Dec 27th, 2007, 12:38 AM
Like I've said before, I work at a Value Village, "The Thrift Department Store". If you've been in one, you've been in all of them. They're all pretty much laid out the same.
On the side of the building is a little shed thing, with orange cones. That's the drive up donation, and that's where I work. We take in bags and boxes of peoples crap, stack them on carts, and put them in back for our production people to price and stuff. One cart for clothes, one cart for everything else (excluding furniture and books). These carts, when full, easily weight 900 - 1200 pounds each.
While I do do Drive Through, I also help in the back, and may be getting transferred there soon. Back there I price furniture, and throw out crap furniture. My stories are going to rotate between the two.
1:
Stacking is the name of the game. If you don't stack a cart with donations properly, it'll
(1) Look like shit
and
(2) Potentially collapse and hurt someone (these things are at least 6, 7 feet tall)
When you have a full cart of boxes filled with dishes and pots and pans, you don't want it falling on you. My cart was almost full one day when someone donated a box of glasses. Cheap glasses mind you, but still glasses. So, I put them up on the cart, but a box behind the one I put up pops out a bit, and drops it on my head. Glass fragments shower over me, and send me to the ground with a few cuts on my face and hands. The person who donated it starts bitching at me, saying "I DON'T LIKE THE WAY YOU HANDLE MY THINGS, HOW WOULD YOUR MANAGER FEEL ABOUT THAT?" Politely, I said I made a mistake and I REALLY FUCKING HURT MYSELF. They went in to talk to my manager, and apparently got told off by them, saying that employee safety was priority number 1. They gave me a snarky kind of look when they got back in their shitbucket of bolts, and prattled away
2:
When we get furniture donated, we take it into the back room and price it. If it's a piece of shit, we throw it out into this MASSIVE dumpster we have out back called the Roll Off. Anyways, there was this table with metal legs that I deemed to be craptacular, and unsuitable for sale. The general rule is, when throwing something out, breaking it into the smallest pieces possible so you can fit more in the dumpster. So, I turn up the table so it's legs are in the air (hehe) and pick up the medium handle length sledhammer (we have like, 8). My friend is sitting on a ratty couch watching all this. I give one leg a good whack with the sledge sideways, and it pops right out. Cool. Same happens with the other two. With the last one however, I whacked it, and it stayed stuck. Stubborn bitch. I give it another good whack, and a nut or something flies off of it, shoots right by my friends head, and cements itself in the wall. We were both a little bit antsy for a few seconds, but then we burst into total immature kiddy mode and started shouting about how awesome that was.
3:
You'd be suprised how many people dig through the dumpsters at value village. But, considering the crap we throw out, I can't blame em. I've thrown out a few really good tv's before because there was just no room for them on the floor. Anyways, it was a few weeks ago when I threw a broken desk into the roll off when I heard something shift. I thought it was just from me throwing something in, but then it happened again. Looking in, there was an old homeless guy digging through broken shit. "Why you guys gon break evything, eh?" he shouts to me. I point out it's illegal for him to be doing that, and he goes off on a tirade, saying stuff like "Does it make you feel good to tell a homeless man what to do?". I say no, but it's the law. We even have a big sign posted next to the dumpsters to that effect. I say that if he leaves now, I won't make a big deal out of it (I wouldn't anyways). He begrudgingly leaves, and I throw some more crap out. Not even a week later, it starts becoming a nightly occurance to have people doing this. So now we have to PADLOCK all our dumpsters at the end of the night
3:
Last but not least, some of the fun stuff I've done
- Put a golfclub through the screen of a tv
- Put a sledgehammer that was on the edge of the rolloff through the screen of a tv, dragging me up a few feet with it when it went in
- Busted apart a whole couch with a sledgehammer within 15 minutes (harder than it sounds)
-Put a 100 dollar price tag on at BEST a 50 dollar tv, and watched it sell the very next day
-Took christmas stock down from the top shelf that was covered with dust, threw it down, and watched the literal snowstorm of dust that resulted (And fell on my coworker)
-Had a cigarette on shift right next to my supervisor (He doesn't really care)
bout it
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