13:06 - 11/30/2008
Politics
Happy birthday and happy Thanksgiving to my special friends of a US persuasion.
Hypothermia. After six hours of working in and around two commercial freezers full of grocery, seafood and meats, where the ambient air temperature is set for -18C/0F, even my body was beginning to succumb to hypothermia on Friday. I was dressed in a warm hoodie as well as headband and gloves. That would normally suffice for me. I had a team of between four to twelve counters plus three of our client's employees to assist with the movement of pallets in and out of those freezers. Even so, with a time limit of only 20 minutes for each pallet to be outside the freezer (health and food safety regulations) and a workspace so tight that movement of goods and personnel became an exercise in precise military logistics, it was somewhat stressful. Add in client staff who demanded access to that material when it was forbidden to allow them to do so and it just all seemed to be more than the body could handle. In addition, I had already worked 11 straight full days with the day before being a 12 hour shift, complete with a corporate showdown at the OK Corral. Me being caught in the middle for a good part of it as my area of responsibility became the scene of the shoot out. Oh yeah - stress to the nth degree.
On the Thursday shift, contract negotiations between the two corporate head offices came to a screeching halt when one eastern based who-ha decided to pull a one-man power play using the area under my supervision as the chessboard. The two heads of our area office arrived at the work-site once they had been apprised of the rogue action - a specific issue that had been under negotiation for several days. Suddenly, I was being directed in person by those two bosses while the two local headmen from the client stood by interacting with them, to work to the exact letter of the existing contract - a document written by people who had obviously never had to inventory a flow through/storage stockroom combined. A number of the conditions/actions of the contract required of front line staff from both sides of the agreement are only possible in the theoretical constructs of an idealized, non-existant work environment. Not enough staff, not enough equipment actually operating, not enough work space and not enough time to work through the time-space continuum for starters, and the fact that we are scheduled to work while the store is open for business, thus adding customer demands into the mix, were all factoring into the deadlock.
My work crew, as well as the client's, were also caught in the drama against their will, first by being ordered by various bosses to do one thing and then to do the exact opposite. Sometimes the two crews were ordered to physically remove themselves from the scene and then to return; sometimes separately and then sometimes together, all in full view of the shoppers milling around searching for holiday bargains. As I was standing by one of my bosses being instructed in minute detail what action I was to take next, I protested that my crew and I were being subjected to a hostile work environment because we were being used exactly like pawns on a chess board, by corporate bodies who didn't have the cojones to face each other directly across the table. Well I didn't use that term, but I spelled out the cowardice of the behaviour in many more words. He nodded slightly but didn't comment. By then, the locus of the action (shoot out)had narrowed to one of the client's department managers that I had been working with the past few days and me. The rest of the crews were out of the area standing huddled together on the sales floor. They were being taken through a painfully slow process on work that would have normally taken a tenth of the time to complete without the glare of senior management as well as shoppers' attention to boot. Maybe by seeing how unworkable some of the current terms of the contact are something good will come of it, but it was a very frustrating few hours in the meantime.
Anyway, when I arrived home around 8 pm yesterday after the freezer shift I ate, left a totally incoherent message for my youngest, then tried to let sleep and lots of heavy warm bedding repair the damage done to my body. I think I took two hot showers and ate again around noon on Saturday then slept for several more hours. I still didn't feel warm or co-ordinated physically again until late that evening. Also meant I didn't go to work yesterday either. Fact is I basically lost most of my memories of yesterday - but that's a symptom of hypothermia too. At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
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