Open Diary Entries


A sea of incompetence

6/19/02

It is very frustrating to work in an environment where I am surrounded by jerks.

Oh, of course the customers are jerks sometimes, but far more frustrating is working with people every day who are so damn inconsiderate. I speak mainly of my managers, two of them anyway.

Now you get to hear about what Linda did today, and shake your head in disbelief at her ridiculousness.

Linda's the bookstore's boss, the highest authority at store level. How she got to that position is beyond me, considering her complete lack of people skills. To give you some idea of what's she's like, she yells "MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!" when a simple "Excuse me" would make a lot more sense. Maybe she just kisses the right asses when I'm not around. I have a long list of all the crappy things she's done during the time I've worked with her--she's even made me cry at work--but other than the fact that sometimes she comes to her job DRUNK, most of them would be petty recountings of her injustices against me and others, so I'll just subject you to today's issue.

Yesterday I spent a lot of the day collecting books from my section that will eventually go on a special "buy two get one free" table. I figured I needed to do this because I was running out of room on my shelves for the regular books because specialty books were piling up, so it'd make things a lot easier if I pulled them out. So, that was pretty much my whole workday yesterday.

Linda has a THING with people punching out on time, because our budget is really tight, so when she got to work she immediately jumped on my ass to hurry up and clock out. I had been a tad late that morning, so I had a spare couple of minutes to wrap up what I was doing. I told her that, and told her I needed to store and label the boxes I'd been working on, since she also goes apeshit if you leave a project on the floor instead of taking it to the back room.

"Don't bother doing that, Megan is going to put out books in the Kids' section tonight," Linda said.

I told her that the books out there were not to BE put out, they were for the buy two get one free sale, and said Megan would have to go get a cart of kids' books from the back. I repeated that I was going to go get the boxes I was working on and label them, but she really wanted me to clock out, so Linda told me that she would take care of it.

In short, she didn't.

And Megan spent all night putting out the books I'd spent all day collecting.

Today I came in and noticed that all the shelves were packed full again of the same books I'd just taken out. I checked around in disbelief but they were all right back where they'd been before I'd pulled them. I figured out pretty quickly what must have happened.

I had to wait all day for Linda to come in, but when she did, I told her what happened.

Her response:

"Well you should have told Megan what those were so she wouldn't put them out!"

AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

So, now it's my fault, of course, even though I took great care to explain to her exactly what was happening. And after she informed me that the situation was my own fault, she just went about her business, as always.

What the fuck?

Anyway, I have another annoying incompetent manager story to share, this one about Damien, with whom I often don't get along, mostly because he is a bastard.

Some lady wanted us to save one of our "My dad is my hero" Hallmark Father's Day signs for her. Linda was the one that made the agreement, and then she didn't bother to tell any of the other managers not to throw it out, so Damien threw it out when it came time to replace the signs.

So this morning the lady calls and wants to know if her sign is ready for her to pick it up. I told her I didn't know about the situation and would ask my manager, so she asked me to call her back when I found out, and I agreed and hung up.

Damien informed me that he'd already trashed all the signs. He seemed slightly annoyed that Linda hadn't told him, but beyond that he seemed to think this wasn't his problem. I asked him what I should do and told him that I wasn't looking forward to calling the lady back and telling her her sign wasn't there. His response:

"Well just don't call her."

Huh?

His solution was just to ignore the problem. I asked him incredulously if that was how he did business, but he told me I wasn't in a position to have to deal with customers who were irate over something I couldn't change, but he also said that HE wasn't going to call her either. So what was I supposed to do, I asked? I got an unconcerned shrug, and then he walked away from me.

I did call her, but I wasn't able to reach her. I wonder what ended up happening...


Notes:

*tsk tsk* Maybe you should be the manager instead :D I can disgustedly remember the time I was partners with this boy for social studies. He said he would past all of the stuff I'd given him onto our diarama (a simple task). He told me the next day that he had too much to bring home and so he didn't do it, like it was no big deal. He was bashed around quite a bit by me AND the teacher. I got an A. [katqueen]

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