Jeff had dreams of really buckling down and concentrating on making out our schedules weeks in advance, instead of how he usually did them, which was at the last possible minute. Kenny envisioned spending most of his time hustling up scores of new customers, but this too was a pipe dream. Because of their distrust (Justified in Jeb's case. Douglas could run a store pretty well, but I think Jeff engaged in a little age-ism where Douglas was concerned) of TL's Jeb and Douglas's ability to run more stores, because the other auditors (like myself) flat out refused to become Team Leaders (who needs that kind of crap?) and run inventories ourselves, Jeff and Kenny needed Moby, Leo and Ethan. And believe me, those three were perfectly aware of their manager's dependence on them. That's why they took the liberties that they did, with their personal hygiene and/or questionable behavior.









Moby's funky body odor aside, he also offended many with his personality too. Although he tried hard to present himself as the stereotypical jolly fat man, he would be unable to keep up that facade for very long, for his inner being seemed to be one of self-hatred, jealousy and rage. Self-hatred of his own wretchedness; his morbid obesity and deplorable smell must have affected him more than he would have us believe. Jealousy in that for all of his and his brother Leo' years of service with RGIS, no manager ever gave Moby and Leo the respect that they (and only they) felt they deserved. The jealousy came from the fact that other auditors in our district would get the praise and accolades Moby felt he and Leo had earned but never received.









The rage that Moby exhibited toward other auditors earned him much contempt as well. When he ran an inventory that didn't go smoothly (a frequent occurrence), his false, happy face would disappear and his true, bitter self would emerge. If some poor newbie had screwed up an area, maybe counting liquor as grocery or grocery as GM (general merchandise), Moby would lose it and call the newbie every filthy, insulting name he could think of. And often right in front of them too. And God help his crew if the store manager had a problem with the way the inventory was going. The customer might complain to Moby about some areas being off on their dollars, or being counted in the wrong department. Moby would take it from the customer, and then proceed to hunt down a scared little newbie in the store and rip the guy a new one. A 500 lb person like Moby could be very intimidating. Seeing him barrel down a grocery store aisle screaming after a newbie was terrifying, and led to his great unpopularity.









I can attest to all of this personally, as I was often on the receiving end of Moby's wrath. As a newbie, I struggled at first with the inventories that I did. I made mistakes, and Moby never failed to point those mistakes out to everyone else and make fun of me for having committed them. But as the months progressed, and I became better and better at counting, and received not only some rare praise from AM Jeff and DM Kenny but from managers of other districts as well, Moby's jokiness dissipated and his resentment and jealousy of me began. He resented the compliments that managers and other auditors would make regarding my work. Just out of my earshot, Moby would downplay my abilities as a counter. When other auditors would say to him that they really admired my ability at counting, and wished they were as fast as I, Moby would tell them that no, I wasn't really very good, it just looked that way because the area I was counting was quite easy to do, or had been prepped by a store employee, or any nonsense that he could make up to make him feel better about himself. With newbies, he could get away with telling them crap like this because they hadn't been around the inventory business for very long and were apt to believe anything a veteran had to say.









But with managers, who knew better, Moby had no recourse but to seethe with resentment when they would say in his presence that I was a really good counter. Instead of being happy for me, or at least being happy that he had a good auditor in one of his inventories, he would instead look for ways in which to make me feel as bad as he did. He would do really lame things like, if I had committed an egregious sin like forgetting to tuck in my polo or was walking around with an untied shoe, he would pounce at me with catty, unkind remarks. Or if I had forgotten to tag one shelf, he made sure that everyone in the store knew it. Really stupid stuff like that. It was pathetic behavior on Moby's part, and sad too. I understood why he was doing it, but that didn't excuse his actions and words.









(Coming up: Part two.)

Tag You're It!

Whenever we did an inventory, along with the bags of audit machines and lasers that we carried into the store we also brought along a couple bags of yellow tags. These paper tags, measuring about 2"x10", were used by the RGIS auditors to mark areas in the store that had been counted. That way, there would be no question as to what had been counted and what hadn't. If the store's manager might be a little concerned that this shelf of books or that rack of shirts had been missed, then the RGIS manager could point to the yellow tag marking that section and show the store's employee that indeed that area of stock had been counted.









That was the way it was supposed to work. In my district of course, nothing ever worked the way it was supposed to. For one thing, most of us were too lazy or unmotivated to tag properly. We were supposed to tag the beginning and ending of every shelf, but most of us just tagged the end of each shelf, or every other shelf. Some people would just stick in one tag for the entire gondola or side of merchandise counted, and quite a few people didn't tag at all. District Manager Kenny might raise a little fuss, but he never did anything about it so we continued to tag haphazardly.









Also, Kenny was always too cheap to order more tags. He was supposed to pay for them out of the office petty cash fund, but for some mysterious reason that petty cash fund always seemed short of money (Moby claimed it was because Kenny's wife had a habit of dipping into it for pocket money but no one had any proof of that).









We would start off the year with several bags chock full of tags, but by around mid-summer we would be down to one bag, about half full. At that point DM Kenny would panic about the tag shortage, and start to get very militant about the tags, and where they were disappearing to. When other districts would show up to help us out in one of our big stores, like a Kmart or Target, at the end of the inventory Kenny would stand by the exit and check the out-of-towner's tag bags (little cloth pouches worn on the auditor's belts). If he saw tags in them, Kenny would tell those auditors, "Hey, those are OUR tags", and make them empty their bags. Of course, when we traveled to another district to help out we always stuffed our tag bags full. Kenny never had a problem with that, naturally. If his auditors could save him a few bucks by pilfering another district's tags, then sweet!









The tags had other ways of disappearing, besides slipping past the watchful eyes of our District Manager. Lots of times Kenny or Jeff would forget to tell us to pull tags (remove and collect them after the inventory was done) in the back room of a store, and the store's employees would just throw them out.









