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January 23, 2006

Accusations

At my job, I stare at Excel Spreadsheets all day long. On these spreadsheets, the pricing and discount information for hundreds of different wines are shown. There is a different spreadsheet for each company (Grocery Stores) that I do their pricing. Most of these spreadsheets, otherwise known as Pricing Contracts, can be completed in half a day, or maybe even less.

Except for ONE. This one company has been a royal pain in my rear since I took over their pricing in June. Unlike the other chains, this one will not accept an emailed copy of my spreadsheet. No! They want me to go onto their website and put in their pricing into their system item by item. This company will for here on out be refered to as "PitaCo"

To start off I was handed a 200pg stack of pages, their price book, with every item they carry and which of their stores carry it. This book still had items in it that had been discontinued a year or two prior. None of my company's item numbers were correct and they had 4 or 5 different UPCs for the same item, and all of the UPCs were off but just by one digit, clearly they were typos and no one in their company was going to take the time to figure out which one was right.

It took me a good two weeks to transfer everything in that price book onto a spreadsheet. I then called and said, here are the changes and they said "Oh no, you must mark the changes on the book and SnailMail it to us. Then we will go in and make the changes and it will show up on the PriceBook we send you next week." I mailed it to them. That was in June. They STILL haven't made all of those changes.

Their website is slower than Christmas. For each item I have to enter what is called a "deal." It has you enter the discount amount, the valid dates, the applicable stores and then the item number. In between each of these tidbits of information you have to tell it to go to the next page. I can literally hit go, get up, go to the bathroom, go get coffee and come back it this dumb website is still thinking. Each month I get to put in about 180 deals. This process takes me a 5 or 6 days.

Each Tuesday I get a new price book. It shows the deals that are active that week. I go thru the price book every week and compare it to my spreadsheet. It never fails that they will have gone in and changed something from the prior week.

After receiving this massively annoying chain under my responsibilities in June, I finally felt like I had caught up and was on top of their pricing by the time the November contracts rolled around. I spoke too soon.

When it came time to put in the pricing for the December contract, the infamous "ExcelLady" who was my boss before I was rescued and brought over to the new office, told me to put in all of the December deals for all my contracts ending on December 31st, since it had yet to be determined what day they were going to end our fiscal year. This was no big deal for the rest of my contracts, because as soon as I was given the date January 7th, I just shot off a couple of emails and all was good.

But oh no. "PitaCo" said that I had to go onto the website and put in a new deal for every item with the dates Jan 1 - Jan 7th. Needless to say, I got a little behind there for a while trying to redo that contract that I had already completed and still keep on top of the other 9 companies I do pricing for.

Then I started the January contract, and I finished it. Two days later I receive an email from them saying.. we have added a new store, please go onto the system and put deals in for this store. This store will carry all of the same items as store #94. Um, Store #94 carries basically every wine we carry, or at least it seemed like it.

I finally got January done for the 2nd time. This was the second contract in two months that I had to completely re-do through no fault of my own and I was getting ticked. I get February half done before I get another price book and I noticed that there are all these stores showing no deals. I call and say "What the Heck?" and they are like oh, yeah. That store just finished remodeling and has a bigger wine section so we just added all those items to it. So NOW I get to go back and REDO January for a third time adding the wines to the newly remodeled store. And I have to go REDO the half the of February contract that I already had done.

Needless to say, I worked on NOTHING but "PitaCo" the past week and a half.

After getting some much needed rest and getting a lot of unpacking and organization done on my condo this weekend, and after changing my work schedule from 8am-5pm to 9am-6pm, I showed up at work, all dressed up in a *Gasp* dress and hose and high heels and felt comfort that I indeed would not have to look at "PitaCo" for at least another two weeks.

DAMN IT!

About 10:15 my boss's boss. The wonderful man who rescued me from the "ExcelLady" and brought me over to this nice new office with nice and friendly and social people came into my office to ask me a question. And what question was that do you ask?

"Why doesn't "PitaCo" have any pricing for January or February?" Gulp. This my friends is the third month in a row someone has come to me to ask why "PitaCo" didn't have their pricing. After being accused of not doing my job, I get out the price book and show them in black and white the deals that are in the system.

The price book only shows deals that are current, in this case January, if there was one. It only shows if there are February deals if there wasn't a deal for that item in January. I was able to show my boss's boss that there were indeed deals listed starting on 01/08/06 and deals showing starting on 01/29/2006

I am extremely anal retentive and obsessive complusive and a perfectionist when it comes to work. For anyone to walk into my office and accuse me of not doing my work just throws me off kilter and ruins my mood for the rest of the day.

I was finally, after three months, able to talk to the person who keeps starting these accusations. He works for our company, only in another branch office. He also gets a price book every week. After basically going page by page with this guy showing that my price book showed that deals were in the system and active, I realized that "PitaCo" has been sending this guy the wrong price book for the past I don't know how many months.

Apparently, the branch he works for used to be the physical location of a company that we bought out and took over, um SIX YEARS AGO. "PitaCo" has never bothered to move the wines and beers over under our company's name and just left them under the old name and added 'DoingBusinessAs' in front of it. So, since he is in the branch office of the old company he has been getting the old company's price book which hasn't shown any pricing for the past 7 months that I have been doing it.

So, today we called them and told them to start merging the two price books. I am not looking forward to seeing the new price book when it arrives. It is going to have quite a few new items and none of them are going to have deals for them in the system. So, therefore I am going to get to, you got it, REDO February for the third time.

Its a good thing I work for a liquor company because I need a drink.

Posted by FutureFoodTVStar at January 23, 2006 05:53 PM

Comments

Posted by: Kami at January 23, 2006 08:41 PM