This story was originally posted on March 08, 2010

Hi again, Roast Beef Slinger here. Work has been fairly uneventful, except for this past week, which has been a nightmare.

A bit of important background: About 3-4 months ago, we get this new manager in training in our store. She got hired as a "fast track supervisor", which basically means she goes through the regular store manager training, runs her own store for 6 months, and if she can do it, gets promoted to the supervisor position. Oooo.

The first 8 weeks or so, she is pretty quiet, doesn't really get to know the people she's working with, managers or crew. In this time, I finally catch wind that she is the ex-wife of our regional HR director, and that he is (supposedly) the reason she got hired in the first place. This is totally shady, and now I'm starting to not like her.

The weeks go by, she is slow at everything she does. Then, rather then send her to another store for her 6 month indenture, they send away our current (and awesome!) store manager, and we are stuck with this bitch. So now she has to do paperwork, enter the truck order, count inventory, and do the schedule all by herself.

She begins failing, miserably. One manager steps in and helps her, only because she doesn't want to see us suffer. But then that manager has to go away, too. :(

So now, bitch manager is starting to get lazy. Rather than doing the counts on Sunday that are supposed to be submitted by Monday morning, she does them early Monday morning. The schedule that is supposed to be out by 5pm Thurs isn't out until Friday, and it's half-assed at that. Every single truck order either had something on it we didn't need or didn't have something we did need, or sometimes both! She's also not that great at showing up on time, and started having car troubles. Granted, it was pretty cold, but she's salaried at $85k/yr, I think she could afford it (rather than splurge on new wigs... you think I'm joking, but I'm not.)

And now starts the week from hell.

Last week, she gets pink eye, and stays home for 3 days. Well, we're short-staffed on managers anyway, so everyone is pushing OT, but has she worked more than her 48hr/week this past week to make up for it? Has she covered anyone's shift? Nope.

Sunday, her first day back, she's 30 min late because her kids turned her alarm off. Ya, ok, because pre-teens are up at 8am on a Sunday? Whatever. Except she's used this excuse before... Hmm. Monday, she asks 1 mgr to stay an hour later, and he says why not! But really it was just so she could go home early and bring her kids dinner and not pay for it. (Oh, I forgot to mention.. employees aren't allowed to order food that "might be for more than them", so we can't bring food home to whoever we live with. But she can.)

Wednesday is the kicker. We start cooking roasts for the day anytime between 6am and 8am (the oven gets turned on at 5am to allow it to heat up). The cooking chart called for 1 roast to go in the oven at 6am that day. Cue 11:45 when my good friends goes into work and finds no roast in the holding oven, looks to the cooking oven, and sees a roast at 100 degrees because the oven didn't heat up properly this morning!!

I'm going to mention here that managers are supposed to check various temps (cooler, cold wells, shake machine, oven, friers, etc) 3 times per day to make sure they are correct, and the first time is at 5:30am. Now, it doesn't take any oven 30 min to heat up to 200 degrees, which is what ours is set at, so they should've known VERY EARLY that the oven was having a bitchy day.

But no. She doesn't do half the paperwork she's supposed to do. (Also, the prep person should really be watching the roast, at least have it in the back of his/her head when it should be done, and if it's taking more than 4 hrs, or it isn't even the right color at 3hrs, something is wrong..) So my friend goes and gets a roast from another store, at which time he calls me and tells me this. Good laugh for the day.

Today, I text the same friend asking if he's at work, and if so, is the schedule done? Well I'm in class, but he calls me to leave a voice mail, because I have a feeling he just *knew* I was going to freak out.

I text my other friend in the mean time, and find out that bitch manager was A WHOLE HOUR late to work today, because her kids turned her alarm off again. Yet, she did have time to stop for coffee & oatmeal. He also told me the other part of what happened yesterday. So rather than be personable to our customers and apologize for not having any roast beef for 45 minutes during lunch and offering some free food, she made everyone else EXCEPT HER deal with the customers, and she told them to LIE and say our slicer wasn't working.

Not even an "oops we messed up, sorry" but an outright lie, and she hid in the back the whole time. I talked to my friend, and he's planning something. He told me he left both the Director of Operations and the Area Supervisor voicemails about the past couple days. So I get out of class and listen to my voicemail.

I was scheduled for 26 hrs this past week, and next week I have 7. Granted, I asked for 3 days off, 1 of which I haven't worked in over a month because bitch is in cookie-cutter schedule mode. But apparently, because I ask for days off, doesn't mean she could even attempt to schedule me for the ~25hrs I've requested I receive each week.

Seriously though, 7?! It's not like I don't have availability for 18hrs during the other 4 days of that week...

Nobody is happy. I want to quit my job, but I can't pay for college if I do that, so I'm stuck here. :(

Love,

--Roast Beef Slinger

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