A good number of yellow (and red and green and blue) tags also vanished from the district due to my passive/aggressive behavior. Because Kenny fretted so much over the dwindling supply of tags, and because he was so despised by me, I took a perverse pleasure in carrying home from every inventory my own tag bag crammed full of tags. I had no possible use for them (save for a preposterous fantasy of using them in some sort of massive pop-art project, like a giant collage or something). I just took a secret, childish delight in squirreling away those damn tags. Thanks to Kenny I still have to this day five large boxes full of neatly sorted yellow (and red and green and blue) tags. And still no use for them.









Some of the yellow tags also vanished due to their handy use as scratch paper. For instance, auditors would use them to write down last minute additions to their schedules, as frequently we would be finishing up one inventory, and be asked by a Team Leader or Manager if we could stop by another inventory still going on in a different store. "Well, as long as you're going by Wherehouse Records on your way home, couldn't you just stop by there to see if they need any help?" And a yellow tag would be used to write down the location of and directions to that store. The tag would get folded up and placed in someone's pocket and never again see the light of another inventory.









We also lost a lot of tags in parking lots. The auditors in my district were fond of tagging each other's cars. There was no rhyme or reason to it. We would tag the cars of people we liked, people we didn't like, whatever. The only goal was to get as many tags on the car as possible. So, in addition to the most obvious spots, like under the windshield wipers and on the antenna, a bunch of tags would get stuck in the cracks around the doors, hood and trunk of the car, and some would go in the tire rims as well.









In order to pull off a really big tag job, you needed quite a bit of time to operate. So it was usually the guy that had to stay behind and help the manager close out the inventory whose car got covered with tags. That poor sucker would be inside the store, doing recounts and pulling tags (how ironic!), while a couple of auditors would be out in the parking lot smothering his car with tags. Then, when the out-of-luck auditor would finally be allowed to escape the night-long inventory, he would drag his tired ass out to the parking lot and find his car covered with yellow tags. After whimpering for a while, he would spend some time pulling all the tags off of his car, throw them to the ground, and drive home sobbing.









Or he might just do as rotund Moby did, after his car got tagged one night during a J.C. Penney's inventory. He had to go to another inventory right after leaving Penney's, and was tired and didn't feel like pulling all those tags off of his Chevy Suburban. So he drove to the next store at 3:30 am, yellow tags still dripping off his car, and leaving a trail of them on the streets of Santa Rosa.









I tagged a few cars during my time with RGIS (see above paragraph), but there was one particular tagging incident that I was most proud of, chiefly because I tagged a manager's van, and someone else got blamed for it.









It started out one afternoon, as DM Kenny had asked me to meet at the office at 4:00 pm to go to a CSK (auto parts) store in San Rafael. He wanted me to be a part of the early crew and go in and count the back room, before the sales floor got started. However, he got the start time wrong and had me arrive at the office an hour earlier than necessary. Plus, he couldn't get the program downloaded to the portable. He kept having trouble with the phone modem or something. That took another hour. By the time we were ready to leave I was in a horrible mood, and that only worsened as I learned that I would have to ride alone to the store with Leo. Team Leader Leo was foul Moby's brother, and just as revolting as Moby, hygiene-wise. In the personality department he wasn't much better, as evidenced by his district nickname, Lil' Hitler.









It was a terrible night all the way around. I did manage to catch a bit of a break as the inventory ended, though. Instead of having to ride back to the office with Lil' Hitler, I instead rode back to Santa Rosa with Robbie, one of the other auditors. And as we arrived back at the office a golden opportunity awaited me.









There, parked right smack at the front door of our district office was Kenny's van. And me with a tag bag full of yellow tags. It was after midnight, the office was closed and not a soul around. Oh, happy birthday to me!









Robbie parked his car and I hopped out. I told him what I was going to do and he laughed and said that since he was no fan of Kenny's either he would join me. We had a fine time tagging the DM's van. In addition to all the usual hot spots, we were able to slap a number of tags on all the windows and doors of the van, since it had rained for most of the night and the van was still wet. The tags stuck anywhere we placed them. It was silly and childish, but we were laughing hysterically, letting off some post-inventory steam and having fun doing so.









When both of our tag bags were finally depleted, Robbie and I said goodnight to each other and drove away in our cars. The evening had ended on a high note for me, but the best was yet to come.









The next morning we were all at a Long's Drugs inventory when gross-out Moby came up to me. He asked me if I knew who had tagged Kenny's van. I of course played innocent and said "No, of course not", and "Why? Did Kenny's van get tagged?" Moby said that yes, it had gotten tagged at the office, but that wasn't all. Apparently it had misted all night long, and the yellow tags stayed put on the van. Then, when dawn arrived the sky cleared and the sun broke out fully. The hot sun dried all of the tags and they were stuck like glue to the van. When Kenny arrived at the office and saw his van he was angry. Then when he discovered that the tags had dried onto his van, and the only way he could remove them was to peel and scrape them off in pieces with his fingernails, he was absolutely furious. It took him forever to clean it up. Yes!









And as if that wasn't great enough, Moby got blamed for it! See, in a district where quite a few people tagged cars, he was the one that was really known for doing it. So when Kenny saw his van he immediately called Moby. "Goddamn it Moby, I know it was you!" Of course Moby hotly denied it, but I don't think Kenny believed him. Ever. To this day, several years later, Kenny probably still thinks it was Moby that tagged his van so memorably. But you and I know the truth!









(Coming up: Meet Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber.)

Ethan Is A Psycho (Part 2)

The RGIS district I worked for covered a lot of territory. We handled inventories not only for our home city and county, but also several counties to the north and south as well. Our district's western border extended to the Pacific Ocean, and east to our nearest neighboring RGIS district, Vallejo (pronounced 'Va-LAY-ho, or 'Valley Joe' as some liked to call it).









So as a consequence we spent a good deal of time on the road. As a newbie I wasn't yet familiar with most of the out-of-town stores that we inventoried, so instead of driving myself I would ride in the company van. This was always an adventure, since you were never sure until the last minute who would be driving. It might AM Jeff who was a speed demon and one ticket away from getting fired, or maybe AAM Dean, who would be so fried from last night's inventory that he would keep nodding off while driving, so that one us auditors would have to keep an eye on him and yell out, "Dean, you're drifting!" when his head would fall forward and the van would veer towards the shoulder.









