Yellowstone Adventure 2016 - Day 1

   Welcome to day 1 of my official working at Yellowstone National Park.  In case I never mentioned this before the place I work at is called the Old Faithful General Store and my dorm is right behind the general store. The place I park at is right by the dorm with an overflow parking lot in the back.  The place where workers take their meals is connected to the general store and seats about 35 workers at a time.  The place is referred to as the Employee Dining Room (EDR) and is run by a very lovely couple James and Kathy who have several helpers to prepare the meals.  Today as part of my first day I received an official tour of the place and it was an eye opener.  The general store sells clothes, groceries and various souvenir items.  Inside the general store there is also an ice cream parlor and a café where people can order breakfast items as well as lunch items.  After the tour of all the parts visible to the general public we were treated with a tour of the stock room located underground and attached to the general store via a nice long tunnel.  The stock room is located under the parking lot between the dorm and the general store.  In fact the emergency exit for the stock room opens up into the basement of my dorm where the recreation and laundry rooms are located.  I could not believe how much stock is located in the underground facility.  Rows and rows of t-shirts, sweatshirts, hood jackets, ball caps, and various souvenirs.  I asked Michelle how the stock gets into this facility and she informed me that they have a crew that works in the winter to travel to all their various stock rooms and put all the merchandise bought for the next season onto the shelves.  The shelves are pretty organized as the sizes of all things start with small being closest to the floor and move up in sizes as you increase in shelf height.  So all day long workers are taking merchandise from the underground storage area and restock the shelves in the public area.  There are workers whose sole job during the day is to check the public areas stock and then make a list of what is needed to be restocked.  The list is brought down into the underground area and workers there will gather all the items on the list.  Taking care to put clothing on hangers and have all hangers labeled with the proper size.  Then someone takes the stock back up to the store and restock the various areas.  This goes on and on each day and it is interesting to watch.  The reason I know so much about this procedure is that I worked for the manager in the underground for most of the day today while the trainers went through training all the new cashiers. We had 9 new cashiers to be trained, and I was one of them, but they could only train 3 at a time.  So my group was last and during this time I worked for Michelle in the underground store room.  My job was to get the list from the worker and then find the stock in the unground storage area and present it properly to the worker who would be taking it back upstairs.  For the first couple of hours it was like an Easter egg hunt.  I would go on the trail of the stock and then praise God that I found it before I turned a year older.

  After lunch I got called by my cashier manager Garth, yes his name is Garth and he is a pretty good guy.  He introduced myself and Kathy and Kathy’s husband Tom to John who would be training us.  You know we have 4 or 5 workers named Cathy working with us in the general store.  John took us all upstairs to the fishing tackle section and used the cash register located there to train on.  John did a pretty good job of introducing us to the point of sale system and all the things that were out of the ordinary when it comes to running the cash register.  If all the sales were just cash and credit then the process is pretty straight forward, but alas there are some things that need special attention.  Such as a person buying the goods and wanting us to ship them (which they do) or a person paying with a traveler’s check or an underage person trying to buy alcohol or someone wanting to buy a fishing license.  All these take special care and different procedures that I am sure I will have to call for help to get them done the first time or two.

   Once the cash register training was done we were taken back to Garth, stop laughing that is his name, and he issued us all our initial $300 and a safe deposit key and box where we are to store the money.  This money will stay with us all through our employment as this is the seed money to put in our registers at the start of the day.  At the end of the day we put all but our $300 into the safe and put our seed money back into the safe deposit box.  Once we do that, then we are free to clock out.  We clock in and out using our badges.  Tomorrow will be my first day on a cash register so please say a prayer that I do everything as well as I can. 

   Just to show you that they treat us well here.  The lunch today was steak and bake potatoes and I just got back from an ice cream social with all the workers of the general store.  The ice cream social also turned into a birthday party for Carrie our manager.  They are good people and God even lead me to meet a couple named Pam and Jerald who were not shy talking about God.  They are from Arkansas and Jerald is a former minister.  Pam and Jerald are the custodians for our facilities this week and they seem to be very nice.  I also got to work with a young man named Race today.  He is named Race because his dad liked to race cars.  He is a nice young man who is trying to get his head straight on what he wants to do in life. He said working Yellowstone will give him time to think and to earn some money.  I also met Steve and his wife Leanna (not sure how it is spelled).  Steve is from England and his wife is from Mexico.  Very nice couple and it was good to pick their brains about life outside the U.S. 

  Well that is all I have for now as I am going to bed early.  This working for a living is pretty tiring.  Take care and stay well.