A Disaster In the Copy Center

I am not sure if I told you or not that I took over the Copy Center at work several months ago, right before I went out on Medical leave. Now its been 3 months later and my copy center is a disaster. I mean the staff did the very best they could while I  was gone, but what a mess they made.

There is at least 2 months of dust on everything. I have been cleaning, throwing out empty boxes, used napkins, some strange thing that someone made, it looked like an evil weapon, and this list goes on and on.

I have been trying to get the customers happy too. I have had several orders returned saying it was done wrong. I fixed them all and the customers are happy again. I have had some of the customers that said I am so happy that you are back, we missed you. That made me feel good to be missed.

Now I've only have been back for 7 days and on the 7th day, in walks my District Manager and the Regional Copy Center Manager. I about fell over. They were the last two people that I wanted to see, since I was still trying to get things in order.

They came up to me and said welcome back, shook my hand and then called my General Manager and the Asst. General Manager over. Now picture this, those four standing on one side and me on the other. The Regional Manager asked this:

What do you need to get up to speed and get your numbers up?

The only thing that kept going through my head was cleaning, but I knew that was not the answer they were looking for. I simply said I need more training on the new programs. (while I was gone they added and updated several programs) It was the right answer to their question, cause they agreed with me. They told my GM to set me some time aside so that I could do more training.

The District Manager did point out several things that he thought needed "cleaning" and moving. He said walk over here Allen, we walked out of the copy center. He said now look at the back counter. Think of yourself as a customer, what is wrong? I said it looks ugly, there are boxes everywhere and the counter looks cluttered. (which I already knew) I told him, that I just hadn't gotten to it yet. The Regional Manager said ok lets look at your numbers. He showed me the list, and I about cried. All my numbers are in the Red, not pretty at all. He told me not to stress about them right now, since I was off for so many months, but he wanted to see some improvement by the next report. I agreed with him.

I now have two pages of things that has got to be done. I only was able to mark a couple of them off my list today. But I am making slow progress.

Our store hours has changed, we used to be open 8am to 9pm. Now we are open 9am to 7pm. So now my hours at work is 9am to 5pm. You would think I would like these hours but have found out that I hate them. I now have to be on the road for over an hour because of rush hour. It used to be between 20 and 35 minutes. I dont like it at all. I keep asking to be put on the closing shift every night, but I am not sure they are going to do that or not. Got my fingers crossed.