This is what I needed reminding of…

Ok, I escaped the store this morning without running into or hearing from her because she was running late but someone of sufficient authority to walk the store and dismiss us came in early enough to let us go. Yay!

Starting at the top of my reminders list: yesterday she was scheduled to be in at 0700 but walked in the door at 0600 and started shouting orders over the radio. Of course we weren’t done, it wasn’t time to be done. The hourly overnighters work until 0700 and coincidentally that’s about the time we normally finish. So, as most companies do now, we bale and recycle our cardboard. Our store is big enough that we need two balers, but one of them has been out of service for the past three days, and due to the increased workload the other one malfunctioned slightly but we were still able to use it. I’l get back to that.

I had just finished up in my backroom when she came screeching over the walkie so I started moving towards the front so I could try to go behind her and get stuff done as she called it out (or at least get someone started on it). The first thing she was on about was no one had swept behind the drink machines at the front of the store, so I got someone small enough to get back there and had him start sweeping. Then she goes off about the bathrooms being “unacceptable!” I had just checked them ten or so minutes before, and while they were not as clean as they should have been they were not unsanitary. So when my guy got out from behind the drink machines I sent him to the back to get started on the restrooms since he’s the one that didn’t do them right in the first place.

Then the break room is UNACCEPTABLE! The other manager comes back over the walkie with “yes ma’am, we’ll get it clean for you.” To which she replies, “I don’t want it clean for me I WANT IT CLEAN FOR THE EMPLOYEES!” I’m sorry, but they’re the ones who messed it up to begin with. They are the ones who refuse to clean up after themselves. They are the ones who apparently like eating in filth. I’m sorry but that’s just the way I feel. I hate to imagine what these people’s homes look like.

On to my back room, she comes over the radio with something to the effect of why is my back room blown up like it is, what have I been doing all night, this is unacceptable, gravely disappointed, etc. Unbeknown to me, the other manager (who’s baler was broken) had told his folks to take all their cardboard over to my side of the store and leave it for me, I would be happy to take care of it. So I ran back there wondering what the hell she was on about since I’d spent the past ninety or so minutes getting everything in order and there are eight or nine pallets of cardboard in my back room that I had no idea were there. And of course, his folks were so busy trying to pull their own bacon out of the fire no one could come back over to help me with it. Oh yeah, that small malfunction on my baler was the counter-weight to the gate, so I had to lift the full weight of the gate up and prop it open when I wanted to load cardboard.

While I was back doing that she started walking the floor, and wanted to know where I was, I needed to be over on the other side of the store helping the other manager because his team was so far behind. I just ignored her, what was the point? She bloody well knew where I was and what I was doing. Some of the day shift folks came in and I was able to have them finish up the cardboard while I started counting outs in the ten departments we have to have for her when she walks in the door (which is usually what I do from 0600 to 0700). I gathered the numbers (the day shift folks have to turn them in too so it makes no sense for us to count them but that’s what she wants) and turned them in. She started to go off on my people about one of the smaller departments that had a lot of outs and I kind of snapped. I told her that we worked all the freight for that department and sent the stocker from that department somewhere else to help. There was no back stock from tonight’s truck, none of the outs were in his area in the back room, we couldn’t stock it if it wasn’t here. She looked a little surprised at me and called the department manager over and he told her the same thing: those items were not in the building, they just weren’t coming in. So of course she dropped it and moved on.

After she called all the managers together we walked the store and when we got to the work area in the back, she saw the inventory preparation folders she had made for everyone laying on the desk. She looked through them, saw that two were missing, stepped around the manager directly responsible for the areas and asked me to find the instructions for those departments on our intranet and put the folders together. At this point I’ve already been there for half an hour longer than I should have been, so I was a little pissed. To add to that, I was on leave when the direction to make these packets was given, so there was no way I could be held in any logical way responsible for ensuring that they all got made. Anyway…

After I got those done (it didn’t take long, it was just the principle of the thing) I have to go to the day shift manager’s meeting because she wants to yell at al of us at the same time.

It seems some of the managers are finding it hard to hand out write-ups when needed, and she’s tired of it. She wants us to hold our people accountable, and if someone from the district or region came in they would make her write us up for not writing our people up. That’s entirely possible, by the way, but since I handed out my first write-up on my second or third day in the store and the ladies in personnel call me “The Terminator” I really don’t think I needed to stay over to hear that speech. Then she turned around and went on for another twenty or so minutes about someone who DID get written up who shouldn’t have been. She went on about how the person came to her to appeal the write-up because she was missing work to try to find childcare, and we should have asked this person why she was missing so much work and offered her a personal leave. But she upheld the write-up. And to top it all off, the person works for a manager who had the day off. So why did we need to hear that speech? After she dismissed us and we were standing up to leave I asked her if this meant she wanted me to fire more people, and one of the day shift managers’ eyes got really big, but boss lady said no without exploding.

I get evaluated tonight. My eval has already been turned in to corporate and my new salary started this past Saturday, but I haven’t seen the eval yet. Whatever. She’s been telling us for months how bad we suck, and I’ve been figuring on getting a two on a five-point scale since that’s the number she keeps throwing around at everyone. One of the managers that got evaluated yesterday was telling me she was going over them. I said, “good, we can get my two on record and get on with it.” Her reply was that I might be being overly optimistic about getting a two. Apparently she didn’t even rise to the level of two-ness. Oh joy.

That’s allI’ve got for now. I’m off.