Zoning fiction. First off, it's right next to the customer service desk, which means that anyone who comes there when there's no one at the desk is going to ask you a question, which you might not always even know the answer to.
More importantly, the company's policy for zoning has been changed in a way that makes zoning fiction fucking retarded. The data scanners now beep when a book from the wrong section is scanned. All well and good, but fiction and literature are combined into the same section. However, the scanner distinguishes between them anyway.
That isn't all. After scanning five books from another section, it will stop and ask you if you want to switch to scanning another section. There is no way to disable this.
That isn't all. Every time it asks you the fucking question, it disregards the book you just scanned, which means that one out of every five books you scan from authors like Steinbeck simply gets dropped. By the time I was done I wanted to hold a ceremonial burning of data scanners.
Luckily I was zoning on a slow morning so I didn't get anywhere near as many interruptions as I could have and I also got to upsell someone to the uncensored edition of The Jungle.
That said it still felt like I got nothing accomplished - even though I scanned sixteen bays of books in about three hours, I found almost nothing out of place or due out, and only a few more examples of books placed out of order. When I zone mystery or sci-fi I usually get to take several strip titles home - I've almost gotten sick of it actually because I'm running out of places to put them, and I haven't had time to read even half of them lately. With fiction I think there were three due-out mass market strips total in all those sixteen bays, and only a couple of trade paperbacks we needed to send back to the publisher. It feels almost worthless performing zone maintenance when the section is in that good shape.
And yet, as if to insult me, the next day when I went to shelve the section I found a bunch of crap customers must have left there the previous night. Ugh.