Open Thread Six: The Revengenining
 

Now with less pictures!

Anyways. Does anyone else here work a sales job? I.E. Commission is essentially your paycheck? Then you'll appreciate this.

As of some months ago, around four or five I believe, we picked up a worker called Christian. He's a little dude, claims he's twenty three, looks like he's thirteen. Comes into work pretty much constantly stoned, is creepy, and even after four months fails to do the simplest of paperwork with anything resembling professionalism OR success. Smiley faces are not meant to be sent to the manager of our East Coast division, nor is the following any way to make a sale:

"So how does the this [Rosetta Stone] work?" *points at the kiosk filled with programs*
"Well, you give me five hundred dollars."
"No, I mean, how does the program work?"
"You put the money in my hand, and I give you this box."
*Lady walks off*

...
...what. And he still has a job? Oh, right, he does. Because he makes sales. He's actually even with me this month. Why? Because the first thing you're supposed to ask anyone that skips demo and shoots straight for a buy is if they've spoken to anyone here before. If no, then feel free to claim the sale. If yes, you're supposed to kind of sneakily ask what the person showed or told you. If it's not much, feel free to claim the sale. If it was the demo, prices, whole spiel, you give THEM the sale, because we might be a sales job but it's still a damn respectable business with ethics. I've done this. Gregg, my manager, has done this. In fact everyone but Christian has done this. The only reason he still has a job, despite all of us having to clean up his messes on a daily basis, is because he's STEALING EVERYONE ELSE'S SALES.

Sorry for the rant. On a happier note I begin PT tomorrow, which involves running 1-2 miles up and down steep ass hills in summer with a 20lbs. weight vest, doing sit-ups in said vest + two dumbells of ever-increasing weight, pull-ups in a vest of 40lbs., and learning how to kill men twice my size or make them stab themselves. The hardest part's gonna be the running, as I've been on a pack a day for roughly a year.

I love being friends with a marine.



EDIT: Also, after reviewing the Fourth Dimension thread wandering around near here, all I can think of is that damned movie The Cube, the latest installment. Has anyone seen those? They're like potato chips - horrible for you, but you can't stop eating them.

You call that a rant? Geez, let me show you how it's done:

Night shift, laundry. I have two industrial washers and three industrial dryers. I barely scrape by with the lot of them. Well, last Tuesday, first day in after my days off, a dryer breaks. No worries, it's the end of the night, one load left. I'll just talk to my boss tomorrow and it'll be up and running in no time.

It wasn't. He left a note to say no one looked at the dryer. And when it's the beginning of the night and you're pulling wet sheets apart so they won't log, and you have one dryer for the three loads, it's not fun. I pull a twelve hour shift to get everything done, including taking a call from a sick colleague - the one who was supposed to take the medical/fire phones from me, so I have to get someone to fill in for her - I realized that people don't like being called in at 5 AM for work.

Next day, Thursday, I decide not to pull another 12 hour shift. No way in hell. So I skip doing the kitchen floor and get everything washed/dried, call an ambulance for a resident having a heart attack and play phone tag looking for someone to cover another shift of an employee who severely hurt her neck.

Tonight, I come in and find that I have no laundry - at all. After looking everywhere, a nurse from the full care floor comes down to help me look. The laundry is eventually found, in the laundry chute. It's just that someone closed the shutter - which I don't know why we have in the first place and I never knew about until last night - and all the bags landed on the thing, twisting and bending it shut so that it was impossible to open.

I have now been called in to do the laundry for tonight (my day off) that was supposed to have been done last night but wasn't because someone (probably my boss) decided it was a good idea to touch things in a room which he shouldn't have been in in the first place.

Mobeus:

That sucks. I've worked with people like that. One of them, like yours, didn't get fired. The only way he DID finally get himself canned was when he asked an inappropriate question to a female coworker about her boyfriend, right in front of literally every manager in the store. Before that, he'd gone through at least one of the girls' purses, camped out in the bathroom when he felt like making the rest of us run around and pick up his slack in busy hours, threw tantrums when he didn't get what he wanted, and generally did everything he could to not actually do any work.

