Stealing people’s comments from my Facebook page for blog post titles — I’ve hit a new low (thanks, Al).
We’re in the final stages of our massive store re-arrangement that we’ve been working on for the last three weeks. Today I spent the day on my knees, lying flat, doing a whole ton of screwing. Now, minds, out of gutters, ‘k? I had a drill, and I was screwing and unscrewing endcaps from bookshelves, and bookshelves from each other.
What did we do with the bookshelves? Some of them we’re keeping, and just rearranging within the store. Many were given away to some of our sister stores, what was left over was hauled out to the loading dock and thrown away. We had several people from other stores in to help, including one guy who showed up in slacks, a button-up, and a tie! A tie, really? For manual labor?
We dismantled the old Popular Fiction shelves, including Romance. And I got to have fun with a run of DVD shelving which refused to come apart.
Look — these are pretty solid, industrial shelving (y’know, ‘cept out of wood, not metal). They come in segments of two: Both units are built so that they lean into each other — a brace runs horizontally at the top, and vertically at the bottom, to keep them sturdy. Unscrew the upper brace, get the screws out of the sidewalls to detach it from the units on either side, pull it free, then remove the lower brace, then pull the units apart and lay them on their sides.
In any case, while most of the bookcases were open-topped, the media run had a top shelf, a “roof” if you will). The problem was that the “roof” made it nearly impossible to get to the screws on the top shelf-wall, which held it to the upper brace, so, I got creative, walked to the phone, and paged for a staff member to locate a crowbar and bring it over.
“Best announcement ever!” a coworker gave me a thumb-up on it.
Crowbar in hand, I got the roof off pretty quickly, and was then able to unscrew the unit from the crossbeam attaching it to the unit on the reverse.
“Um.” A manager said, looking at the assorted boards propped up against another bookshelf. Nails protruded at weird angles.
“You said take them apart.”
“Yeah … but …”
“You didn’t say how to take them apart.”
Right? Because if you tell me to break a bookshelf down, you don’t really have room to complain as to how I choose to do it, yes?
Also: I liked handling drills and crowbars today. Not only did I get a great workout today, what with walking to and from work, and then manhandling heavy pieces of furniture, but I got to feel uber manly!
Also: my feet hurt.