On the Hunt

There's always a slight amount of stress involved when I answer the phone at work.
Because there's no way to know what sort of customer is on the other end.
Are they just grooming customers that need to be transferred back to the grooming department?
Are they someone with a quick question that you can answer in two seconds?
Or are they the type of person who makes you hunt all over the store for a product, or else asks a gazillion questions that you may or may not know the answers to and you end up spending an eternity on the phone with them.....

Which means that when you're helping an actual customer in the store and the phone rings...it's always a game of Russian roulette on if you answer the phone while helping the person in the store...if you'll be able to quickly multitask and answer the phone customer's question...or end up in a bad situation where you're now helping two needy people at once. *Exhales* 

Thankfully....
This wasn't like that.
I wasn't helping a customer, I wasn't busy.
But the customer on the phone did have a need.

He called wanted to know if we had a specific brand of rat food in the store.
Oxbow Essentials. 

Which I know very well that we carry oxbow food.
But it always throws me off slightly when the customer adds in extra words like "Essentials" 
Because I don't always look closely at the packaging to see what all the little words under the brand name say.

So I had to go check to make sure that the Oxbow we had in the store actually was the Oxbow Essentials he wanted.

It was!!

Only....there was a small problem.
We didn't have the adult rat food in stock on the shelf. :S 
I mean I had the young rat food in stock,
but unfortunately the customer was in need of the adult food. 

A glance above in the overstock in the aisle showed that we had no extra food up there.

But instead of telling the customer that I didn't have any of that food in stock.
I told him I would put him on hold and check around the store.
As I knew that we had a truck come in today, so perhaps that food was on the truck.
After all, that particular section of the shelf had been empty for nearly a week now.
Which meant....either we'd lost the food somewhere in the store, or it should be coming in soon. 

A quick question to the manager, a check in our boxes off the truck....
Revealed no rat food.

Which left me with just one option left.

We've just started a new organizational thing where we have boxes of overstock product placed on the steel in our store. And thankfully, they've now been labeled with aisle numbers and the sort of things that are in the boxes.
Like :Aisle 5 Fish food and Filters.
That sort of thing.

Usually we don't get too much overstock in our small pet section. (unless the DC goes crazy sending us Hamster balls. :S ) 
But it was worth a shot to go look and see if somehow extra animal food had ended up up there.

I found the right box.
Could see that there were red bags up in it. (the boxes are clear) 
And upon grabbing a ladder and reaching the boxes.
Discovered where all our missing adult rat food was. lol.

There were five bags of the stuff in that box.
So when I got back on the phone with the customer and informed him that I had found his food.

He was extremely happy. :D lol. 
So grateful that I had found him his food, so he wouldn't have to try and find it elsewhere.

I ended up placing a bag on hold for him, just to ensure when he came in that he WOULD have a bag of food to buy.

As I doubted that someone would come in within the day and buy all 5 bags of rat food.
But it's better to be safe than sorry. 

Hopefully he got the food alright. :) 
I'm just glad I was able to help him out. :) 

-Sarnic Dirchi