Crazy Day!

Have you ever had one of those days when you thought that nothing could get any worse, and then it did? Well, today was one of those days...

I got to work at Trader Joe's, only to find out that during the night all of the refrigerators have broken. So ALL the meat and deli stuff is completly spoiled. We can't sell it (unless we wanted people to eat it, get E coli, then sue, which was a possibility but eventually was decided against becasue of financial difficulties...hehe), so we have to spoil it all. Eventually the repairman for the refrigerator gets there and starts fixing the refrigerator, until we discover that during the night the defrost sequence didn't start up so all the fans are completly iced over. The other manager goes back to chip the ice off the fans and Elena starts me on spoiling all the meat (that means we record what went off, so we can send the dollar amount to the insurance company). So we go over to the register so I can start scanning all that putrid, leaking, icky, smelly, raw meat and find that it's not working either. She calls some place to have them remotely turn them on and after about fifteen minutes on the phone they get a whopping three of the eight stations working. Oh well, that can be fixed later. I get my gloves on to start going through the four overflowing carts of meat when Caleb (one of the guys who works there) walks by and says "Do you hear that hissing? It sounds like a gas leak." About thirty seconds later we're told to evacuate the building.

Fortunately for us, it was not a gas leak (though, in my opinion, it would have been fun to see the building blow up j/k) instead while the manager was chipping ice off the fans he hit a line in the refrigerators and released a poisioneous gas into the whole store. What fun!! So with freon gasses flowing through the store and about twenty minutes until we are supposed to open all of the employees are sitting out by one of the cart corrals speculating about what exactly would happen if someone died from freon exposure. Caleb called his science-major friend and we discovered that freon robs the air of oxygen and then if it gets heated it can become toxic (which was really bad news for the repairman who had to weld the tube back together...he survived though).

About forty minutes later we were told to go back into the building becasue everything was taken care of, but of course it wasn't. So it was back outside. Finally, the leak was taken care of and so we got to open up the store about an hour late (which makes for some pretty disgruntled customers), and I got to spoil my four carts of putrid meat. Nobody died. The end.