Plus you really didn't have much of a choice of who you could sit next to. There were a lot of fat people that worked in my district, and if you were so unlucky as to be squeezed between two of them in the van, it could make for one long and painful drive to San Francisco. Or maybe you might be fortunate enough to score a window seat, but then be jammed up against the window when two big ones crowded in next to you.









And as bad as that sounds, the people with BO? A million times worse. Besides Moby the Foul One, he of the 450+ lb. unwashed-for-weeks body, there were a couple of people in my district who must have been taking those garlic tablets, because oh my God they reeked of garlic. The stench was so thick and pervasive that you could almost see the fumes rising out of their bodies and flowing into my nose. Puke!









So the van rides to and from the stores were usually quite unpleasant. Between the speeding drivers and sleepy drivers and the XXL people squeezing the life out of you, and the garlic pill poppers making you want to vomit, you were usually in a foul mood even before you reached the store, which would last through the inventory and only intensify on the ride back to the office.









But there was one van ride to an out of town store once that I thought might be different. For starters, although AM Jeff was driving, he had been chastised recently for collecting too many speeding tickets, so he was actually driving at a rather safe and sane speed for a while. Also, everyone in this van ride was of a normal size and scent, except for cesspool Moby, but thankfully he rode shotgun next to Jeff so no one had to be pressed up against his sweaty, reeking greasy body.









This time it seemed like the long drive to Lakeport to do a Long's Drugs would be okay, even though we'd be on the road about 1 1/2 hours each way. Boy, was I wrong. The ride to the store was okay, but the ride back home was a nightmare from hell.









It started out innocently enough. The ride to the store was quiet, and the inventory itself went fairly smoothly for a change. Going home it was the same people in the van: Jeff driving, half-ton Moby in the seat next to him. The first bench seat had Conor, myself and Sam and the back seat had Lilian, Eden and TL Ethan. Ethan normally drove himself to all the stores, but his car was being repaired so he was stuck with us.









Eden, a girl, was sitting in between Lilian, an older woman in her sixties, and Ethan. TL Ethan had a serious crush on Eden. She was quite aware of this, and even though she had a boyfriend (not with RGIS. She told me once about her boyfriend, and how she accidentally blinded him with her thumbnail. Not a pretty story.) she didn't let that stop her from flirting all the time with Ethan, and every other guy in our district and several neighboring ones.









Eden was busy telling Ethan about her parent's house. She lived there during the summer, when she was home from college, and worked with us at RGIS while out of school. Eden told Ethan that her parents lived in a very rural part of town, high up on a hill. The only way to her house was a rough gravelly road that Eden claimed was accessible only by a 4-wheel drive vehicle. Ethan, smitten, immediately told Eden that HIS car (an early 1990's Honda Accord) could make it up to her house. She kept insisting that no, no, only 4-wheeled drive cars could travel on the road to her home.









The more that Eden insisted that Ethan's car couldn't make it to her house, the madder Ethan got. Used to Ethan by this time, I could tell without looking back at him that he was nearing his boiling point. (A word about Ethan. He could be a real pleasure to be around sometimes, believe it or not. Tall and good-looking, he was naturally quite a ham and loved nothing better than to be the center of attention. During lulls in inventories, he would often entertain us by acting out scenes from favorite TV shows and movies. Plus, he was great at counting, and one of the fastest auditors in the district. When he was on, and things were going well and nobody crossed him, he was a lot of fun to be around. The life of the party. Or inventory. And because I never gave him any trouble, and always did well in any inventory he ran, he was always nice to me.)









Any little thing could piss Ethan off at a moment's notice, so most of us had learned to tell when Good Ethan was about to transform into Bad Ethan, and to leave him alone to cool down by himself. But Eden, new to RGIS, wasn't able to gauge Ethan's moods very well and didn't notice that he was building up quite a head of steam. When Ethan kept on insisting that she didn't know what she was talking about, and of course his car could make it up to her house, Eden very jokingly told him, "Ethan, I am sooo close to hitting you right now!" Her tone of voice was very light and playful, and you could tell that in no way did she mean that seriously. But Ethan, crown prince of the district and used to getting his own way, was unused to having someone (especially a girl) stand up to him and, in a very characteristic and familiar way exploded as only Ethan could. "What?! You want to hit me? You want to hit me? Then go ahead and hit me! C'mon, hit me! Why don't you hit me? What do I have to do to get you to hit me? Do I have to call you a bitch? Fine, you're a bitch, a real bitch. Bitch! You're the queen of bitches! Fucking bitch!"









While this was going on, the rest of the van was completely silent. No one uttered a peep. Not even Jeff, the AM, dared to say word to Ethan (Jeff and Ethan, both in their early 30's, were best pals. Ethan was most definitely the dominant one in their friendship, and had Jeff thoroughly convinced that he couldn't do without him, Ethan, in the district. So as a consequence Ethan was allowed to do and say whatever he wanted). And myself, Conor, Sam and corpulent Moby were not about to confront Ethan. The rest of the van just sat meekly by and prayed silently that it would all be over soon.









But not Lilian. She was a feisty, no-nonsense woman in her sixties. She had been quietly sitting next to Eden the whole time, eating her lunch out of a little plastic container. But finally she had heard enough, and muttered to Ethan in her somewhat accented English (she was Russian born), "Oh, why don't you just shut up." Ethan immediately turned on Lilian. "You shut up, you bitch!" This went on for a while, back and forth, with Ethan and Lilian each telling one another to shut up, and Ethan telling Lilian to kiss his ass and Lilian saying to Ethan "I wouldn't kiss that nasty thing," when Ethan, who was now experiencing the unfamiliar sensation of having two females stand up to him in the space of just five minutes, said to Lilian ominously, "If you say shut up to me one more time, you're going to be sorry. " Lilian, never one to shy away from a fight, came immediately back with a "Shut up" to Ethan. Ethan then exploded a second time. "All right you bitch, that's it! When we get back to the office I'm slashing ALL of your fucking tires!" Lilian then very calmly told Ethan, "You do that, and you see this?" She held up the fork that she had been eating her lunch with. "I will take this fork and shove it right up your ass, and I'm gonna shove it up there so hard it's going to come up through your mouth."









