Hello

Why's this being Written?
This blog is being written for one purpose. To provide a place for me to vent the build-ups of tension and anger that are the result of working in a supermarket. That way I can splatter my anger all over this blog rather than boring my friends and relatives with never-ending rants about the latest source of annoyance at the Food Place (as we shall refer to it here - to prevent me having to set up another blog, at a later date, to rant about being unemployed).

Who's Reading it?
What you'll get out of reading this blog will depend entirely on who you are. If you're the type of person who goes into Food Place purely to buy food then you will, most likely, be utterly disgusted to learn what staff like me think of you. If you, like me, work in one of the UK's Food Places (they're all the same, one presumes) then you might enjoy reading about a fellow sufferer's sufferings. Or you might be screaming "NO! I put up with this ALL DAMN DAY and I can't take ANOTHER SECOND OF IT!" In which case, leave. It's okay, I understand. If you're neither then I don't know - sorry. You might enjoy it, in which case I'm glad at least you find it amusing.

Who's Writing it?
I work for a supermarket chain in the UK. Recently companies have been, very publicly, making mincemeat of employees who dare to blog about work, apparently because it brings their employers into disrepute. It would, therefore, be quite unwise to reveal which particular logo my slavedrivers brandish. It's not as though I'd reveal anything that would harm them, but you have to be safe. It may be the sort of job you could spend hours moaning about, but it's a job and it pays. Also, get sacked from one company and who else would want you?

So, anyways, although I work in food retailing, I don't retail food. I work in a bizarre, somewhat self-inflicted, role that encompasses administration, personnel, payroll, cash office, checkout supervision, checkout operating for that matter, customer service, and, sometimes, putting out shelf labels and POS. It's self-inflicted because I'm soft as clart and too reserved to ask the management to take me off an old duty when I learn a new one. As a result, I only live to wipe asses. If anybody, anywhere in the store, has a problem, be they a customer or a member of staff, they invariably get directed to me.

As mentioned, I'm soft and won't unleash the fiery hell of my wrath on annoying customers or infuriating colleagues. All the bile builds up inside me and I have to release it somehow. In the absence of a tried-and-tested listener, there's no alternative but to throw a tantrum. I throw things, punch things, kick things, shake things. I grab hold of innocent objects and smash them repeatedly against the nearest work-surface. Is it any surprise that most of the equipment at Food Place has, at some point, been rendered broken by one of my wobblers? Sometimes, the source of my frustration is so great, even a good hissy-fit can't relieve the stress. There are a great number of customer encounters that are burned onto my mind and the mere mention of them will send me into a spasm of destruction.

Hopefully I can help myself through writing this.

What will it contain?
Anything about my life at Food Place that I feel needs to be said. This may be a rant about stupid rules and procedures, a rant about how poorly we are treated by the company, a rant about the customers, the things they do, the things they say. How they breathe. A good long thesis of how I'd run the company. If Food Place is unusually quiet, or the moron-customers have all agreed to give us a week off, I might delve into the dusty archives and talk about the snotty customers of many moons ago. I'm sure I'll never be short of things to complain about; there's a colleague of mine I could happily bitch about until the sun turns teal.

So...
Read on.