25
It was the final months of Nineteen Eighty-Five. With the threat of
their store being unionized, the owners of the big grocery store, the
Svensons, decided to take all the money they could out of the store
on the week of the organizing vote, right down to getting their
last truck loads of groceries on credit from the suppliers, so
they could divvy-up the largest possible amount of money between
themselves. Once the Union was voted in, they'd have a big surprise
for us employees by promptly declaring the store out of business and
walking us all out and locking the doors behind us. The only problem
was, the Svensons had been such great people to work for that when
the vote was called, they won and the store wasn't unionized...
Now they were the ones surprised and all they had to do was
take most of the money out of their pockets and put it back into the
store.
Yeah, right.
They just couldn't bring themselves to do it. But at the same time
they had no excuse to walk away from the store as they had won the
vote and the store had been very profitable during its first year.
So their new plan was to continue running the store on credit until
its natural profit flow continued long enough to replenish the
store's operating cash. Meanwhile the unionized established chain
grocery store opened-up across the street and our curious customers
gave them a look. As a result our natural profit flow was tapered
down for the initial few weeks. The Svensons' first step to
temporarily boost the profits was to cut everyone about five hours
per week and just have the family members work additional unpaid
hours to make up the slack. The nephew who worked in our department
wasn't interested in that and left us. I don't know if he had
another job lined-up in town or if he moved back to their home state
of Minnesota to find new prospects among extended family and
childhood friends. We were down to our department head, Butch, and
the four of us employees. Three of us had been original hires who
had started at the store in the beginning, with the fourth one being
our new springtime hire who had turned out to be a pretty dependable
guy. With the loss of the nephew, our hours weren't reduced any
further as the next round of hour cutting came reducing the previous
forty hour full-time employees down to thirty hours.
Things were winding down for me at the Business College as well,
though in a different way. After two years of being just
under a full-time night student, I had exhausted the courses I could
take that would be transferable to the associated, accredited
College. While I could finish a handful more classes at the business
school and get my 'certificate of completion', transferring to the
accredited College was a no-brainer where one could get an
actual degree, then pursue a job in your chosen field. As a
no-brainer, more and more of the Business College students had
transferred over the past year and the once packed and thriving
'American Business College' was now about half full. It was deemed
that there was no longer any need to have both a nighttime and
daytime computer instructor and so the original nighttime instructor
had disappeared by the end of the spring quarter. The original
daytime computer instructor decided to leave at the end of the summer
quarter and for the fall quarter I discovered that I had the new
daytime computer teacher reporting to me as the most senior remaining
person, yet they made me his 'Teaching Assistant' as they needed me
to partially teach my final quarter at the school before transferring
to the big brother...
It turned out there were two other nighttime students and me needing
one last computer class. The daytime computer teacher couldn't work
nights and the school couldn't insist we take days as we had all
signed-up at the Business College under the agreement that we could
get all our classes at night. So, since I was already an employee
there as the Saturday computer room monitor & tutor, they asked
if I could teach my own final computer course there. This meant that
not only would I be paying for the class, I'd also get paid for it as
well. To make this 'legitimate' I was just assisting the
daytime teacher who would be officially teaching the course.
He would roughly give me the details of what to teach and when to
give pre-made tests, then I would review the material before hand and
teach it to the other two students, giving them unlimited one on one
attention as they did their coding projects as part of the class.
This extra income helped to supplement my reduced hours at the
grocery store so I wasn't left hurting at all.
But my co-workers at the store were feeling the pain and soon things
got worse. Our suppliers were no longer willing to deliver us stock
on credit and they let us know by just not having the trucks show up
one early morning. I don't know if the Svenson family had been
forewarned and just didn't believe it, but we employees showed up at
the store at our assigned times in the early morning and waited and
waited. We polished up the shelves as much as we could, but
there reaches the point that they can't look any more full without
the boxes and cans to fill them. We all ended-up in the break room
chatting amongst ourselves and tossing things around for fun for the
next four hours. Eventually the Svensons came in and got it
confirmed from the suppliers that if they didn't start paying their
back bills, they would not be getting any more stock. This would
have been a good time for them to 'invest' their windfall money they
got just before the union vote back into the store so all the bills
could be paid off. But they still wanted to stay the course and let
the profit flow catch-up to the waiting bills.
