Math is hard

If GenCon has become my Christmas, then this weekend is well, that day when your taxes are due and you have a dentist appointment and, by the way, you accidentally ran over a kitten. And a puppy. It's time at work for INVENTORY.

If anyone out there remembers last year, that was the weekend I had a bit of a mental breakdown and held an impromptu mathematics lesson after finding over a dozen miscounts in the span of 24 feet of shelving.

I fear this year will be worse.

How would that even be possible? Lots of reasons.

1) We're down 3 bodies from last year. Unfortunately, not the three bodies I would have hoped (that is, the people who can't count during the course of the year). Fewer people = longer count times.

2) More product that last year. With a slew of new merchandise (that's been sitting on the shelves since I located it there), at least 84 more feet of shelving have been assembled. Most of it has lots of teensy-tiny boxes with teensy-tiny product inside. Most of the shelves are also so high they need to be reached by ladder. Lots of items + ladder-counting = mistakes.

3) I don't know how to phrase this exactly, but shoddy stocking seems to make the most sense. Finding products mislocated, sometimes in the wrong warehouse, doesn't give me a lot of hope that the counts are going to be tallied accurately. Recounts? Even more of a problem.

4) Here is the kicker: there's a chance all this counting over the next two days will be for naught. Why? Our parent company is going through a computer upgrade this weekend, an upgrade that was pushed back from 3 weeks ago. There exists the possibility that when all is said and done and the inventory is set to post... it just won't. All data lost.

And the management knows about this. We had a meeting about maybe possibly delaying the counts for another 2 weeks, when it's hotter and we have that Monday off and as such won't get overtime for counting. By the fact that we're counting today, you can see how well that went over with the personnel. (Aside: when inventory date was put to a vote during this meeting, I abstained. When called out on it, I stated "It doesn't really matter to me. It's got to get done. Besides, I don't think we'll get it done right anyway." Cynicism or realism? You be the judge.)

I already had a headache yesterday. The counting starts today at 1 PM. Updates will come via Twitter feed. Pray for my sanity. And that I'm not giving math lessons on July 10th.