h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Coming, soon... having breakthroughs and epiphanies galore!

There is some debate concerning my employability. I eventually tend to chafe under the conditions that minionhood confers. I've reached that point again, now.
After my late husband passed away, I found myself working in retail (again) during the Holiday season; I liked the people I worked with, and the position would allow me to return to school because of the early-morning hours of the shift. I was a department of one, self-supervising, largely independent, and had very little customer contact--it was groovy. Sure, it didn't pay much, but I didn't have a lot of stress, either; as a department of one you can avoid problems by simply never making mistakes. And, I was good at it, too. I've been with this Corporation for over three and a half years now; they've gone from having almost no employee benefits to speak of (even lacking an employee discount), to being OK.
When I transferred to open a new location, I was shortly moved to a front-end position. And, with the "crumbling" economy, the workday was shortened so I've switched to working nights to accommodate school. Working with the public is not one of my strengths--at best, I can fake it pretty well. But, at least my new department provides creativity, problem solving, frequent opportunities to repair equipment, and almost ceaseless impetus to create workaround processes--thanks to a combination of corporate paranoia about security and "trade secrets," in tandem with almost zero applicable training resources. This corporation has risen treating the employee as the enemy to an art that the Home Depot only wishes it could have achieved. To paraphrase from "The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul," if break room chairs were made to be impossible to use for sitting, they would purchase the whole lot.
It's just as well I moved from my old store; the manager who I worked so well with was transferred the other direction. And it's never the same. Communication (written) and procedures with the first manager were so systemized that we were able to function very well without ever having actually to talk to one another. My last year there, I had a total of $0.61 in Purchase Order Discrepancies; for the whole year in a 'multi-tens of millions of dollars' store!
Anyway, I was hoping to NOT have to learn a new position, and then transferred to one of the two most "challenging" departments in any store of this nature. The gal who is the "head" of the department, by virtue of being full-time, is hopelessly under-qualified and also under-trained. Once upon a time, she used to be the producer of one of our local nightly news shows; she has the "flying by the seat of your pants" approach to life that you would expect from someone who excelled at that line of work. She is not, well, organized. She doesn't take notes. She doesn't finish one thought before moving to the next, even when she really as the opportunity to do only one thing at a time. Like many of the employees that this particular manager seems to prefer, she has “issues.” Her ex-husband calls her multiple times a day, as does her current boyfriend and her son (who I’m sure is the most likely to have real reasons to interrupt her work). Rumor has it that the Ex deals drugs to many of the employees at the store. He’s creepy. He hangs around (behind the counter) reeking of beer at 2pm. She promises work first, and then tries to figure out how to do it—I’m the opposite. She DEEPLY discounts jobs (in some cases charging a third of what she should) without even explaining what the charge should be in the first place, while I get jobs at full price because I explain what the charges are for and alternative procedures and products with the customer instead. Our styles and the way we think are like oil and water; and mine happens to be consistent with company standard and lead to fewer customer satisfaction deficiencies.
So, why would a manager opening a new store oust a back-end associate with less than one dollar in PODs for a whole year? One of a handful in the district who actually gets credit for discrepancies in merchandise returned to the warehouse (in a “just-in-time-delivery” model)? One who convinced stores across the continent to ship merchandise so we could open with fewer than ten “out-of-stock” empty spaces on our shelves? One whose inventory prep is so good that we all got to go home by 10:00pm and closed the inventory books two days later? One who only had ONE lost item claim against UPS in over two and a half years? One whose “damages on-hand” consistently ran very low among stores in our region? One who had a perfect safety record and a back room holding no surprises or “mystery items?” Well, my replacements might provide a clue. Both are ex-gang members with assault and drug convictions. One was finally fired for repeatedly neglecting to call before “not” showing up for work. The current one is actually AT work little, because they keep getting in car accidents—when they are there, they usually can’t lift anything and is clearly taking muscle relaxants and painkillers (and sharing them among their co-workers); oh, I ought to point out what they DO, in the interest of fairness—start and stir up rumors about who is doing what, who is mad at whom, and who management does/doesn’t like. Currently, so many people participate in handling returns and shipments that detecting discrepancies is impossible—and I can tell you for a fact that all of the paperwork does NOT get filed.
I take pride in my work. This hurts every time I think about how the job is being handled now. As soon as I was officially moved to my new department, nearly all of my files were dumped in the trash. This manager places NO value in being able to ascertain what happened. I’m not even sure he knows what a Purchase Order Discrepancy even IS. He’s actually moderately intelligent, although never graduated from High School. Oh, and I should probably mention that he has a physical problem and takes huge amounts of painkillers. He’s even SOLD some of his to at least one employee. And, you guessed it; likes to think he’s helping ex-gang members become productive members of society. So, he may actually be blind to the virtues of my abilities. But I also have some lingering hunch that he may be trying to hide something and that he knows very well that I’d catch him doing something wrong.