Ethan was completely taken aback by this. As I mentioned before, he was unused to having anyone, much less a female, stand up to him and he could only sputter in reply to Lilian's threat. He finally managed to come back with a "Oh, yeah, well, you can take your knife there and slice off a piece of my ass", which was a weak reply and didn't even make any sense. It didn't matter. Everyone in that van, including Ethan, knew who had won that battle.









We were only about halfway back to the office by this time, with another 45 minutes or so to go until we reached Santa Rosa. But it didn't matter to Ethan. He called someone on his cell phone and told them to pick him up in a town nearby. His friend must have asked him was he back at the office already, because Ethan said into his cell phone, "No, we're only near Hopland. But I can't stand being in the van anymore with these fucking bitches." He slammed his phone shut and told Jeff, "Drop me off in Hopland."









AM Jeff, silent throughout this nightmarish ride, finally spoke. "Dude, I have to stop in Cloverdale (at the Long's Drug store there) to pick up the discs, why don't you just wait until we get to Cloverdale (about 10 minutes south of Hopland)?" Ethan told him, "No! Drop me off in Hopland!" And of course Jeff did as he was told. We reached the tiny dusty town of Hopland about 5 minutes later. It was the longest 5 minutes of my life. Everyone in the van was silent again except for Eden, who was crying in the back seat.









When we got to Hopland Jeff pulled over into this old abandoned gas station. Even before he pulled the van to a stop Ethan had the sliding door open. As Jeff parked Ethan leaped out of the van, storming off and throwing his leather jacket to the ground. Jeff, like a faithful puppy dog, jumped out too and followed Ethan a short distance away. No one in the van could hear what was being said by Jeff to Ethan, but it was clear that Jeff was trying to calm Ethan down, placating him with soothing words and gestures.









Now that Ethan was out of the van, all of the rest of the he-men in it finally came to life and began talking. Conor and blob Moby discussed with each other how unreasonable Ethan had been, and Sam told Eden not to cry, that she shouldn't let Ethan get to her like that.









Wow. Big brave guys. Where the hell were they when all of this was going on? I mentioned this later to gargantuan Moby, who reminded me that "You know how Ethan is. It wouldn't matter what anybody said to him, it wouldn't have made a difference, it wouldn't have stopped him." But so what! For God's sake, be a man and say SOMETHING to him. I mean, we had an Area Manager in the van, and he was afraid to chastise one of his auditors. How pathetic was that?









Jeff finally left Ethan and came back to the van and climbed in. We drove off, leaving Ethan behind in Hopland. He refused to look at the departing van and turned his back to us as we left.









As we headed south to Cloverdale, no one said a word. The silence was extremely uncomfortable. I think everyone was afraid to say anything (again). That is, except for Lilian. Maybe one minute passed since we had dropped Ethan off before Lilian spoke. She started to say something about how absurd the whole thing with Ethan had been, and about how childish he was, when Jeff abruptly cut her off. "I don't want to hear any more about it!" he told Lilian.









The tension in the van after that little exchange was so thick you could have cut it with a knife. I was afraid Lilian was going to pop up with some more about what Ethan had done, and thereby causing Jeff to erupt as well, so I hastily asked Jeff about the Long's Drugs store in Cloverdale. We were stopping there to pick up some discs that Jeff needed to program the audit machines for tomorrow's inventory. It was a brand new Long's, and this was to be our first inventory there. "So, um, Jeff, what's this new Long's Drugs like? Have you been in it before?" I asked him. Jeff seemed extremely relieved to be talking about something else besides Ethan, and chattered on at length about how much nicer this new Long's was than the old one. My diversion tactic worked, and the rest of the ride back to Santa Rosa was peaceful.









The next day, when we were doing the inventory at the Cloverdale Long's, I spoke with DM Kenny regarding the fiasco that had happened the day before. I told him that I was rather upset that AM Jeff had let the whole thing go so far, and had made no move to stop it. Kenny told me that had HE been the one driving the van, the incident would never have happened. He (Kenny) would have nipped the thing in the bud and would have told Ethan to shut up.









I, who was no fan of Kenny's, believed him on this one because he wasn't as close to Ethan as Jeff was. AM Jeff had made the fatal mistake of making friends of a few of the auditors in our district, and this I believe affected how he treated these friends/employees. It's one thing to be friendly with your employees, but making friends of a few of them was an error on Jeff's part. It clouded his judgment of these special few, and the F.O.J.'s (Friends Of Jeff) were treated much better by him than the rest of us. It caused resentment and discontent amongst our happy little district and would eventually contribute to Jeff's firing some time later.









(PS: Kenny must have spoken to Ethan regarding our conversation, because a few days later Ethan came up to me during an inventory at Andronico's Market in San Anselmo and apologized for the horror episode in the van. Wow, that was a surprise. So maybe there's some hope for Ethan after all.)









Coming up: More RGIS happiness.

Batch? Natch.

I was fairly busy with inventory work after my first two stores. I guess I wasn't as completely horrible at it as I thought, because I scarcely got a day off the first couple of months I was there. Of course, January and February were the busiest months of the year for RGIS, with many stores wanting inventories so that they could see how well they had done during the holiday season. My district hired over a hundred people in January one year, and I think about 3 or 4 people ended up staying for more than a couple of days.



This busy time was great for us auditors, as we could really rack up some serious overtime hours and come away with nice fat paychecks. Even at $ 7.50 an hour. TM Ethan said that when his mom used to work for RGIS, she made enough money one January to buy a really nice car.



