The Taskboard

The Taskboard is a board available for both employees and curious customers to inspect. On it, tasks that require urgent attention will be outlined. These tasks are vastly varied and may involve something as apparently simple as mopping that weird stain off the floor in the frozen peas aisle, or as overtly dangerous as rescuing the freezers which have sunk into that weird stain on the floor in the frozen peas aisle. Tasks that are truly simple and trivial to complete will not end up on the Taskboard, so don’t be misled: even apparently simple tasks will require a greater degree of attention and effort to deal with than just passing through and making a token effort.

The Taskboard will be updated as more urgent tasks become known. It will also be updated when a task has been complete - management don’t want employees to waste valuable store time on trying to fix a problem that’s already been dealt with, after all.

There is an additional private Taskboard channel for employees only, to give employees a space to talk more frankly with each other and coordinate to resolve issues presented on the Taskboard.

While Taskboard information is directed at employees, there is no rule preventing employees from seeking help from customers, or even delegating the tasks completely to customers. However, employees should endeavour not to present the store in a negative light when indicating a problem in store.

While there may not be enough employee capacity (or customer willingness) to deal with all problems on the Taskboard, problems may get worse if they are not dealt with in time.

The Taskboard will be represented in a channel: #taskboard. Each task will correspond to an Excursion that you can choose to go on, or a turnsheet action that can be taken. Both options are equally valid for every task. New tasks will usually be added to #taskboard slightly before the start of session, or slightly after session has started. When a task has been completed from the board i.e. an Excursion has come to an end, #taskboard will be updated to indicate the issue is resolved (by some varying definitions of “resolved”).

The #taskboard channel is read-only and visible for all players. For employees to discuss who wants to deal with what issue, there is a second channel: #taskboard-chat. #taskboard-chat is only visible to employee players. However, employees are encouraged to involve customers who they think might be interested or could be well-placed to help.

You can go to deal with a task when you indicate to a GM that you would like to go on an Excursion to deal with that task. This applies both for tasks in normal areas of the store everyone can access (e.g. Grocery) or areas you would normally not be allowed to go to. As long as they are on the Taskboard and you want to go on it, you will be given approvals to access that area when you pick up the task. All tasks happen in separate Excursion channels, not the standard area channels.

Please note that tasks in more standard areas of the store will still be Excursions, as they will involve a problem that is too large to be dealt with through a quick inspection. Although in standard areas, these tasks will take place in a separate channel specifically for this Excursion.

Taskboard tasks that are picked up during session will most likely have been resolved by the end of session through an Excursion. For those that are not picked up in session, you can instead try and resolve these after session with a turnsheet action. Issues on the Taskboard that are not resolved either in session or in turnsheet may or may not get worse after being left alone for a season.