An interesting week for sure. This week all the employees were called into an after hours meeting. This meeting was called by the store supervisor to discuss the parks up coming 4 hour scheduled power outage. It seems the park has to do some transformer work and decided, not my vote, to do the work in the middle of the day from ten AM to 2 PM. The boss went over what was expected of each of us. The fountain, which is where they cook food in the store, will be shut down all that day. The freezers and the refrigerators, that hold perishable items, will be locked or blocked shut. This will prevent any tourist from opening them during the outage. The cash registers will only run for about 15 minutes after the power goes off. After that only credit card transactions will take place. When items are brought to a register, then runners will go and hunt all UPC bar codes and prices for items that are not marked. In my grocery, there is no item that has any prices marked on it. So I spent my time running back and forth between the grocery and the registers to get the cashier the prices and item description. It was an interesting experience and I hope we do not have to do this again before my contract is over. The bright spot of the whole thing was that the tourists were all respectful of the effort we had to make in order to keep the store open during the power outage. The power came back on after 4 hours and 35 minutes and a cheer was heard all over the store from us workers.
The second thing that happened this week was we had to say good bye to a worker. This guy not only stole from the store, but he had a few other issues that I will not go into. Needless to say those in the dorm were happy he was on his way out of the park, via a park ranger escort. I said a few prayers for this guy, but talking to our second in command, I got the impression that he would not learn any lesson from this incident. We discussed and agreed that if Delaware North would do in person interviews, that many of these personnel issues would be filtered out way ahead of time. They really don't do any phone interviews anymore and there are no drug tests given, mostly due to states allowing marijuana sales now. So what happens is they arrive and finally show themselves for who they really are and Delaware North expects the store manager to handle the issue. Not a good way of doing business, but I can tell it is very hard to find people to work here and sometimes HR just wants a bean count.
In the next couple of weeks we will be getting more employees to help run the store. We also may be expanding our hours of operation. I don't know if I am looking forward to that or not, as I like getting off at 6 and not having to go into work until 9AM.
I am getting a lot of steps in working in the grocery, as well as getting a lot of somewhat heavy lifting daily. This last week I got 90,097 steps in. Which translates to roughly 42 miles of walking back and forth in the store putting up stock. That is just 5 days of work. I don't count any of the steps I get in on my days off, because I try to give my legs a break then.
This past week I also had a birthday. 64 years old and still going strong. Praise the Lord. I want to thank all those that wished me a happy birthday and I want to thank the social security administration for reminding me that I have 9 months to figure out what to do about medicare.
We still have a pine marten in the store and now a chipmunk running around eating our grocery items. They opened a large bag of peanut M&Ms and only ate one or two. Then they opened a large bag of peanut butter M&Ms and went through the whole bag. The ravens are getting bolder every day with the tourists who are dumb enough to feed them.
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| A raven taking interest in my breakfast |
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| This is what happens when a raven thinks there is something in the seat. |
The snow is melting, but since there was such a big snowfall this year it will take some time. Below is a picture I took today of Lewis Lake on the way to the Tetons. It is still frozen over and wiol be for awhile I assume.
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| Lewis Lake |
The sad thing about today's trip to the Tetons, was that the drought is still not over. They had an incredible amount of snow but the lake is still not filled enough for Coulter Bay to be used for large boats. Only kayaks will be allowed to use the access.
I saw my first Grizzly today. I was heading into the Tetons when up ahead was a traffic jam. Usually that means people were watching something. Sure enough, it was a grizzly. The rangers were there to keep the traffic moving and make sure that the tourists don't do anything stupid.
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| The traffic jam created by the grizzly watchers |
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