Monday, January 22, 2018

Desert View - Day 73 - (Shutdown day 3) - What the....

5:56 am - Monday - January 22nd - Grand Canyon - 5º F (feels like -2º F), humidity 71%, wind - CALM......forecast high for today is 37º F with partly cloudy skies.....BP 125/77.

We slept in til after 8 am thinking we did not have to go to work, but about 10 am there was a knock on the door.  It was our assistant manager there to advise that the meeting we had the prior morning in which we were told, in no uncertain terms, that our store would remain closed for the duration of the government shutdown was a complete misrepresentation of the actual facts.  The manager, apparently, had completely misreported the information from the compay meeting he attended on Friday.  How it is possible to completely misunderstand what was being said in a meeting held expressly for the purpose of discussing the government shutdown and its ramifications for the Grand Canyon operations I have no idea.  As it turns out our store should have been OPEN, not CLOSED on Saturday......the government shutdown was having NO effect on operations at the Grand was business as usual.....the gates were not closed, the roads were plowed, and everything was like a normal weekend.....all NPS employees were working......nothing, not one single thing, we were told was correct.  At any rate the assistant manager (in no way at fault for what had happened) was there to tell me I needed to report for work at my earliest convenience as some of our employees (lucky them) had left Desert View immediately after the completely unnecessary, bogus Saturday morning meeting to go visit family, etc.  To say I was a little out of sorts about this news is an understatement.  To be fair, I was scheduled to work on Sunday before the government shutdown happened at 12:30 pm.  After getting myself together I walked through the snow over to work arriving just before 11 am to a store devoid of customers.

If I was the manager and I had made such an amazing, bonehead goof I would have let everyone still at Desert View know that I had given them incorrect information, to be prepared to work Monday, and then had all the managers and supervisors run the two stores on a very unbusy Sunday, but our manager was no where to be found, or heard from.  I'm sure he must be a little embarrassed....I'm sure I would have been. What would you have done in such a situation?

Okay, enough of my rant......from the time the store officially opened at 10 am (2 hours late) until the store closed at 5 pm the total cash sales were $179.56.....the Deli was not even that busy.  As an attempt to apologize for the debacle, and us having to work Sunday our assistant manager, Wayne, bought us all a meal......I ordered the French Dip and took it home for dinner.

One clarification is in is possible that our manager was not the one who goofed may have been someone above him, but we don't know, because our manager has not been heard from.  I do know that the Marketplace store, also run by Delaware North, was open, so they apparently weren't given bogus information.

That was my Sunday, and in a few minutes I will be trundling off to work for the 'open' shift on a day when I thought I would be on my way to Prescott, AZ for an overnight trip....sigh....thanks for stopping by!



  1. Sounds like a real mix up there. Here in Quartzite the LTVA services are shutting down they are going to cut off all services, Mon, even though the office was closed since saturday, no garbage pick up , will be an interesting time here with all these crowds.
    Too bad you missed you holiday.

  2. I was at the big tent RV show in Quartzsite yesterday & asked the recruiter (for the Grand Canyon) what was happening with the govt shutdown, he said the Governor of Arizona came up with the money to keep the park open & it was business as usual at the stores.
    I didn't mention your blog...