This story was originally posted on August 24, 2011
What's D-GAS?
Don't Give A Shit.
Bookstore Slave again with a story from the days when she was a Scrubs Slave.
This job lasted about 9 months, and those months astounded me. It was a small in-mall store tucked in a distant corner. This is a long one so please forgive me. It is all important.
On my very first day on the job (literally, my interviewer told me to appear on Wednesday for my first day of work), the two employees looked at me, looked at each other and said that the one manager in the store, also my interviewer, had quit on Monday. Fascinating, because I had called Monday morning and she had confirmed my start date.
My paperwork hadn't been processed. I was not in the system. The employees were muddling along as best they could with no manager, because calls to the nearest store a few cities away resulted in nothing. With some effort, we got me input to the best of our understanding.
Training consisted of whatever my fellow employees could teach me on the fly. Well, I got folding done fine. I could do cashier work just fine. I could close out the till, take it to the deposit ATM and lock down the store. Cool. Awesome. Bare minimum knowledge, but heck, it kept the place running. On Sunday I learned the process of submitting hours. Awesome. Paycheck on the way, right? Nope. Read on, and abandon all hope.
Turns out I was employee number 5 for the whole place, which, granted, is small enough that we can handle it. Joy. Well, we're all manager-less, our calls to the nearest authority figure are still being ignored or forgotten, and we're all just being one tight knit co-worker community because, damn it, we're all that's there.
With phone calls and a pow wow, we figure out our own scheduling, breaks and coverage needs. We, the untrained minions, have figured out how to keep everyone's breaks covered while juggling availability. Let's hear a round of applause for the poor untrained slaves.
So why did Manager 1 leave? Because she discovered that the company planned on firing her for "Stealing." Now keep this in mind because it's important.
Two weeks go by, no paycheck. A call to the nearest store results in a "I'll get right on it." Translation: Shut the fuck up, you're being ignored already.
1 month, no paycheck, the General Manager appears on a routine tour of the store, and I bring up that my paycheck hasn't come in yet. A quick and simple fix reveals an un-dotted i or an uncrossed t somewhere in the system, the hours are submitted and I get all my missing pay promptly from there on out.
Two months later, we get a note, Employee 2 is Manager through internal promotion. No manager training results.
One month later, Employee 2 quits. Why? "Stealing."
Employee/Manager 3, rinse lather repeat. Quits before being fired for "stealing." See a mysterious trend? I can vouch for 4/5 days closing till with all of these managers that the till was never off by more than a few pennies, and that was usually over due to declined pennies.
By now we have two complete newbies that we had to hire because, well, our ranks were dwindling. We are struggling to train through osmosis, essentially.
Technical difficulty #1. A pipe cracks in the ceiling, resulting in frantic store rearrangement, a plastic bin being dumped out on the floor and placed under the crack. We place a call to the mall repair who could hear the pattering of water and sent a repair man right away. Problem fixed. Simple, relatively painless.
Technical difficulty #2. The fluorescent lights start going out. A call again results in a veiled STFU from Useless Manager. No way to contact the General Manager and not a problem important enough to pass on to her from UM. The light gets progressively dimmer in our store as they go out one by one.
Eventually customers start having to change in the dim stalls, coming out and using a mirror outside because they can barely see for shit.
When a customer (surprisingly they were all at abnormal levels of being patient and understanding) FINALLY sought to complain, I said "Please do!"
Cue shocked expression.
Coworker: I think you broke the customer."
Customer was sent with an itemized list of complaints and the only phone number we could offer, which was, sadly UM's number. I can only assume the customer complaint was shunted like everything else.
Fast Forward to 5 months into my job. GM comes wandering in, looks around and goes "Good lord, it's dark in here."
I bit my tongue till it nearly bled to hold back a loud and emphatic "DURRRRRP!" What followed is a brisk lesson in ordering and installing the lights (the mall told us it was OUR problem to replace the lights) and how to receive shipments (because we had no idea where the doohickey to scan new shit was or how to work it so we were forced to just open the boxes and put it out to keep the shelves from going bare.
No Inventory correction was done.
We lost an employee shortly after that due to school.
So. New employee. Now our tight knit community has been surviving on mutual support, so not only did we work together as best we could, but we also assisted one another for transportation and covering breaks.
