I’m not ’snarky’ enough.

That was until Office Max took away my bloody chair.

Seriously, read this.

I didn’t buy a chair, I work there, in the copy center, normally in a chair where i do anything from hand you your faxes, to making your copies to printing proofs for your business cards to working on my abs. Sometimes I’ll hand you your faxes while working on my abs. But you’d never know it. Caleb Roy is an ab-crunching, fax-handling ninja.

And now Caleb Roy is irritated. Office Max took away my chair.

Larry, the other Office Max copy center guy who works the late shift is not irritated like I am. Larry boy is outright ticked. Store manager claims we’re not to have a chair anymore so that we cut down on the amount of personal editing we do on the computer for customers. We actually do charge people for that. It’s a dollar a minute. Sixty bucks an hour. Store Manager (pregnant hormonal nazi ahem ahem) says we’re supposed to outsource that stuff to IDEA (some other company that will run a spellcheck on your resume and ding you 40 dollars for it.) IDEA normally gets back to you with the result within 24 hours.

The problem is that customers come in with documents on their jump drive but they want to change just one little word. Before: we could drop in the seat, pop open the document, change the word, add the comma, hit print for a thousand copies, and make bank.

Now we’ve got to say. Oh you meant the word ‘obvious’ (word describing the necessity of a chair in Office Max Impress) but instead wrote ‘oblivious’ (word describing Store Manager’s reaction to even CUSTOMER complaints that we’re not allowed to sit down and help them out any more) yeah well… we’re going to have to send that out to the IDEA site. Can’t make changes in house to any document any more.

That pretty much goes like “WORK ORDER: IDEA, please correct the word ‘oblibvious’ to say ‘obvious’ in the third paragraph, second line.” SEND

IDEA then writes back, FROM IDEA Site: “WTF? Change two friggin letters? You know we’ve still got to charge you $40 for that. Are you serious? This is a Word document. Don’t you have Microsoft Word there? Typing that email took you longer than it would have to correct this document. \\ ORDER RECEIVED. Thanks!”

DEAR IDEA: “Manager took our chair and banned us from doing any Desktop Publishing. It’s all you now baby!”

Customer is then like… “Wait… what just happened? Are you printing it now?”

DEAR IDEA: “Cancel last order. Customer couldn’t see the obvious logic inherent in outsourcing the correction of a single word over twenty four hours for forty dollars when he could get it done in ten minutes at our competitor’s store.”

FROM IDEA: “Dear Office Max: Don’t you mean ‘oblivious’ logic? ORDER CANCELED, unfortunately you will still be billed as the order was processed and completed before the cancellation was received. (L on Forehead) Thanks!”

So what ends up happening is that instead I sit on the floor beneath the desk with my airs dangling in the air like a string puppet and the monitor tilted down retyping a word or two, resisizing a picture or two, and printing everything the managers ask me to find in the store’s net system and print all the while NOT working on my abs but instead thoroughly dusting my pants while the customer peers over the desk and says. “Uh… didn’t you guys used to have a chair?”

Four out of five customers that come to the copy center need something done on the computer. Four out of five of THOSE customers need something minor and quick. This makes about eighty percent of customer work requiring a computer solution that referring to IDEA would either produce outrage, customer rejection, or both.

Larry also complains of splints in his kneecaps. (He kneels) He went to talk to Store manager about it today. There isn’t another Office Max in the nation that has pulled the chair from copy center. She claims it’s corporate. He claims he doesn’t give a S***. He’s got another job and is getting plenty fed up. I’m with him.

I told him today “Hey Larry, since they cut everyone else and I’m such a little pushover that I’m willing to work 45 hours a week and still be designated as a part time employee because they don’t want to give me more than nine an hour or benefits and you’ve got the security of your other job with ALLOWS you a chair, pays more and gives you better shifts and without us they’d all be royally (bleeped) in the (bleep) why don’t we just pull the chair back over there and tell them to screw off?”

He mused about that for a while.

I’m doing it. They can’t fire me. They have no one to replace me. It takes two weeks to train an associate for that center. Larry refuses to work there more than ten hours a week because he’s working at his other job all the time.

What I want to know is: Is there anyone else working at an office max that reads this blog. Is there any one of you that this sort of nonsense has happened to? What happened? What did you do about it. And how did it all pan out?

today’s picture of the day is of my arm pumping untold dollars of fuel into my car. Viva la hypermiling. Darned oil barons…

-Caleb

Explore posts in the same categories: Uncategorized

Tags: 0561, Australia, caleb, chair, cocain, cocaine, copy, copymax, freemonster, fuel, gasoline, IDEA, impress, max, monsterbox, new, office, picture, roy, store, york

You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.