Left Out

It was towards the end of my lunch break when my manager came into the break room with a concern.

We'd gotten in a shipment of our feeder goldfish earlier that morning.
Like around 9:30 or 10am or so. As I saw one of the delivery guys approaching the office with packages. A walk by a little bit later showed that there was a box of our feeder goldfish waiting by the office. 
Being in the middle of something, I made a mental note to get to it later.
Which was a mental note to work on that task after I got off lunch.

But my manager beat me to it.

He opened the box.
And what did he find?
1100 goldfish.
Dead. 

And he was super concerned that it was our fault. That we'd left the fish to sit in the box too long -as from his perspective the box had been there before he showed up, therefore he didn't know how long that box had been waiting to be opened for. 
And because we hadn't gotten to the fish in time, we'd been the reason why the fish had died.

Hardly. 
I was quick to reassure him that it wasn't our fault.

After all the fish -both feeder goldfish and our fish shipments- spend hours in the boxes and usually end up fine, even if we don't get to them right upon them arriving to the store.
So them sitting in a box in our store unopened for a couple of hours wouldn't be the issue.

No.
More than likely what happened was that because the weather has become much warmer recently. 80s and 90s....the fish probably were left on a dock in the sun, or in an unconditioned truck for a few hours...and the fish got too hot...and died. 

Thankfully, this occurrence happens rarely. But when it does happen....it usually happens around this time of year when the weather heads towards summer.
I don't recall there ever being a 99% fatality rate though.
Over half yes, but not almost all of them.

My manager and I proceeded to open the bags of dead fish and sift through them to catch the few lucky survivors who didn't perish in the heat.

There ended up being around 30 of them when all was said and done.
And it was doubtful that those few would even make it through the night. :S 

So instead of placing the survivors in the tanks on the floor to sell, we put them in a tank we had set up behind our fish wall, to see if they'd make it or not.

I hope they do.
Though by the time I left work ten more of them had already died....

So we'll see. 
:S
But hopefully our replacement shipment turns out better than this one. :S 

-Sarnic Dirchi