”You’re in charge of the restocking, OK?”
That’s what I heard when I came to work around 6 months ago. I actually didn’t even get a “hello” once I stepped into the door. No, straight to the very unclear demands about restocking, whatever that meant.
When I came to work that day, I’d been gone for 2 weeks. I felt like I needed the break and it had been quite hectic for a while. Not at work, that was constantly calm, but in my life. Anyways, after 2 weeks travelling Latin America, I was back in business. That’s when the comment on restocking came up.
“What’s going on?” I asked, looking at my co-worker Phil. I would have wanted to ask my boss but she moved along to others after dropping the restocking comment. Phil looked at me, took a deep breath and then explained. The seconds between me asking the question and him opening his mouth were pretty scary. You know how I am, always expecting the worst. Didn’t have to do that this time though.
So, apparently, some kind of marketing activity had gone really, incredibly well. When Phil told me, I looked over at Chris, our marketing guy. He looked scared but also very happy. So there was a chain of stuff happening and that resulted in me becoming in charge of the restocking.
The first thing that happened was that Chris was, for once, thinking out of the box. He was reaching out to an influencer and asked if this person would promote us. He explained that our company did not have that much money, but great products. Apparently, it was a good day for this influencer because she said yes. It got even better because she apparently wanted to do several posts about it, right away. She also had millions of followers so this was… interesting.
A lot of people got to hear about us and our products. A lot of people placed orders and our stock ran out immediately. Hence the restocking. I was going to be in charge of restocking our stock. At first, I felt like this was a task that was not really what I agreed on once I signed for the job. I actually said that to my boss, and she didn’t even look up at me from her desk when she answered: “We’ll raise your salary, OK?”. I was perplexed.
“Restocking responsibilities means higher salary, sound good?”. It sounded very good to me.