The details of the crap

OK. Here we go, as much as I can say anyway.

Senior Manager Who Shouldn’t Be soon won’t be. She will most likely be unemployed by the end of the day tomorrow. She was already being investigated, but the thing that put the last nail in the coffin was the thing the Other Senior Manager and I stumbled onto last night. It seems that she asked an employee to do something that is outside of normal procedure, but within her discretion as a Senior Manager. That isn’t the problem. Here’s the problem: when the employee questioned her about it, she said that her badge said "Senior Manager" and his badge said "Sales Clerk" and she grabbed his badge and held it up to his face. You CAN NOT DO THAT. In addition to being extremely rude, we are not permitted to touch our employees in that manner. A customer heard/saw the altercation and called corporate, but since it was later in the day there was no one of sufficient authority at the call center to contact the store (if it had been me they would have been all over it like white on rice, but Senior Managers are not supposed to act that way) we didn’t get contacted until the next day. The Facility Manager gave it over to the Other Senior Manager to investigate, thinking it was a set-up to see what he’d do. Considering the other investigations that are going on that was not an unreasonable assumption.

Since I was the only male manager available, Other Senior Manager told me what was going on, called the employee involved and had me sit in on the interview. We both almost fell out of our chairs when he told us what had happened. No leading questions, nothing. All he was asked was if there was something that had happened involving the policy in question in the past week. He went straight for that incident. What he described, while not exactly the same, was consistent with the customer complaint. We swore him to secrecy, invoked the seal of the Official Investigation on everything so he wouldn’t talk about it to other employees. and went straight for the security office to pull the tapes and see this for ourselves. I covered what happened next in my last entry, so I won’t repeat it here.

Other Senior Manager didn’t sleep at all last night. She recommended Senior Manager Who Shouldn’t Be for her position, now she feels responsible for costing her friend her job. The Facility Manager has assured her this is not the case, Shouldn’t Be dug her own grave, and he should have reigned her in right after he got there in February of last year. The fact that he hasn’t done more to control her might cost him his job. Other Senior Manager has gotten caught up on the edges of Shouldn’t Be’s chaos and may be demoted, but probably not fired. I don’t think she deserves even that much. She has talked to Shouldn’t Be on more than one occasion and at the instruction of a district level staffer.

If we lose the Facility Manager as well as both Senior Managers *again* in less than three years, corporate will send in a Fixer. That’s *never* a good thing. The other salaried managers (including me) will likely be pushed and pushed and pushed over the course of the next quarter in order to try to get us to do something stupid and get fired. Those of us that survive will likely be offered lateral (if we’re lucky) moves to nearby stores to separate the perceived trouble makers. If a transfer is refused in a situation like that then the process of moving us out the hard way will begin, and it’s not really all that hard.

I almost left my keys, radio, and badge in my desk, just to save a trip back, but I didn’t. The video and statements I helped gather will be forwarded to District HR tomorrow, and the lightsabers will be lit and swinging before lunch, I’m sure. Something similar happened at another store in the district three years ago, and within an hour of the District Manager and HR rep walking into the store the Facility Manager, *both* Senior Managers, and two managers at my level had been summarily dismissed. Needless to say I’m not going to be sleeping very well tonight. If nothing else, as long as Blondie goes down before I do, even if it’s just a matter of minutes, I can hold onto that and draw some small comfort from it.