As anybody who has been given the privilege of dealing with me on a daily basis knows, I think very highly of myself, and I am fairly confident that this will never change. Still, after spending 200+ hours with coworkers and managers, I am now begging for someone to please just humble me.
Many workplace stories that demonstrate the stupidity and incompetence present in this corporation have already been told over the past couple of weeks, but some of the more recent events have me begging for some sort of presence that is a better merchandiser, more intelligent, or superior in at least one positive attribute. For example:
1) The weekend before last had us moving patio chairs into aisle 2 of the garden center, patio umbrella boxes by the patio furniture displays, and my assistant manager filling a large area of shelf space with tiki torch fluid. However, management fucked up, as I had to move the umbrella boxes back to where they were Monday, and the tiki torch fluid and patio chairs in aisle 2 will need to be moved very soon, as back-to-school displays must all be set by next week. Why waste labor and move all that shit in the first place when management should have known not to waste time doing that?
2) Today I received a phone call from my boss asking me to restock the 20-lb birdseed that is on sale for this week. When I looked in the backroom (the staging area is now cluttered again - big surprise), I could not find any of the 20-lb type, only 10 and 40-lb. I called my boss and told her that, and instead of trusting me and giving me further instruction, she told me that she would be down to help me look. Of course, she could not find any either, so she essentially wasted her time coming down there. But it gets better.
3) Later in the shift, I receive another phone call from my boss. At first, she asked me to blow up balloons, but then she remembered that we were out of helium, so she then asked me to go out there and tell the customer that we were out of helium but that we would get more tanks tomorrow. When I walked over to floral, my boss was standing in HBC, 10-15 steps away from the customer. When I gave her a dumbfounded look, she responded by saying, “I’m not going in that direction.”
That direction? She was much closer to the customer than I was, and I actually was trying to get something done for her - taping up the broken bags of dirt and mulch so that somebody could mark them down. She easily could have walked over to the customer herself. She is a very cool person, but sometimes I am embarassed that I have to take orders from her.
4) At work we have these stupid things called “friendly huddles.” At approximately 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. every day, one of the managers makes a page telling all available employees to meet at a certain place for our friendly huddles. First of all, the philosophy behind the friendly huddles - to remind us that we need to look around and interact with our customers whenever we are working on projects - is nice, but it’s incredibly asinine to discuss it every single day in the middle of the store in front of customers. It actually reminds me a lot of school: the manager, playing the role of teacher, teaches us workers AKA students the same thing over and over, but the students never seem to learn while the teacher pretends that progress is actually being made.
Second of all, during the friendly huddle, the second shift director - who I previously praised on this blog - discussed the July 4 walkthrough. He asked us if we knew how we did. I mumbled, “We got a three” under my breath and one of my coworkers heard me, but he didn’t hear me/ignored me and nobody else seemed to notice. He told us that he wants the team members to know how we did in a walkthrough with the group VP, but he doesn’t even mention our actual score but only gives us the Bill O’Reilly version of the story by telling us that we’ve done so well. So well? We’re at a three; we still suck!
And people wonder why I think so highly of myself.
