Had a long day today, first i woke about 3.30am and after trying tpo go back to sleep to no avail, i ended up on the web surfing the internet and face book?

About 4.30am i was feeling tired so went back to bed and just as i dozed off my alarm went off at 6am, i had set it early because today was our quarterly usdaw  and Tesco store directors forum, and we had been invited by the SD to visit the Chepstow distribution centre.

My alarm was set early because i had planned on picking Jackie a Swansea rep on route at about 7.15am, i left the house about 7.10am, stopping off in my local post office and arrived with Jackie about 7.20am

The weather was gorgeous with a bright sun at this time of the morning  We had a 79 mile trip in front of us and we arrived safe at our destination at 9.20am as we signed in at the gate house another 7 reps were arriving literally minutes behind us, all signed in we went up to the board room to find bacon rolls and coffee had just been served 

Anyway the meeting was scheduled for 10am start but all 17 reps one per store in the group were there so the meeting started 9.45 a good job really as the day's agenda over run and if we had had a fifteen minute head start it would have ment we would have been there longer.

The highlight of the day was the tour just before dinner around the warehouse, as we were walking down the warehouse to the freezers, we past cages waiting to be loaded ready to go to my store, i felt tempted on leaving a note for the team back in store, in the cage, they would have just about recieved the deliver by now lol but i didn't have paper or pen on me

The freezer was huge, i mean huge, there were dozens of fork trucks in there, and they were wizzing past us in convoys

they had long forks and picked up 4 cages at a time

Which was why the managers stressed that the stores need to use the damaged cages stickers, as nobody pulls any cages in the depot they are all moved with these trucks and as you can see there's more than 200 of them in the depot unit 211 can be seen here

Anyway after our 30 minute tour of the warehouse it was back to our meeting, this was a long meeting today because the 17 reps represent 11,000 staff between us and todays meeting was the start of this years pay talks and we had to priorites 6 items from a huge wish list, of what we would like to see in this years pay offer

we had to work

what we liked about last years offer

what we disliked or were dissapointed with

what we would like to see in this years

what were our favourite benefits and what benefits would we like to see improved and it took us ages to agree which order, we all had very similar like and dislikes but they wanted us to number them 1 to 6 which caused problems in debate and voting

We were due to finish at 3.30pm but actually finished at 4.15pm, two hours drive home was not that bad, but i felt sorry for some who were travelling down to devon and cornwall, they had a longer drive home and had had a longer drive up