Over the past couple of months, I have been writing about the three years I worked at Radio Shack when I was in college.

It was an interesting time working there. It definitely opened my eyes to what the working world was like as this was my first real long term job.

Up until then, I had only worked mowing lawns and a couple summers as a camp counselor. There was also the short month I worked at a department store.

In my past posts, I have alluded to inventory and how excrutiating it was. Let me expound upon that for you.

At the end of each year we had to inventory all of the merchandise that we carried at the store. This would usually take two to three long days of work.

The workers would come in early and start counting basically everything in the entire store. Imagine having to count every individual package of diodes, resistors, fuses, connectors, etc. It was horrible.

The worst part was, we couldn't close the store, we still needed to do business, so we would have people coming in and buying stuff from sections we had already counted.

This meant more work we had to do when it came time to reconcile. It is amazing the number of employees who would magically be sick during inventory each year.

I don't think I missed a single inventory day the entire time I worked there.

Basically, we would spend all day counting and helping out customers and then work well past our closing time at 9:00 PM continuing to count. We would each tackle a different section of the store and the back storeroom until we were totally finished.

After we had done our initial count, the manager would go into the system and print a report that showed the numbers the system said we had compared to the numbers we actually input.

From there, we would have to visit each item where the numbers didn't match up and figure out if we had just counted wrong or something else was going on.

Sometimes, items would get pegged on the wrong peg and mixed in with a similar looking, but different item. Errors like that were very hard to track down at times.

About the only good thing about doing inventory was the manager would buy us free pizza on the late nights that we were there working.

Carrying on with the theme of annoying things at Radio Shack, let me tell you about a couple more things.

There were certain items that we carried in our store that people seemed to think were there for rental purposes. For example when the Family Radios came out (basically high powered walkie talkies with a range of a couple of miles) they were pretty expensive. $100 to $200 for a pair was not uncommon.

It never failed that once a month we would have someone come in on a Thursday or Friday and buy a set of them. They would then come back in on Monday and tell us how they didn't work for them or that they didn't get the distance they had hoped for.

We knew full well they had used them all weekend and were really just borrowing them. It was really hard to not ask them how their trip was when we knew they were blatantly lying to us.

The same was true with power inverters back before they were more common in vehicles. People would buy them so they could hook their TV up in their car for a long trip and then bring them back afterwards claiming it didn't work out for them. If we hadn't been paid on commision, it probably wouldn't have been so annoying.

I have just a couple more stories about my time at Radio Shack and I will probably cover them next week. Stop back for the final post in this series. The good news is, my time at Radio Shack trasnitions right into my next job and I am going to post some about that as well.

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