The other one DID get himself fired, despite the fact that he could validly claim to be one of our best salespeople. The guy could leave an Eskimo standing in the middle of a refrigerator warehouse wearing nothing but his shorts. However, he was regularly inappropriate with female patrons, sloppy with the till, hit on me ( :shifty: ), complained about his life in earshot or in front of customers, and generally was a wild card depending on his mood. Good mood: awesome sales, great service, great to talk to, occasionally allowed his big mouth to get him in trouble. Bad mood: slouched around, cried to customers about his problems, complained about work within earshot of customers, was sloppy, and generally caused problems. Either way, he was a fast talker who could sell stuff without the customers even realizing they were buying things they never knew they wanted. Because he sold so well, people tolerated his overall sloppiness and poor work ethic. As in, he didn't get fired. What DID get him out of there was the added suspicion he lied on his application. A lot of people started muttering about how his skills didn't match his supposed education, and then there was some question about how he'd left his previous job, and he somehow ended up not working there anymore. He claimed he quit, but a lot of people said he was fired.



It's amazing how people like this get so much leeway. It's bull for honest hard workers, and it's all over. Another coworker talked about how he was getting cheated commission at Mall Furniture because one of the owners was giving everyone else's sales to her nephew. You just deal with it, and try to quietly alert someone who can do something about it without being too direct.

Edit: If you do try to point it out, do it in such a way that you don't get yourself fired. Sometimes, you have to be very careful. Also, there's power in numbers, so if everyone else is disgruntled, too, see if you can find subtle ways to get them to help you. Again, be very careful.

Somehow, I have the secret to ultimate customer service locked within me.

I was left to deal with customers solo, from 10 PM to 7 AM. All the cleaning got done for me. All the bake got done for me, but no one else would help with customers, specifically because they wanted to see what I could do.

Realize this means I ran the Drive thru and front cash, and made bagels and sandwhich orders at the same time as filling everything else out and taking money.

We made $186 each, between 3 people.

My manager initially accused me of stealing it from the till and said she'd NEVER seen someone get tipped more then a full quarter what our nightly sales were.

Math:

We split our tips, so:
$186x2 = $372. $372 in our tip cup.

Roughly 1 quarter of our sales that night, so we must have done roughly $1500 in sales.

Now the fun thing is when I go to retrieve my tip cup at 10 in the morning from Jenn, our manager, I find only $100 in it, and Jenn tells me that Pam (the bitchy manager who I loathe) Skims all the tip cups for manager take. She skimmed $86 out of our tips.

I made several VERY angry phone calls. I can see MAYBE leaving me $150, but taking $86 for sleeping on your fat ass while refusing to do any kind of work within the store, except to come in and yell at us?

And that's why I'm quitting my job and going to become a bartender.

Isnt manager take only 20%? she took nearly40%. You could have her fired.

Also, sweet, will ya give me discounts?

Good for you. You'll make a killing.

There's nothing like working in tech support to make one a misanthrope...not that I wasn't halfway there already.

So normally around here, the only real smoke you see is from potheads tokin' up and cigarette smokers. That's about it.

Well night before in the middle of June there was a series of thunderstorms and fires starting several miles from here, and the wind has been blowing this direction for the last week. So now the entire city and several neighboring cities are all blanketed under a giant field of smoke, making it even more heated and humid than it already was.

And the fires are still going.

I get the distinct feeling humans have fucked the ecosystem sideways.

So...I have apparently an older sibling.

This sibling is also dead (my mom had a miscarriage) and I just learned about it this weekend. not through my mom of course but my dad told me that before she met him, she was expecting a child. Alas she miscarried.

So yeah, imagine learning that.

You're not going to be all depressed now, are you, though? It's something of interest to find out, but it really doesn't change anything. You know a little more about your mother (and I wouldn't recommend bringing it up), but that's about it. It would be different if you had a big brother/sister somewhere out there still alive that you might be able to find and meet. I can understand feeling shock, just so I don't sound unsympathetic, but there's nothing you can do about it.

What I'm trying to say is if you feel bad somehow, don't. It's not your fault.