One of my co-workers, the other keyholder on staff, has gone AWOL. She handed in her keys one day and stormed out, leaving us to flounder in the lurch. The District Manager (DM) told us she'd be back, pending an "investigation". What this investigation entails, he won't tell us. We're not sure what's going on or if she'll be back (much less when she'll be back).
In the mean time, the Assistant Manager (AM) and I are covering her hours.
Now.
The reason the two of us are covering and not our boss is because the General Manager (GM) has a son in public school. She's one of the few people who still work in this store that has a small child and she uses him as her reason to refuse to
- come in earlier than 9:00 AM,
- work later than 5:00 PM and
- work on Sundays or Holidays.
That means that the AM and I are picking up the slack, even though she's close to 40 hours a week and I'm going over 30 lately. My position is only allowed 25 per week. Our DM is freaking out about this because our hours count against the payroll tracker for the week, while the GM's do not. We only allowed a certain number of staff hours per week and our store has been over in hours every week for the last six months by at least ten hours.
Last week we were over by nearly fifty.
Now, the reason for my raging, wrathful rant today is that last night, I stayed more than an hour after closing to help the AM set up a display. Normally, this wouldn't be a big deal. We stay after closing to do ads and signs and displays all the time. The reason I'm pissed off about it this time is because our GM hadn't done it. She was supposed to have put the new display out earlier this week. We only found out about the new product because another store called us and said "hey, where are the photos of your new fleece? Didn't [GM] tell you about the email?"
Baffled, we said, "no."
She hadn't told us to put together a display.
She hadn't told us about the email.
She hadn't told us a damn thing about photos.
We called her to find out what was going on with that and the GM threw a fit that the stock from the truck hadn't been put out on time. I wasn't on the phone with her at the time or I would have pointed out that it's hard to put out stock when the guy hired to do stock only ever stays two hours (little of which he actually works) and then disappears for half a week.
Anyway.
The AM ran around for an hour trying to find the new product and put together the table display we needed to have done, while I prepared the store for closing.
I also fielded sudden, frantic phone calls from the GM, which was a pain because we had people in the store until about a half hour after closing. In addition to the complications we were already facing (such as the AM staying three hours past when she was supposed to have gone home), I had only one person (ONE!!) to do recovery for me last night.
That's right. One. To recover a whole store.
We had one woman called in sick and our stocker left early (again) to pick up his mother-in-law. How, I have no idea, since he isn't supposed to be driving (his license was revoked due to a DUI) and doesn't have a car. He usually tries to beg rides off of me and is something of a creep, but he's a topic for another rant entirely.
Probably after I've left the country.
Right. So.
The GM called us at least four times after we first contacted her, freaking out that we hadn't finished the display yet (for something we hadn't known we were supposed to put out, she sure was adamant that it be done yesterday). The AM was very nice to her on the phone and I tried to avoid talking to her much at all after a while. It was too tempting to tell her that if she didn't like how we were doing it, she should have come in yesterday and done it herself.
We finally got the table put up, the product put out and texted her the resulting photo. As we were heading to the back to get ready to leave, she called back to say it wasn't good enough and to read the emails to see how they wanted it done. Frustrated, we did just that. We added about twenty signs to the display, moved balloons from another display to the new table. We then rearranged the part of the store behind where we put the display, cleaned up a giant mountain of fleece and retook the photo.
When the GM finally approved that, we clocked out to go home. During the phone conversation at the end of the night, she kept trying to convince me to send the photo to the AREA VP'S PHONE directly when the emails had explicit instructions to email them with the files renamed with our store number. She also tried to argue me into adding more signs that said "NEW ARRIVAL!" when the emails said nothing of the sort (ignoring the fact that we covered every surface of the table that we could with priced signs and had nowhere else to put the damn things).
... I cannot wait until I am out of this job, now. I was already pretty eager to move on and out, but the last week or so has driven home just how much of a horrible position I got myself into this time.
On a happier note, don't forget to check out my 100 Post Celebration! I'm giving away a red, hand-made camera plush to one lucky reader!
