It's memorial day today, which means it was memorial day weekend the last two days I worked. If Sunday were the only day I had ever worked, I would have quit now and forever avoided this company like the plague.
My manager is relatively new (two months and counting) but supposedly experienced and better at running large stores than the old manager, who did a much better job of keeping his employees from dying and/or quitting. Yay logic. We don't sell that here. In her great wisdom, she has decided we don't need to hire more people. We are massively short handed, and yet in the last two months have hired one person, the overnight fryer who was fired for not showing up for work. Which I think was partially the manager's fault, but more on that later. Anyway, because of our short-handed-ness, the two most difficult jobs in the department are spread upon the shoulders of two people, myself and a lady I'm going to call Sally. When we had a second overnight fryer, I would be his backup and Sally would be mine, in case I got sick or got a vacation. Sally also does scratch, so I would be her backup and the Assistant Manager would cover when I got sick.
No full time fryer means I am the FT fryer, with Sally as my backup. But I'm still supposed to be Sally's backup for scratch because the AM doesn't know how to do a couple of the breads. Which means, ladies and gentlemen, that we are SCREWED. Which was proven to me when the manager did the schedule so that I was doing scratch Sunday and Sally was doing doughnuts.
Which Sally didn't know. She says they changed the schedule on her, but I know they did not because I was pretty happy with the setup on Monday. Oh well.
There is another co-worker we'll call Ann. She has two settings while working: Singing and "Where's my glasses?". Ann actually DID lose her glasses yesterday, for real, and also twenty dollars. So she spent her breaks digging through everything in the department trying to find either, and couldn't.
Customers were everywhere. I had to make a late-shift flour run at noon, and got bombarded by people looking for the stuff on coupons, in a department I am completely unfamiliar with. I came back shuddering and frightened. In our store, the employees wear red shirts and the management+ staff wear dress button-up shirts in whatever color they want. Which means, in true Star Trek logic, that when the zombies attack they will know who to kill. My only hope is that I can defend myself with a carrot long enough to get to the street clothes I keep in my locker. Except that doesn't always work on the customers. I will walk in the store in sunday clothes to buy a pint of Blue Bell and get asked where stuff is by fifteen different people between the ice cream and the registers. Not that I mind helping, it's actually rather nice to help, but do I like have "employee of store" TATTOOED to my forehead? I'm in a dress, and it's not even red. How do you guys KNOW I WORK HERE???? Are you a stalker? Should I be worried? Are you a zombie in disguise planning for the future invasion?
Frankly, I love working for this company, it's fantastic, most of our customers are cool and make up for the customers who are not cool, but I'm gonna give the "new" manager about another month ('till my lease runs out) and then I'm probably going to transfer to another store. There is too much stress, too much stupid and OMG the schedule has reached sanskrit levels of incomprehensible. The reason the old fryer never showed up on Mondays is not because he liked skipping work (or not just because he liked skipping work) but because the way the manager schedules overnight shifts makes Mondays look as if you have it off when you don't. I've mentioned it to her and she just says "Oh, that's how I like to do it."
You also like the hiring process a lot, I take it.
Oh well, back to the hopeless treadmill of editing the book nobody will ever read. Have fun, universe!
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