For the pittance I’m paid, I can certainly “let go” of the old job position, it’s just not worth worrying about. But the new one is becoming untenable, too.
As the business volume in this relatively new store picks up, there is less room for experimentation, in terms of producing work. And, we are attracting customers with more “commercial” needs (as opposed to small home- or hobby- based projects). In other words, people are bringing us work that they can’t figure out how to do themselves. And larger-volume jobs, and short-deadline stuff, and these folks are pros—they know exactly what they want. So, work has to be done right and on-time. Not easy when incomplete instructions are left for the person actually doing the work. And, there is less time to experiment for correct set-up of equipment and software settings. And less time to call other stores for help and advice, less time to wait for successively higher levels of IT support to call you back (and even less time to overcome the language barrier that plagues our outsourced IT department), less time to call the customer and convince them to go with an alternative that you DO know how to produce, less time to fix the machines when they malfunction or wait for a technician to appear in 2-5 days without parts.
I leave meticulous notes for my co-workers, on occasions such as this, when IT won’t call back until I have two or three consecutive days off. I do this to make sure that we get a solution to our problem, and to try to save time by leaving a trail of solutions I’ve tried and their results. But, if recent history reflects a trend, I’ll return to find that no notes were taken and no one remembers what the solution was; and I even clearly state in my notes that I need to know the solution to this problem because it applies to another job I’m working on for production in a week or two. Plus, the department will be a mess; it’s a wonder we don’t have vermin for all the food crumbs left around. Stock will be mixed up in storage and in machines, notes will be left around randomly without dates or follow-up comments, machines left on and out of adjustment, trash not dumped, counters not tidied or cleaned, tools borrowed and not replaced, and customers’ calls not returned. And, there will be a pile of jobs saved for my return because no one else can figure out how to do them, and each will be due in succession and dominate my time to prevent me from taking jobs as I work those left (and make it look like I can’t sell our services), and prevent me from finding additional jobs left among the clutter and forgotten by unprofessional habits of co-workers.
So, it comes down to lack of training, lack of resources to find answers to problems, lack of expedient repair services, lack of proper identification of the problems by those in the department and higher up, lack of respect, lack of pay (I think I’m worth more than what I’m paid—which is less than a dollar over minimum wage after three and a half years), lack of consideration and courtesy, lack of discipline, lack of enforcement of rules (like limiting personal phone calls during work), lack of accountability for mistakes, lack of enforcing policies and procedures, and lack of caring on the part of management. Management does not care how impressive the work-around devised to make a customer happy, or how one person had to scramble to fulfill promises made by another, or who actually produces the better profit margin for sales made, or apparently even who shows up dependably and on-time. It’s a “teamwork” environment, and although it took a great deal of observation and experience to adopt this perspective, you can’t hold a group accountable.
So the department head gets accolades by giving away our services to customers, and I’m chopped liver because I modestly say that it was my pleasure to serve the customer, as though it is my job (imagine that). They love the department head because she takes care of them, even though she couldn’t produce their order if she even tried. She sits and talks on her cell phone much of every day, while I don’t even have time to take a break.
Maybe I should just do what I can do, take my breaks, and let her scramble around about the stuff I can’t get done. Just as it’s not someone else’s fault that I don’t already know how to do something, it isn’t my fault if I can’t get it all done. It’s the team’s responsibility, not mine; and personal accountability actually counts for nothing, if not equally enforced.
I take pride in doing really good work. But where is the honor in it? Where is the honor in being removed from a position you do really well? Where is the honor in letting yourself work, unappreciated, as a major part of team success—when your requests for help are consistently undermined? Where is the honor in allowing illegal activity to continue where you work—and what would preventing that activity to continue yield me, my job? I’ve worked in retail long enough to see district managers caught stealing from the company fired, then re-hired as district managers in another state by the same company. All companies SAY they want you to act with integrity, but experience has shown me that their definition of integrity is conditional and situational at best. And that minions like me are usually considered more hassle than worth if whistle-blowing becomes an issue. Toll-free anonymous tip lines for reporting theft and suspicious activities are not usually set up to actually be used. Rules only apply to workers that are convenient to dispose of, and as long as you do the “mature” thing by cleaning up other people’s messes, no one will try to change that situation because as long as you fill that function, they don’t have a problem. But the mess is not mine; it is the team’s mess. One store being run by-the-book does not mean that every store in the district will be run the same way. One manager caring about efficiency, accuracy, and integrity does not guarantee that the whole company is run that way, no matter what the propaganda says.
So, where is the honor? What can a minion take pride in at the end of the day? “Exactly how does this make the world a better place?” I don’t see that it does anything to make the world a better place.