The Last Year Part 5

Early 80’s Pallet Coordinator: I don’t have exact dates for this role at Safeway, but it was before the move to California. This position was a risk for me. I had applied to be a warehouse supervisor a few times at Bellevue, but never got the job. The pallet coordinator job was a position where the pay dropped from my Teamster rate, as it was a non-union, but still hourly job at a payrate less than a warehousemen. I took the job. This was technically a clerk type job (with that kind of pay rate), but it was really a negotiator job dealing with hundreds of companies that sold stuff to Safeway. I started out in a little unused office that was in the way back of the grocery warehouse. Lucky me, I did have a window to the outside, so that was nice. As pretty much a person without a boss (The DC manager was my official boss, for time cards etc. but he left me alone). I had free reign around the DC, collecting forms from all of the operations for stuff that was removed from the center (Pallets mostly, but also anything an employee had permission to remove). I arranged for loads of pallets to be sent to vendors, as tallied the pallets they sent into us. The difference between them was my pallet banks that I had spread all over Washington and Oregon, as well as farther places, mostly Safeway manufacturing plants. Easy enough right? Add pallets in, subtract pallets out, and that’s your number. Well, no. Pallets have grades. There are prime pallets that are all that officially could be exchanged. Those 4-way pallets without significant broken boards, without secondary rails (The 2x4 frame) are what could be counted for credit. Anything else, softwood, broken, doubled rails, broken boards were disqualified from exchange counting. Of course, that gave rise to all sorts of disagreements. A vendor hated to send in 20 pallets and only get credit for 17 for example. Also, it was a never ending struggle to have the warehouse receivers properly judge the quality of the pallets that arrived under product. Ok. This tally of pallets started out in big binder books, with accounting paper used for the calculations. Think of a paper check book register. When Safeway decided to buy its first PC (actually an IBM XT with a 10 MB Harddrive), it was my chance to jump on that, and learn how the thing worked. About this time I moved from my little office back to the Box Shed, not as a supervisor, but just to hang out there, do all of the supervisor stuff, but retain my deceptive role as the pallet coordinator. Similar to the work at the Safeway store, the powers that be got a bargain out of my official job. I started logging a few hours of overtime every day, there wasn’t much they could do to argue against it. Anyway, there was a project to equip all of the individual warehouses with electronic time card systems. So all of the housed needed a PC. I was selected to be on the team of Train the Trainers, and that was a good thing for me. Cemented my growing reputation of being the PC guy. Now with a PC (now updated to what they called an IBM AT with a 20mb harddrive, I was in business. The main program that was used for EVERTHING was Lotus 123, a precursor to Microsoft’s Excel. We used it for little spreadsheets, some people used it for a word processor (Wordperfect was the official WP program). SO I build pallet tracking systems, DC Cost and income systems, and made pretty much anything else, any of the managers needed. I built this one really complex sheet, lots of macros etc. that the DC manager went to a headquarters meeting and tried to claim as his own creation. No one believed him. That got the attention of the head of transportation (Trucks) at the head office. The next time he came up to Seattle he asked to meet the guy who built that complex computer model. That was me. Within a couple weeks, he had offered me a job at the Oakland headquarters. That’ll be in the next installment.