Dylan Lian's Senior Project Blog

These past four weeks have been filled with long hours and lots of stress, but with them came many learning opportunities and avenues for growth. At the beginning of this project, I set out to improve my communication skills, both in the workplace and when dealing with customers, as well as learning to run the store on my own. I feel as though I was able to reach all three of these goals, having led two shifts on my own (once while closing and once during a Sunday night rush), having been able to see the positive impacts of good communication and leadership can have on the efficiency inside a store, and having dealt with multiple customer complaints, ranging from the raw pan pizza incident to dealing with a lady with a five-year history of making complaints to our store (yes, five years of trying to get free food from our store and calling to complain about their pizza) and having to give her a refund. In addition to meeting my goals and achieving what I set out to learn during this pr...

Since the last time I wrote on this blog, OER still hasn't shown up (read my previous blog to read my rant on who OER is and why they are scary). However, knowing the deadline for OER is this coming Sunday, our store is now just getting ready in anticipation, knowing that we are bound to be hit within the next few days. This has meant a few things in the store, from deep cleaning every nook and cranny of the store, to making all food to perfection. But with hot summer weather and playoff basketball games, the store has gotten busy, so it doesn't help that our store has lost a few drivers over the past couple of weeks. Because of this, I found myself managing the store on my own mid-rush on a Sunday evening, since our opening manager had left at 5pm and our closing manager wouldn't be in until 8pm. And with a store of only one other experienced worker and only 3 relatively new hires, the store got busy very fast. However, things got worse when some customers started calling ...