So the work was fairly steady, the hours were flexible, and as I did more inventories I improved my counting skills and my confidence grew with each inventory I did. I began to actually enjoy the process of counting aspirin boxes and pans of eye shadow. I even liked doing the scan-only inventories, where clothing boutiques made you scan each individual blouse and pair of pants in the store. It didn't require much if any thinking, so you could just scan like a robot while you let your mind wander away to more important things.



Of course, a scan-only inventory could be a real pain in the ass when it came to a store like Victoria's Secret. I mean, can you imagine scanning a round table loaded with hundred of pairs of panties? One table with over six hundred pairs of panties, all carefully laid out in neat rows, and you had to search in each frigging pair for a miniscule tag to scan, over and over and over again. Oh, and let's not forget the racks of bras on the walls. Dozens crammed onto tiny metal rods so that when you reached for a bra tag to scan about 25 of them fell off the rack and landed on the floor. And then you had figure out which ones you had already scanned and which ones still needed to be counted, and...fuck it. Just jam 'em all back onto the rack and hope that no one noticed.



There was a dirty little secret to counting in Victoria's Secret, and a few other stores as well. It was that while out on the sales floor you had to at least appear to scan every single item (fragrances and cosmetics excluded; those you could quantity count), in the back room you could batch like crazy. By batching, I mean we would take one bra and scan it like 50 times. This method of counting was expressly forbidden by RGIS, but of course it went on all the time in my district. No Manager or Team Leader (except Ethan, who used to encourage me to batch all the time) would ever come right out and say it was okay to batch, it was just sort of implied that it was necessary sometimes in order to finish the inventory on time.



So what we would do in a Victoria's Secret back room was this: We would make ourselves as comfortable as possible on the cold linoleum floor, sitting cross-legged and gathering several garbage bags and huge cardboard boxes full of underwear around us. Then we would dump it all out on the floor. We would pick up a bra, scan it say 50 or 60 times, toss it back into the bag or box and grab handfuls of unscanned underwear and throw them in too. This was a much faster way of counting than having to search and sort through piles of tangled bras, looking for that elusive bar code tag to scan, only to discover that the tag was missing and you had to call "SKU check!" and wait forever until some clerk dragged her ass away from the fascinating conversation she was having with a couple of her coworkers out on the sales floor. I mean, who has time for that crap? If we counted everything the way we were supposed to, we'd have been there forever. Not that I wouldn't have loved the fatter paycheck, but did I really want to spend 10 hours sitting on the floor in Victoria's Secret? No thanks. So, we would batch the hell out of the place, and no one was ever the wiser.



(A side note about Victoria's Secret: a friend of mine shopped there quite frequently, and I used to tell her about some of the creepy people I worked with. I would say, "You know that new bra you bought the other day? Just think, some sweaty oily old man was probably pawing through it, looking for a tag to scan." My friend would be suitably grossed out.)



So as I mentioned earlier, batching was supposedly against the rules at RGIS but it went on all the time. The reason it was forbidden was because the store couldn't get an accurate inventory if you batched. For example, if you were counting cosmetics in a store like Long's Drugs, you couldn't just pick up one tube of Revlon lipstick, scan the bar code and then quantity count the rest of them. If you did that, then when the area was printed out, it looked as though the store had about 756 tubes of the "Love That Red" color, and no "Pink in the Afternoon" or "Berry Brown." Only red. Oops! Busted.



Not that my managers cared. If they thought they could get away with it they would let batching slide. RGIS' official slogan was "Accuracy Is Our Primary Concern." Hah! In my district it was "Our Primary Concern Is Getting In And Out Of The Store As Fast As Possible, And To Hell With Accuracy." My district's inventory reports were never quite up to par, so there was ever increasing pressure on the managers to improve. Of course, that meant more pressure on us auditors to count faster faster faster! Faster counts meant better-looking inventory reports. Better looking inventory reports meant bigger bonuses for the managers. But what did it mean for us lowly auditors? Not a whole lot. If we were fortunate we might get a laconic "Thanks" as we closed out our audit machines and headed out the door. Oh sure, we might get a little raise now and then, but that's nothing compared to getting a nice fat bonus. Or benefits. It really sucked that the managers had medical and dental benefits and a 401K plan AND bonuses, and all an auditor got was maybe a 25 cent raise once a year, if your manager remembered to give you one. I was fortunate that DM Kenny was a happy drunk, because I think that's why I received five raises my first year with RGIS. Two 50 cent raises, two 75 cent ones and one $1.00 raise. I think that in his drunken state he kept forgetting that he'd already given me a raise the month before and then would go ahead and give me another one. Thank goodness for Coors Light.



But back to the subject of batching. When I was a newbie it really used to bother me to see people batching in an inventory. I would think to myself how unfair it was that I was taking the time to count things properly, and others were just blowing through shelves and areas, counting all the different flavors of fruit juice as one. I also felt bad for the store too, in that they weren't getting the kind of inventory that they had paid for (meaning an accurate one). But as the years passed, and my cynicism towards RGIS grew, I eventually stopped caring so much about accuracy and fairness and the customer getting screwed over. Fuck it. If the AM and DM didn't care, why should I? And if the store's employers were too stupid to figure out that they were being had, then that was their own fault.



Batching figured into an auditor's APH (Average Per Hour). In most inventories a record of how many items or dollars you had counted was kept. When we were in one of our Long's Drugs cycles (2 weeks worth of Long's stores, about 1 per day), the DM would print up a list of how many dollars everyone had counted in the previous inventory, make copies, and pass them out at the beginning of the next day's inventory. Of course, if you batched, your APH would be much higher than someone who counted legitimately. Printing out our APH's was supposed to be a sort of incentive for us to count faster, as in "Hey! So-and-So counted $90,000.00 worth of stuff, and I only did half that. Gosh! I had better count faster this time, so I can do as well as him!" What a load of crap. I mean, who gives a damn, right? What did we get out of it, except for bragging rights? Are bragging rights as good or better than getting a bonus? Hell no. Screw bragging rights.



