Thursday, March 25, 2010

What are the odds

OK, so, I know all that about how the human mind looks for patterns and picks up on them, while it ignores other non-pattern events ... but still, this is weird. :-)

I worked overtime on Tuesday, in fact a whole bunch of us did ... getting a lot of little chores done that we haven't gotten around to because of a ridiculous turf war we've got going on at work right now. I was relabeling some shelves when I noticed that some of the turnbuckles were ... not broken, cause they were totally fixable, but just had some parts missing. Some nuts and bolts were gone. I got some new ones off the shelf and just fixed them then and there, but I was thinking that I might as well not bother, cause when do we ever sell these things anyway. I don't think I've sold a single one since we moved. o_O Anyway, I fixed them up.

Then on Wednesday one of the sales guys from one of the daughter companies was wandering around the store with a customer and shouting for me ... and at first I couldn't figure out what he was saying, because it seemed so unlikely, but he was asking where I keep the the turnbuckles! :-D And even weirder, we have the things in three sizes, and the ones that I fixed the day before was the size he needed. o_O He actually needed more than we had, even. I ordered some more for him. But what are the odds.

It gets even weirder though, because today another customer came in and, get this, I asked if there was anything I could help him with, and he said Yes, do you have any turnbuckles in stock? WTF?? I haven't sold any of these things for what, eighteen months, or more ... then this. If someone comes in tomorrow wanting some of them I'm going to really freak. :-) What are the odds. :-D

5 comments:

Paz said...

those patterns are what religious people call acts of God :P
again I had to google what a turn buckle was, Irish people don't get bogged down in technical terms, those would be on the 'Thingamajig' shelf in between the 'Yokemabob' and the 'Whatyamacallit' shelves. joking we call them couplings

Trilltrall said...

Great story!

I wondered too, so:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnbuckle

Curious about the turf war???!! Tell us more Leisha!

Leisha Camden said...

Paz: in Norwegian we have two names for them, one real name and one that people use. ;-) They're really called 'stretch screw' but people mostly call them 'stretch fish'. I guess they do kind of look like fish a little ... :-D

We keep them on the bottom thingummy shelf, anyway.

Trilltrall: Basically, there are five different companies in this building, all subsidiaries of the one mother company. One of these groups have decided that they have too much to do (although that's not the case), and they've decided to fix that by unilaterally declaring that we'll just have to do a major part of their job from now on. They couldn't cope so just basically stopped doing their jobs. I wish I could fix my problems that easily, don't you?? I'll tell you the details later, if you're sure you really want to know ... >:-)

Paz said...

that happened me in my last job, I was expected to carry out my own work and carry others, hope things work out for you

Leisha Camden said...

The sad thing is that the reason they couldn't handle it isn't because their workload was too big, but because they're not competent enough. >:-(