However, this new girl never got the memo. This was a real, honest to god Thief.
Another employee was a single mom with five kids. Having no one to take care of all of the kids all the time, Single Mom would bring her eldest in occasionally so she could keep an eye on him. Now this was an angel, not a hellspawn. He helped out around the store, listened to mom, helped shelve scrubs that we folded and all around acted like the kind of kid you almost never meet in the retail business. Again, keep this in mind, as the following paragraphs will reveal important info.
The first clue was money disappearing from MY purse, and Thief with a cheap meal at a mall store, after complaining that she was starving and had no money. "No I meant that I didn't have any money for TOMORROW." mmmhmmm...
Once again, a complaint was ignored. "It's not [company's] responsibility to handle employees stealing from one another." Still no contact information to the GM despite us asking for it when she had been here.
So, I took a trip to Wally World, bought a toolbox and a padlock, and locked my stuff inside. Later that same day, Single Mom confronts me, saying that Thief said that I was locking my stuff up because HER KID was suspected of stealing. WHAT?!
I had to straighten it all out, touting her kid as a wonderful helper and that I would have hired HIM if he'd been of age. I had to explain that Thief had taken money from my purse while she was the only one in the back room and the kid had never left anyone's eyesight except to trot across the hall for the public bathroom.
After my purse had to be locked up, the till suddenly became exactly $5 short every time Thief worked. Every. Goddamn. Time. UM acted all concerned when we reported the till being stolen from, which was ultimately the COMPANY'S fucking money, but if you've noticed the trend, you know what was done about it for two whole weeks. That's right. abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
On the plus side, we got a hallelujah from the back room, because GM's number was magically unearthed in some mysterious corner under a bunch of product boxes. Thief was promptly fired. Our lack of manager was FINALLY noticed and we got a brand spanking new manager, who I'll call Racist Bitch (you'll see why). Now she was not Caucasian, something that would normally not bother me. Over the course of working here, we had workers of all colors, and I got along with all of them save for Thief.
Now RB decided that the store needed to be whipped into shape and proceeded to do so.
Her: "Now I know you all know what you should be doing so I don't see why you haven't been working according to company standards."
Us: "Um..."
Her: "I know you read the handbook."
Us: "Handbook?"
Her: "This."
She pulls out a key, unlocks a drawer that has been locked and inaccessible since I started and pulls out company handbooks, which should have been part of the hiring process.
Cue blank stare.
Her: "And you should have seen the company video."
Blank stare, then I say: "How?"
We do not have a tv or a vcr except for a recordable vhs collection and a monitor, which are part of the bloody security system that we use... mystery of mysteries... to record security tapes 24/7.
Sooo, we are all "trained" by a "proper" manager, who had to eject the security tape and play the company video on the monitor.
My hours, despite having no other job or school at the time were suddenly reduced to 4 hours each for three days a week. The math resulted in paying more for gas than I got in a paycheck every week. The reason? "It's a competition now. If you want more hours, you all need to work harder in order to earn them." She even wrote me up for not working harder, which served as an excuse for termination if I dared made a stink about it.
Yeaaaah fuck you.
1) I am the only employee whose hours were reduced right now, instead of balancing according to store needs.
2) I'm not working harder for less hours because YOU reduced them.
3) I worked my ass off for the 8 months BEFORE you ever came to this store, and
4) I helped save this store's ASS not only in money but in manpower to keep this fucker from shutting down completely.
I gave up and quit after only a month of her presence. Passing by on a later date, I glanced in and saw that all of the former employees had been replaced. Running into another former co-worker, I found that Racist Bitch had served everyone the same treatment "work harder if you want more hours" and then writing them up so that it was documented that she had "made an effort to correct the behavior."
All the while, she had been cutting back on hours until the employes had to find other employment to pay their bills. Each and every employee that replaced the hardworking mini community was hand picked by RB, and each and every one of them was the same ethnicity as she was.
5 years later, RB was STILL manager, and over the course of time, every single employee in that store has only ever been one particular ethnicity.
The Useless Manager was useless, the GM only ever did the bare minimum she could get away with and it took them 8 damn months just to hire a new manager for the store, resulting in my leaving the company after 9.
Complete and total D-GAS.
--Bookstore Slave
Read more Bookstore Slave / Ilia stories here!
