March 2022 - The quietest month?

I think March may have been the quietest month I had ever had. I just didn't seem to do anything or really go anywhere, I'm not quite sure why!

I think part of it was to do with the week of night shifts I did at the start to get everything into Spring layout. Which involved moving pretty much everything on the ambient department. Most of it went without a hitch, but it was alcohol, particularly wines that just took forever. Every bottle had to move, red and white wines swapped places, every shelf had to be cleaned, dusty bottles wiped down, and everything moved. It took me and my trusty sidekick Mel a lifetime to do it, and incredibly, we didn't break a single bottle. That was a new record! We also got these new navigation boxes to help customer find particular national wines, and we had a laugh doing it as well. So the end result was worth it.

It was horrific though, there was stuff all over the place, and I wish I had taken before pictures to compare. Post Christmas, New Year's and Valentine's events meant that the Prosecco shelves were empty, and we seemed to have triple the amount beers that we actually needed. And surprise surprise, when I counted all the stock of beers, we did indeed have triple the amount! Talk about an intelligent stock system!

I needed some serious rest after a week of nights!

This was then followed by my worst nightmare, public speaking. God I hate it. We had a training session at work, in which myself and the other managers were to each take a group and present a 20 minute information session. There were to be three groups of sales floor and backstage/operations staff. I was presenting about Ambient, and more specifically, how to upsell on the Beers, Wines and Spirits department. I won't lie, I had written myself a script to get myself through it, and I got the team to try two different exercises. One, was to try and help Mel (our wine expert, pretending to be a dim witted customer) in choosing a wine. I did a talk about how to find out information from the bottle and labels, such as country of origin, the aroma's, flavours and notes of the wine, and also by other more specific information, such as Vegan or sulphate free wines. We did two runs, one where I talked them through it, and the other where I only intervened where it was going wrong (Like when Mel asked for a white wine and they tried to give her a red). But I think it went really well. For the second part, I got them to taste a wine, we brought in some small shot glasses, gave them a taste of one of the wines, then gave them three bottles, and by looking at each of the bottles and noting the taste profiles, to see if they could guess which one they had tried. I think one of the groups got it, but the others didn't. It was the final group that caused a problem. I had just gone through the bottle information and had set them up with trying to upsell a wine to Mel, when I realised, this was the group that had three underage people. That threw a spanner in the works. I ended up grabbing a non alcoholic wine for them to try, and because we only had the one, got them to express what flavours were in it and how they could describe it. Phew, lawsuit and loss of alcohol license averted! We had three groups, and overall, I felt it went ok. At the end, the team all gave feedback, which was all really positive. Thank god. I did tell the store manager that it had been my one public speaking event of the year, and there was to be no more until 2023. She laughed, but refused to promise that. We then to the pub afterwards for a congratulatory drink. I think I needed it!

Both these pictures make me laugh, we found tumbling monkeys at the back of a cupboard when clearing out. I've not played since I was a kid, and it was hysterical, particularly when James somehow managed to flick two monkeys up and onto my stick which meant he had won! Perhaps he had been practicing! And this squirrel, I was visiting my Nan and Grandad, who told me they had just brought a new bird feeder in the hope the squirrel wouldn't be able to take the food. No sooner had they said it, this squirrel appeared, took it as a challenge, and ate the lot!

And this was just the funniest thing, after dinner with a friend, I was walking home to see this seagull stood browsing the glasses at the opticians. His eyesight must have been bad, because he didn't seem to notice the store was closed!