The Vacuum Cleaner

In my previous post, I mentioned that I work at Panera Bread, making 9 dollars an hour (before taxes).  And, as with any job, there are good and bad things about it.  One of the less annoying things that I discovered sitting down to write this post is that now, when I type in “pan” into my url bar, instead of Pandora magically beginning to play music as it used to, now I get the internet reminder of the company stealing my life away.

One of the better things about the job is the food.  Luckily, Panera actually serves good tasting (and good for you) food, unlike other fast food joints.  And when I am working closing shift, I get to take that food home.  A lot of people know that Panera donates it’s food at the end of the night to food shelters in the area.  This is true, but we can’t donate all of it.  We give all of the bread, bagels and pastries away, but the pre-made sandwiches, opened soups and fruits all go to the trash.  So if there’s a leftover tomato mozzarella Panini at the end of the night (there almost always is because it’s the best one so we make butt-loads of them in the morning) I get dibs!

Also, the charity we give to doesn’t collect on Sunday mornings or holidays, so Saturday nights we can take whatever pastries, bagels and bread are left over.  I’m working tonight and planning on stocking up for the summer!

But there are some downfalls of the job.  And now we’re going to rewind to the title of this post.  The Vacuum Cleaner.  One of the downfalls of Panera is they don’t like spending money on stuff.  They, like most businesses, try to save money wherever they can.  So when it came to buying a vacuum cleaner, someone had a grand idea of getting one from the 1930s.  It looked kinda like this guy's vacuum:

Let me take a moment here to tell you that the Panera where I work opened in March.  Of 2013.  So It’s not like they’ve had this thing for a few years.  They just opened.  That seems like a good time to purchase a nice new vacuum cleaner that will last you a while, right?  Nope.

So this vacuum cleaner sucks pretty good (trying to leave all overused vacuum puns in their graves), but it has a problem going backwards.  If you yank on the vacuum a little too hard, the top part (that long rectangular thing with the bag and power and everything) comes off the bottom part, turning the machine off.  So, okay, that I learned to deal with.  Don’t yank.  And if you do, just shove the top part back into the bottom part, and pull back a little lighter.

I did that for a few weeks until last night.  That’s when things changed. I was doing good for a while and had about half of the big dining area cleaned, when all of a sudden, I lightly pulled back and the top popped off.  Huh… that’s weird, I thought, Maybe I pulled harder than I realized.  So I stuck it back together and started up again, and one push later, it happened again.  Once more I pushed the top in and slowly, barely pulled it, like pulling a tissue out of the box.  It popped out once again, and I yelled curse words as I put it back together. This time, I held the machine together by keeping my foot on the bottom part and using my hand and foot to go back and forth.

The only problem with that was I also had to move all of the tables and chairs while I was vacuuming, which I couldn’t do if I’m using my whole body to keep the machine together.  I got pretty frustrated and my manager came over and asked what was going on.  I told him and he told me to do my best and said he’d try to get a new one, but if I know my Panera, they’re gonna take at least another two weeks to get one.  I went for a little while more and then the other girl closing with me came to my rescue.  She took over the vacuum cleaner while I moved the tables and chairs around.  She used my foot technique for a while and then starting pushing on the top with one hand while the other hand was on the handle, which seemed to work better.

We got it done and were out of there at 10:55pm (we close the store at 10pm).

I’m closing again tonight, and hopefully I wont have to vacuum.  We’ll see…