We were sent home by the sixth hour as the family negotiated a deal
with the suppliers where they would pay whatever daily profits they
had toward new groceries for each truckload, the suppliers would use
part of the money to pay off back bills, and then with the remaining
money, look over our order lists and pick & chose which boxes of
groceries would just use up the remaining money. This lead to
us repeatedly receiving half the stock we needed every couple of days
and soon the shelves of the store started to look sad and empty;
where once the shoppers had briefly checked-out the new grocery store
across the street, when they returned the customers found our store
looking tattered & depleted and lacking many of the staples
needed for their family's cabinets. The Svensons addressed this
problem by cutting their employee hours even deeper and Butch saw no
future at the store and left, leaving just us four employees to
manage our department for ourselves. While we did this for a week,
the Svensons didn't feel this would work in the long term. Not being
able to hire a new department head and, with more of the extended
family members abandoning the cause, they dubbed one of us four the
new department head. Of the four of us there was the well spoken
man with a year's experience, the classic rough & tumble blue
collar guy with over five years experience working at various
independent grocery stores, the stutterer with a decade's worth of
grocery store experience, and the 'new guy' with six month's worth of
experience. At least they didn't pick the 'new guy', and the
blue collar guy and myself had to walk the well spoken man through
the process of ordering stock and keeping the department's books. It
was a pretty easy time to do it as there was little else going on at
the mostly deserted store.
As the fall quarter came to an end at the Business College, my
students were very happy with the class I taught as, once we had
finished with each class's scheduled work, they would ask me to go
back to previous quarters' computer class material and help them with
the bits and pieces they had never quite mastered. With the fall
quarter done, nighttime computer programming classes went the way of
the Dodo bird leaving only the computerized accounting classes to use
the TI-990 at night. While the daytime classes continued,
halving the overall number of computer students also reduced the
number of students I needed to help on Saturdays. With my free time,
and a need to make up for lost hours at the grocery store, as the
head of the computer department, I assigned myself the job of
modernizing the college's 'Computerized Accounting' software.
What they had was originally written to work with card readers for
input and output. This code had been quickly patched to use the
keyboard and video monitor instead. This meant the accounting
students would look at a blank screen and have to type in their data
based on what column it would have been placed on the original punch
card. As they typed in this data at the blank screen, they would
then count the number of columns to skip with the space bar, then
type in the next bit of data. Without any prompts or feedback, the
students often got this data in the wrong columns as they'd discover
once entering in all the data and having the accounting software
crash due to having the wrong, or partial data in the fields. The
students could only start entering in all the data from scratch and
hoping to get it right on their second try... third try...
fourth try... The accounting teacher had been
very frustrated with this and when I told him of my new project he
was thrilled as I asked him what sort of features he was looking for.
As our big brother, accredited College worked on a three semester
year, rather than quarters like the Business College did, once I
finished the fall quarter I had just shy of two months free time
during the evenings to work on the code. Once done, I had given the
software a whole new interactive user interface with on screen
prompts and the ability to list and scroll up & down one's data
to insert or delete records, and make data changes as needed without
having to reenter anything. The accounting teacher was so happy with
the result that he sang my praises to the administration and no doubt
defrayed any hard questions they might have asked about my
dramatically increased paid hours.
With the money from the additional hours working at the school, and
not needing to make a partial payment toward my next set of classes
until the turn of the year, I was actually flush with cash as my
grocery store coworkers had to subsist on one third of our original
work hours for the Christmas season. It would have been worse, but
the 'new guy' wasn't going to take any more of it and left the
grocery store, just us original three employees for our department
remained. By the end of the year, the suppliers took the Svenson
family to court and this lead to the details, of where all the money
had gone, leaking out. The courts forced the store into bankruptcy
and the Svensons were all abruptly gone soon after New Years, to be
replaced by court appointed management.
It only took the courts two months to have the store back to
full working
order and thriving.
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