Besides,any idiot there knew that if you got stuck counting in a crap aisle like fishing tackle, with their millions of tiny bags of $1.99 lures (at cost), you would have counted a ton of stuff and ended up with a very low dollar amount. Whereas some ass cherry-picking could score the vitamin aisle and load his machine with over $10,000.00 in one section alone. (Cherry-picking bastards. Another thing that went on a lot in my district. People were supposed to take the next available aisle or gondola to count, but some jerk auditors would take a peek at the next aisle, see that there was too much crap to scan, or too few dollars in it to mean much, and skip over that one, leaving it for someone else to count.) So the posting of everyone's APH didn't mean much to us. Who cared? Give us auditors a bonus or benefits, then we might have cared. Somewhat.



(Coming up: More RGIS crap.)

Ethan Is A Psycho (Part 1)

Of course, like a sucker, I came back to work for RGIS, the very next day. My first road store, a place called 'Tuesday Morning'. A stupid name for a store, and confusing too for some people. "Wait, am I doing 'Tuesday Morning' on Wednesday, or is that 'Wednesday Morning' on Tuesday?"



What I remember about 'Tuesday Morning' (the store, not the day) was that it was a real ratty-looking place. Dirty, dusty or damaged items that other stores had rejected were snapped up by 'Tuesday Morning' and sold at a discount. Anything and everything was sold there. Thus you had cheap duvet covers next to Waterford crystal, which would in turn be standing on a shelf next to a leering papier-mache Santa Claus that was missing one hand.



This was my first inventory that Jeff (he of the girly fingernails) ran. Jeff seemed nice, but very preoccupied. He kept up a frenetic pace throughout that whole inventory, running here and there, printing out all the areas that had already been counted and constantly checking his laptop computer (called a portable) to make sure all the areas in the store were accounted for. He never stopped moving the entire time we were there. At times he would shoot across the store so fast he was like a blur. He had tons of energy to expend. Where did it all come from? I wondered.



AM Jeff was so busy he barely gave any time or thought to explaining what needed to be counted and how. Of course, once again I was the only newbie, so I just sort of fumbled my way through this inventory as well. And like the 'Miller's Stockman' fiasco, all the other veteran auditors were surly and uninterested in answering any questions from me.



Jeff did manage to give me one bit of valuable, time-saving advice. At one point I was counting a section filled with hundreds of bath towels and washcloths, when Jeff came over and told me, "You don't have to fold them back up, just throw 'em back in there (on the shelves)." He said that the towels had already been all jumbled up and it wasn't RGIS's job to clean and tidy the store, just to count the stuff.



After all of the counting was finished, Jeff still had to wrap up a few things with the store personnel before he could leave. Since he had driven the company van and I had rode in with him, myself and a few other auditors had to stay there until he was finished. A few people had driven to the San Rafael store in their own cars, and I enviously watched them drive off. We had been at the store since 8:00 am (having left Santa Rosa at 6:45 am), and six + hours on my feet was a very tiring thing. Plus, we still had that long drive back to the office on the perpetually traffic-clogged 101 freeway. It would take us at least an hour or more to get back to Santa Rosa. I was beat.



While Jeff was schmoozing with the store's manager, I waited outside in the parking lot next to the RGIS van. I was afraid to leave it and go sit down on a bench somewhere, as I thought it would be really easy for everyone to forget I had even been there, and drive off and leave me stranded in San Rafael.



So I was leaning against the van, getting dust all over my burgundy polo, and watching a couple of the other auditors who had remained behind. The three of them were having a very animated conversation, with much laughing going on. There was a tall, skinny guy with short spiky black hair and pale skin who seemed to be the leader of the group. At least he was the one doing most of the talking and gesturing. This was Ethan, a Team Leader and AM Jeff's best friend at RGIS. With him was Ellen, a short girl with long brown hair. She was for some strange reason wearing pink fuzzy bedroom slippers. She wore these slippers to most of the inventories, even though they weren't the regulation black shoes. I mean, they weren't even shoes, for God's sake! But she was a veteran, and as we all know the vets could get away with breaking any RGIS rule they felt like. Also breaking another RGIS dress code rule was a tiny little guy with them. His name was Zudu or Zulu or something weird like that. He wore a blue plastic hoop earring in one ear, even though it was a no-no for male auditors to wear earrings.



So the three of them were standing in the middle of a parking lot aisle talking when a car came up behind them. It wanted to get past their group, but they were right smack in the middle of the aisle completely ignoring this car. So the car somehow managed to squeeze carefully past them, and I guess when it did the driver must have given them a look because Ethan exploded. "What? What the fuck is your problem? You looking at me? C'mon, get the fuck outta your car! C'mon, fucker, get out and I'll kick the shit outta ya!" Ethan was leaping around as he screamed, flailing his long skinny arms like an angry orangutan. The car calmly left the parking lot. Ethan was still fuming and told Ellen and Zudu/Zulu, " I should have kicked his fucking door in." The other two just grinned.



I was shocked. I had never before seen someone overreact to something so benign as a look. I remember thinking, "Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into? What am I doing here with these psychotic weirdos? Wah! I wanna go home! But I'm stuck in a parking lot in San Rafael with no way to get back to Santa Rosa until some man with long fingernails is finished chatting up the manager of a crappy discount junk store! Okay, I SWEAR this is my last day with RGIS and this time I mean it!" Um, yeah right. Have I mentioned I worked for RGIS for over 7 years? Boy, was I a glutton for punishment.



Finally about 3 years later Jeff emerged from the store, and we could leave. Ethan and Zudu/Zulu drove away in Ethan's car, and me and Ellen joined Jeff in the company van. Ellen rode shotgun with Jeff driving, and I sat behind them. The two of them carried on an exclusive conversation the whole way back to the office, talking about other auditors and various inventories that they had done. I was NOT made to feel a part of this conversation.



