m&ms487

I survived the great fire of '07
So, I took a five hour cashier shift from six thirty to eleven thirty tonight because I'm trying to get to fourty hours every week. Little did I know that I was in for an exciting night.

At about ten thirty alarms started going off in the back of the store. Me being on a lane, I couldn't really go see, so I just told everyone to not worry about it...we would have gotten evacuated if it was serious. So, they keep going. Ten or fifteen minutes later all of our lanes go down (there were about seven of us). It sucked because we couldn't ring anything up, we had to scan it, put in dept. 10 (grocery) and then a price. Hard to do if it doesn't have a price on it, or it's on sale. Anyway, so the s.c. comes over and tells me to shut off my light, and I was going to the gas station because they had the same problem.

So, at eleven, I go up to the gas station. Their registers were down, you couldn't even sign into them. So, I called back down to the store (luckily, because a few minutes later the whole phone system went down) and I said that there was nothing I could do. So, we decided to close down the gas station. I also found out there was a small fire in the computer room where all of our servers that run the store (and gas station because they're connected) were.

So, we got out some good old "caution tape" and some trash cans and chairs and blocked off the two exits into the gas station. The pumps were still working, but we couldn't ring anyone up...so we didn't want people filling up and then getting it for free.

By this time, there are tons of police and fire trucks and flashing lights everywhere, and I learn that I'm "in charge" of the gas station, and they had to evacuate everyone from the store due to carbon monoxide.

Finally, they let everyone back in, but we had to have the customers leave because we had absolutely no way to check them out. So, I made a trip back down to the store to see what they wanted me to do. I went back up to the gas station to "be in charge" and I sat outside on a folding chair telling people we were closed.

Then, a lady that was "high up" came and told me that the lanes were back on. Of course, she was misinformed, and they weren't, and as we were talking, a second round of firetrucks and police come back to the store. It was one fifteen, and I was going to be on overtime, so I had to leave.

All the firemen had to say was "it's going to be a while" before our system was going to be up again. The corporate lady said it was just one server and IT was on the way. Of course, that was before the second round of firetrucks and police.

Anyway, this all means that I got two extra hours in (that means forty for this week!) and Meijer will be closed for a while. This is really bad for them, since we are an expressway store, and Friday is one of the busiest days of the year for us because people stop on their way up north to buy all of their camping food and equipment.

So that was my exciting story for the night. If anyone knows anything more, please let me know!

michelle

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