Not Economically Viable, Part 2

On Monday June 30th, both Karen and I had interviews with the Target just down the street from my house. This was after they had already told Karen they didn’t have a position available, but then called her back a few days later saying there was a possible opening. In my case, my application had been eaten by the system and they couldn’t access it. Since our former manager had given them both our names, they finally put two and two together and figured out Karen and I knew each other. They called her on the 29th looking for me. Once that whole business was sorted out, it was agreed that I would come in with Karen, fill out an application for the second time, and “get this process started”. On Monday, I got up early, cleaned myself up, and hopped a ride over to the superstore with Karen. I felt pretty hopeful about the whole deal since Karen came back up to me before I was even halfway through the lengthy application process (it takes about an hour). “They want to see you when you’re done,” she said and gave me the directions to the Human Resources office.

In all fairness to Target, I liked what I saw as I was sitting there in the waiting area. It was organized chaos, but everybody had their own job. If you were working on a cash register, you didn’t have to worry about anything else. If you were pushing stock in hardware, that’s all you were doing. People seemed hurried, but otherwise in a great mood for a Monday morning. The more I watched, the more I actually wanted to work there. It was still retail, but not the way I know it. For Karen and I, there’s a lot of rushing around in all departments of the store. Plus we’re sometimes asked to bail out the pharmacy if they get hammered. In comparison, this Target store seemed to have its shit together. I wanted in.

I had two interviews back to back that day. Their system is a bit odd, but I understand it. In the first interview, a regular “Team Leader” sits down with you and asks you a set of scripted questions and writes down your responses. After that person is done with you, they pass you off to another Team Leader who is higher up on the food chain. They then ask you another set of scripted questions, shake your hand afterward, and tell you how everybody is going to talk it over and give you a call for a third interview. That, they say, can take up to five days. Lynn thought all of that was kind of strange, but I really liked it. In a lot of cases, the people down in the trenches can get a better read on a person because management is often blinded by the need to fill a position with a warm body. Sometimes, for them, any body will do as long as a shift is covered. In the past couple of years, I can think of two very bad situations that could’ve been avoided had management simply asked us what we thought. As it turned out, we were the first ones to bring the problems to the management team. One person turned out to be a raging drunk, the other a major thief. We knew this in a matter of days. Management, of course, remained oblivious and/or indifferent for months.

All in all, I felt my interviews had gone pretty well. I only asked for my current salary ($11.75 an hour) and I tried very hard not to slam my management team. But the questions were kind of complex, so some of my current distress seeped through. They were horrified when I told them as a full-time employee, I was not getting a daily lunch. Since I’m now only at 30 hours a week, if I take a lunch and go anywhere below that, it starts to affect my eligibility for benefits. The simply way to fix this is to have management do what we had always done before the merger–schedule the lunch in. But the current management team doesn’t know the policies and laws associated with scheduling and my store manager felt we were taking too many breaks anyway. It’s easier for them to stay under the store’s budget and payroll cap if they simply don’t schedule us full time people for lunches. Which is probably why the Department Of Labor has been doing surprise audits in our area stores these last couple weeks. What they’re doing is illegal, but there’s not much I can do about it. It’s either take a lunch and lose my benefits, or grind out the day with taking one (maybe two if I can fit it in) fifteen minute break.

They also learned how I felt about the store’s lack of organization and that I thought having Christmas merchandise in the stockroom on December 1st was a pretty bad idea. “Did you have a lot of clearance afterward?” the second interviewer asked me. “Not as much as I thought we were going to have,” I responded dryly. I hesitated on some questions, choosing to pull my punches with some of my answers. I figured I wasn’t going to get very far by slamming my old boss. What would be the point? It wasn’t going to change my situation any. I felt the interviews had gone well enough. Confidence was high. I felt I was finally getting on the right track. You know where this is going, right?

On Wednesday morning, I came downstairs and checked my e-mail. At the bottom of my inbox was a simple, canned message from Target stating that they could not offer me a position at this time and they thanked me for my interest. There wasn’t even a contact person listed in the e-mail. It was just like any other piece of computer generated spam. I called Karen at home and asked her if she had received one, too. Sure enough, she had gotten the same message. We then spent the next several minutes trying to figure out just what were interviewing for if they had no positions available. In the end, we felt we had just been extended a courtesy. Scott had put our names in and they wanted to fulfill their obligation to him and nothing more. Emotionally deflated, we went back to the store and threw ourselves into the grind. We both agree that’s there’s not much we can do but keep looking. But every day we look at the papers and read the news. More jobs are being lost, more stores are closing. The pond is shrinking right along with our paychecks. There’s not much we can do but keep on looking for our little piece of the worm.

During all of this, I leaned heavy on Beth via telephone. Much like the weeks following the robbery in January, I felt I needed an outsider for a sounding board. And despite the fact we wound up 1,000 miles away from one another with different people, there are times I feel Beth’s outlook is a lot similar to mine. Speaking with her on her lunch breaks two days in a row made me realize that, at least in the workplace, maybe the idea of longevity is a thing of the past. Certainly, the writing was on the wall a couple of years back when Circuit City laid off all of its highest paid, long-time employees and replaced them with inexperienced people willing to work for less. And maybe ageism is a part of that, too, but I just think we’re now living in a culture that values the bottom line more than anything else. So if experience and dedication isn’t going to work in my favor, then maybe my next move should be to whomever is going to pay me the most and then use that to jump ship if something else comes along. The next job will be the transition job. Screw longevity. And, surprisingly enough, Beth understood this. I wish I could say the same for Lynn, who wants me to find a nice office job someplace and die in my cubicle. I’m sorry, but that’s just not me.

Anywhere, that’s where I’m at right now. And I’ve pretty much decided that this is going to be my last work related entry for a while. It’s obvious that my writing has slowed down a lot over recent months and I desperately want to get back to more “human” conversations. If anything, my writing was always more fulfilling than my job, even if my largest audience came from OD. This spot here, with you fine folks…this is what really matters. The rest of it just needs to be pushed into the background. And I can’t do that unless I stop talking about it. Out of sight, out of mind, and all that, right?