Focus

 It's often a good thing when you have coworkers who are eager to help out. Eager to learn.

As it makes it easier to get things done, to finish tasks, to have an extra pair of hands.

But at the same time...we sometimes have coworkers who are....well too energetic?

Like they're an eager puppy ready to jump to the aid of whoever needs help...but like they have a two minute attention span and if they're easily distracted by the next 'shiny' new thing they see.

Which is what happened tonight.

I had a coworker who had a couple of hours to help us out and I directed them to help us with a particular pallet in petcare.

As we have inventory later this week and we have to work a truck and get it all out onto the floor before said inventory happens.

And the pallet was huge. Like taller than I was. 

And I set my coworker to go get as much of it done as they could before they had to be elsewhere in the store.

Only....it seemed like every two minutes...I would catch the coworker elsewhere.

Namely, in the petcare department.

Which yes, it's easy to get distracted there as we're constantly doing things, talking to customers, catching animals, etc.

And this coworker is so very eager to help out in petcare. Wanting to catch fish and bag crickets and do water tests and such and basically stick next to my petcare associate like a shadow and follow them wherever they went to see what they were doing to learn from them.

*exhales*

It got frustrating. To constantly have to be like "Hey, we really need you working on this pallet. Can you go back to the pallet, we need help with stocking." Like FOCUS person FOCUS. 

In the end I think they only managed to get like...a third of it done? Maybe half? I'm not sure how tall the pallet was to begin with.

But it was still pretty huge when said coworker had to go do their other responsiblities in the store.

Leaving me with a half worked pallet...that needed to be finished before we left for the day. *exhales*

I ended up putting away almost everything else on it by myself. 

Not surprisingly I was much quicker at it than my coworker even with the constant calls up to the register and around the store to go help other customers.

And by the end of the day I just had the 'overstock' stuff. Product that wouldn't fit on the shelves, that needed to be placed in our midsteel.

And like...I was proud that I managed to get it basically all done before we left.

But it still left me irritated that I ended up having to finish the pallet in the first place as my coworker should have been able to have done a lot more than they did if they hadn't been so focused on getting distracted by what was happening in petcare. 

*exhales*

At least the stuff got done.

But yah...gonna have to figure out a better way to get this coworker to focus on the job at hand...

-Sarnic Dirchi