Not that I was missing much. Ellen seemed chiefly interested in bad-mouthing what seemed like every single person in the district, especially a woman named Lilian. It was "Lilian said this to me, what a bitch", and "Lilian told me and Trina not to talk so loud in the store, who the fuck does she think she is", and so on. Jeff would just nod and say things like, "Yes" and "Hmm" and "I know". Stimulating conversation.



When we finally reached the office and parked I opened the sliding panel door, ready to leap out and make a run for it. At that point Jeff seemed to remember that I was even in the van and said, "Thanks for your help", or words to that effect. Ellen chimed in, saying "Oh yeah, thanks", very condescendingly, like she was a manager or a Team Leader or something, graciously conveying her gratitude to the lowly newbie. Give me a break. I beat it out of there.



(Coming up: More RGIS horror stories. Actually, soap opera stories might be a more appropriate term.)

My First Day In RGIS Hell

January, 1999. I was standing outside the locked main entrance to the Santa Rosa Plaza mall at 5:45 am. Like a good little newbie auditor I wore a pair of regulation black pants, all-black shoes and RGIS polo shirt. Nothing over the shirt, and it felt like 30 degrees F outside.



I was so anxious to make a good impression on my first day that I followed the dress code rules to the tee. No jacket, even though I was freezing. And of course the all-black shoes. This was stressed many times during my sentence with RGIS. You had to wear solid black shoes, with no other color on them at all. Once this guy wore black running shoes with white soles showing, and DM Kenny went into a panic and grabbed a roll of black electrical tape out of the company van and covered the sides of the white soles with the plastic tape. All this because some of the Ops (Operations) managers were due to make an appearance at this inventory, and Kenny didn't want to get chewed out for an auditor dress code infraction. Not that it mattered. Even without the shoe problem, Kenny usually got nailed on about half a dozen screw-ups anyway.



Finally Dean came out of the parking garage with a couple of auditors all carrying soft-sided brown suitcases. AAM (Associate Area Manager, basically an Area Manager in training) Dean was running this inventory. When he reached the main door he said to me, "I recognized you because you were shivering so hard." I noticed that everyone else was wearing coats and sweaters. Damn it. I didn't realize it then, but you could wear a jacket TO the inventory, but not IN the inventory. Looking back on it now, it would have been pretty barbaric for RGIS to tell their employees, "We don't care if it's 20 degrees F below outside, nothing over your polo shirt!" But again, I was newbie, anxious to please, and did not want to make any mistakes at all. Oh well.



We entered the mall on the first floor and went directly to a store called 'Miller's Stockman' (soon to undergo a name change to 'Corral West Ranchwear'). 'Stockman' carried jeans, tee shirts and some ranch wear, like cowboy boots and long black duster overcoats. 'Miller's Stockman' was my first inventory, and it was a disaster.



At least for me. NOTHING Dean taught me in the training sessions was even remotely similar to what I was supposed to be doing. All the other auditors there were veterans and knew exactly what to do. I was the only newbie and I was completely clueless. There was no counting of quantities and keying them into the audit machine. It was all scan, scan, scan. Scan every single shirt, pants and pair of boots. No one told me what to do if something would not scan, and of course this was not covered in the training sessions that I'd had previously. The other auditors were very grumpy and unfriendly. I would ask them for help and they would say things like, "I don't know, ask Dean" and "I'm busy, ask Dean." Assholes.



So I would go to Dean and ask him how to do something, and he would say, "I'll be with you in a minute," and then forget all about me, or finally come over, try to show me how to correct a mistake, and be so vague and confusing with his explanations that I could have screamed with frustration.



Eventually, after I had screwed up several areas, Dean gave me the easiest section in the store to count: boots. How could anyone fuck up something as easy as counting boxes of shoes? I could that day, and did. Nothing was going right for me. Aaaaarggghh.



The only time I even came close to having a light moment that morning was when I was counting those damn boots. I found a pair of ratty old running shoes under a bench and I asked a store clerk, "Um, am I supposed to count these?" The guy laughed and said no, that a customer must have tried on a pair of boots and shoplifted them by walking out of the store wearing the boots, leaving his sneakers behind. The clerk held up the pair of sneakers and yelled to another store clerk, "Hey Bob, it happened again!"



The inventory didn't last very long, maybe 4 or 5 hours (it probably would have been over a lot sooner had it not been for my screw-ups needing to be recounted). I remember at one point thinking, "What the hell am I doing here? I hate this I hate this I hate this! This sucks. I shouldn't be counting this crap, I should be buying it." Completely illogical thought, since A: Without said crappy job I couldn't afford to buy anything, and B: I wouldn't be caught dead shopping at a lame redneck store like Miller's Stockman. It was just me feeling frustrated over all the mistakes I had made, and my coworkers distinct lack of support, and Dean's confusing vagueness. Whatever. One thing was clear to me. This was my first and last day as an RGIS auditor. I was never coming back. Never never NEVER.



(Coming up: my second day as an RGIS auditor.)

Kenny The RGIS Rat Bastard (aka F.U.R.B.Y.)

After the five of us finished our second RGIS training session, we were one by one called into a small inner office to meet Kenny, the District Manager. Kenny was a short, fair-haired pink-faced man in his early thirties. He seemed extremely upbeat and very cheerful, and had the pinkest skin I had ever seen. It wasn't just fair skin with a rosy flush, but his face, ears, hands-all visible skin was a solid, bright Play-Doh pink. Very weird, and unnatural looking. Much later I found out via the district grapevine that Kenny was a heavy drinker (he would regularly put away a 12-pack of Coors Light every day), and someone said that alcoholics tend to be very pink because the alcohol brings the blood close to the surface of the skin. I don't know if that's true, but it would explain Kenny disturbing pinkness.

