Amac Productions

Welcome to Listen To This!

If you’re new here, welcome! Every month, I’ll drop a new wild story from all my years working in retail! Names and other identifiers have been changed so everyone may remain anonymous. All terrible customers will be referred to as Karen or Daren (male.)

The Sign Saying, ‘No Electric Power Jacks’ Isn’t a Suggestion

Today, today is a marked occasion! Because! We’re not talking about customer stupidity today. No.

I feel that too often we don’t give enough attention to the fact that retail workers themselves can also be stupid and their own worst enemies.

It’s time to give some love to one of the dumbest things I’ve ever witnessed.

We’re not in the bookstore today. No, we’re back at the start of my career with the General Nonsense. Back when I worked for an entirely different branch. Which included a grocery store.

I used to be in charge of making sure that everything was priced correctly, had tags, signs, and so on throughout the store.

It meant that I was there at ungodly hour every freaking morning and my department could never call in sick or else the store just could not run. Considering the jerk I worked for at the time, I should have held the store hostage to get some peace.

Anyway!

One morning, I’m blearily eyed and beyond exhausted as always stumbling into work at 6am. I head to the back room and make my way upstairs to my office in beside the breakroom.

My computer and supplies were there and I’d drop my stuff there every morning. Same as always.

Store didn’t open until seven. Managers and other employees would trickle in over the next hour getting everything ready for the day. Nothing new.

I sit down, power on the computer, and pull up the list of price changes. Update the system and basically turn it on so the registers would work. See how if I didn’t come to work, they’d be f*cked?

Got that squared away and unbeknownst to me the dumbest thing in the world is about to take place below me.

Beneath my office is the meat department cooler and freezer.

Freezer on the left, cooler on the right. If I’m sitting in my office, the freezer is in front of the cooler. But basically, I’m seated above them.

Then I hear the strangest noise from below me.

Sounds like an electric pallet jack.

The ones we had there were not quiet. With my door closed, I could still hear them in the background more often than not. Then there’s also the beeping whenever they back up so you don’t run anyone over.

In my sleep addled brain, I dismiss the thought. Because there’s four million signs on all the doors leading into the departments from the back rooms saying NOT to use an electric pallet jack in there.

As Deli, Produce, and the Meat Department each had a cooler to put pallets in. But they were required to use the manual ones to move pallets in and out.

For good reason, mind you.

If you’d take more than three seconds to look at the coolers, this was a rule just to annoy people by not allowing you to use the easier machine. But the electric ones could lift pallets up metal pallet holders on the wall. Meaning they could raise pallets too high for the door frame or the ceiling of the coolers or freezer.

The room could only handle a single pallet stack.

One pallet with stuff on it. You can’t stack more than one like you could in the warehouse where the ceiling is a good distance away.

The door is just wide enough for a pallet to go in and out. If you’re not careful, you’ll damage the wall with the electric one that could just go right through the wall. Better to use the manual one with only one person pushing. Much harder to destroy the wall.

There’s also a little drop into the coolers or freezer. Meaning that over time, we’ll destroy the heavy machine. While the pallet jack is much cheaper and can handle the beating without breaking off a delicate engine piece.

There are some very good reasons not to use the wrong jack.

However, on this morning, I’m getting ready what I need and thought I heard the electric pallet jack beneath me. Then I think, ‘no one could be that stupid. We’re not even allowed to take them to the floor.’

That’s what I thought.

Oh, what baby me didn’t know was that people can be incredibly stupid and lazy when they want to be because the next thing I hear is the most god-awful metal grinding sound and the entire floor shaking.

So loud and crazy, I thought for a moment it was an Earthquake.

Oh, and boy was I awake now. Wondering what on Earth happened, I start to stand only for another terrible grinding sound to occur, lots of shouting, and then the worst of it – water exploding.

I blink. Super confused about what the hell happened. Get to my feet, exit my office, see other confused coworkers, and run to the top of the stairs which open up so you can see most of the warehouse from the very top of the steps. Down to my left, I see a commotion occurring.

All the workers in the back are rushing over. Managers are shouting. Someone is yelling about turning off the water.

Then I see this horrific looking black and brown liquid rushing out of the freezer.

Then the smell hits me and I’m suddenly wondering if I can enough to investigate what the eff happened any further or try to escape the smell.

Unfortunately, due to the lack of workers in the building given the hour, I’m quickly summoned to help deal with the mess. Grabbing all the paper products and emptying the shelves of cat litter to sop up this liquid.

All the while, the meat manager is yelling at one of his workers. I genuinely can’t remember if he was a manager or just a full-timer there because he was never seen again. Whether he was fired or resigned in shame I’ll never know. To be honest, I never thought to ask.

I was much younger and hadn’t been working long enough to feel confident or brave enough to investigate things like that. Nor was this a place where it was welcomed.

However, what had occurred was that this individual brought the electric pallet jack into the freezer attempting to stack a pallet onto another. Which there is no space for. Something he discovered as he hoisted the pallet up with the electric jack smashing into the sprinkler system meant to put out fires.

The first loud noise.

The second loud noise was him trying to get the pallet jack back down and destroying the sprinkler system in the process instead of admitting his mistake and getting some help. I mean, not that would have saved him here.

This store and it’s store manager very much did not have a mistake friendly atmosphere.

However, it might have stopped it from getting worse.

Because when he pried the pallet jack back down, he took the sprinkler system with it, and it went off. Sending the black and brown horrifying liquid everywhere.

Because let me tell you something for the next moment you look at those sprinklers. It’s not clean water like you see on TV. No. It’s not running. It’s sitting in a pipe. Just waiting to be used. Rusting the pipe and turning into standing water. Waiting for who knows how long to be used. Rotting away.

Then it bursts forth and you have water to put out the fire, sure. Yes. Good news. Bad news? It smells like standing water with rust in it.

It is one of the grossest things I’ve ever had the misfortune of smelling.

The smell and the mess and the idiocy are enough to contend with. However, the meat manager then points out another problem. We can’t just clean everything in the freezer and call it a day. We have to call a health inspector to validate whether or not we can return anything in the freezer to the shelves.

Which annoys several of the managers of the entire store because they would have preferred the shortcut of wipe and stick it back on the shelf and say nothing. Another lovely reason to have food and safety regulations in place.

Our meat manager couldn’t do it in good conscience and called for an inspector who arrived in the afternoon.

By the time he was gone, we had thrown away most of the freezer. Only keeping items that hadn’t been touched by the water at all because they were so tightly wrapped in the interior of the plastic pallet.

But oh man there was so much stuff. Imagine the frozen section of the meat department just getting tossed. Anything in a cardboard box? Gone. Anything that could have been contaminated inside? Gone. Anything that could grow something gross if left sitting? Gone.

Only sealed plastic bagged good remained and they were sterilized on the outside. Clean-up took three days. Including a freezer deep clean before it could be restocked on day four.

Suffice to say, the signs might be there for a reason. Maybe read them and listen and think twice before you decide you know better.

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