Finding out several months later about Kenny's favorite beverage, Coors Light, would also explain the beer cans all over the office. Every single wastepaper basket in the office was loaded with beer cans. In the front office behind the counter, in Kenny's inner office, in the storeroom, in the bathroom...EVERYWHERE. Now, to his credit, I never saw Kenny drink before or during an inventory. But afterwards, at the office...apparently a different story indeed.
One time an RGIS Ops (Operations) Manager dropped by the office when Kenny was out, and supposedly saw all the Coors Light cans in the wastepaper baskets. He asked the office secretary, Betty, "Whose are these?" Betty took pity on Kenny (she liked Kenny for some odd reason, and was always afraid he was going to get fired, which was perceptive of her), so she said the beer cans were hers. Betty knew that she could get away with beer at the office (at least once, anyways) because she was highly valued by RGIS. She was the only one who knew how to do a lot of stuff at the office, like time sheets, payroll, etc. AM Jeff once told me that if Betty wanted to ruin a new Manager she could do so very easily, by not telling the new Manager how to do things on the computer.

Kenny could have been a dead ringer for Archie Andrews, the comic book character, minus the checkered pants and black sweater vest with a big 'R' on the chest. Kenny dressed even worse than a comic book character. He liked to wear horrible mustard-yellow dress shirts that clashed with his neon-pink skin.

DM Kenny was a contradiction of sorts. On one hand, he could appear to be quite friendly and personable to your face (probably due to his beloved Coors Light), but behind your back he might be wielding a knife, ready to plunge it between your shoulder blades. He had a reputation of promising raises and then never giving them, of promising more hours and then scheduling you for less, and making rude comments about your counting ability out of your earshot. One auditor named Hilda became so frustrated with Kenny that she found a drink called 'Rat Bastard' and went into Kenny's office and slammed it down on his desk. "Here, just for you, Kenny," she told him. Kenny apparently just thought that Hilda was only kidding and laughed. But word got around, and from then on Kenny's nickname was 'Rat Bastard'. Odious Moby embellished upon it and started referring to Kenny as "FURBY", for (F)uck Yo(u) (R)at (B)astard, or F.U.R.B.

Kenny gave me a yellow legal pad to write down the dates and locations of upcoming inventories. He sat behind his desk and began leafing through a big plastic binder. "Let's see...January 4th, 6 am, Miller's Stockman, Santa Rosa Plaza... January 5th, meet at the office here at 6:45 am to go to San Rafael to do the Tuesday Morning store... Jan 6th, 6:00 pm at Montgomery Village for Ross Department Store..." and so on. He then rattled off a string of Long's Drugs store locations and dates and chuckled, "After this, you'll be a Long's Drugs expert!" I smiled and agreed, even though I didn't know what the hell he was talking about.
I accepted all the jobs that he gave me except for one: Macy's in San Francisco, to start at 8:00 pm. I told Kenny that I wasn't too thrilled on driving all the way to S.F., and Kenny explained that for jobs we did out of our district we would meet at the office and commute to the store in company-owned vans. These vans were sometimes driven by the Area or District Manager, but most often driven by an RGIS auditor picked by the AM or DM at the last minute. I mean they picked just about anyone to drive us. Old men in their seventies with bad eyesight, young guys with glassy eyes, people with suspended driver's licenses, ANYONE. RGIS was supposed to check the DMV record of any auditor who was chosen to drive a company van, but to my knowledge Jeff, Dean, or Kenny never once did this. They didn't seem to care too much about following company policies. They just wanted to get the whole herd of auditors off to the store, in any way possible.

I asked Kenny what time I would get back to the office after Macy's. He said around 6:00 am. The idea that I would work all night and then get home in time to sleep just as dawn was breaking was unthinkable to me and I politely declined. Kenny said okay, then something like, "Welcome to RGIS, see you again soon!", and I left the office clutching my little yellow schedule.
Of course, in the months and years to come I would become quite adept and used to sleeping in broad daylight. All of us long-term auditors had to learn to catch a quick catnap (usually 40 minutes or so) whenever possible in order to survive a hectic work week. These bits of sleep were often the only time I got to close my eyes for days.



The schedules of stores that we were to inventory were frequently mad. That is to say, often we would do stores back to back to back, and I would only have enough time in between inventories to dash home, grab a bite to eat, quickly freshen up and run out again. Sometimes I wouldn't be able to go home at all between stores. I would leave a Whole Foods inventory in San Anselmo at 4:00 am (having began counting there the night before at 7:00 pm), drive 50 miles north to Petaluma, stop at an all-night Jack-In-The-Box for a burger and Coke, gulp those down, drive to a Long's Drugs down the street, park and catch maybe 20 minutes sleep in my car before I had to report inside the store at 5:15 am. Insanity.
Thanks to this crazy way of earning a paycheck, during my stint in RGIS hell I would come to make caffeine my very best friend. My dearest companion, without whom I could not have survived. I would consume loads of coffee, Red Bull (yuck), Sobe Adrenaline (yum), Mountain Dew only because I'd heard it contained more caffeine than Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola when I tired of the putridness of Mountain Dew, and plenty of No-Doz. One auditor named Cory even tried coffee-flavored yogurt. Anything to stay awake.

For me, anything legal that is. I stuck to the safe-and-somewhat-sane methods of staying awake. Many other auditors (and managers) delved into other less wholesome ways of keeping their eyes open long enough to count cans of soup and bottles of wine. There was much whispering around our district and other ones of who was snorting cocaine, with people claiming to have seen this auditor or that manager coming out of a bathroom in an Albertson's Supermarket with a bit of white powder under their nose or continually sniffling suspiciously during a long drive to a Sear's Department store in San Bruno. I never actually saw anyone do drugs during the time I worked for RGIS, but during that time I heard many rumors of drug use. MANY. Veteran auditors would tell me in my first year that "Well, that's why this company never does drug testing. If they did, they would lose most of their auditors and managers."
So between the sleep deprivation and rumored drug use it's a wonder anything got counted in an inventory at all. Sometimes it didn't. Sometimes certain auditors, Team Leaders, and even Managers would 'plug in the numbers' instead. That is, they would take the totals from the store's previous inventory, change the numbers around a little bit, print out the area, and...presto! Instant inventory! But more on that later.

(Coming up: My first day as an official RGIS auditor. Whee!)