That Moment

When one of your employees makes a life choice so breathtakingly dumb that you can actually feel your jaw drop open.

And you have to somehow paste on a smile and congratulate them and wish them all the best with their breathtakingly dumb choice really fabulous new adventure. Yeah. One of those moments you know will end in tears but they're so naïve that they think life is all roses and rainbows. Work Bestie and I have gathered the popcorn as we're convinced there is a train wreck coming.

On the plus side, Boss Lady thinks it's similarly stupid and did a bit of ranting and swearing that if Beryl wants to fuck off and skip across a meadow instead of working then she can fuck off and skip across a meadow because we're not going to deal with Beryl's too-busy-for-working bullshit anymore. (Beryl is not the cashier's real name, and Boss Lady used less-polite language.)

BL is shattered from the enormous workload of running our store while repairing incredible problems in cousin store. All while her own manager is ranting about improving all sorts of things and introducing great new procedures we all have to do and all kinds of new systems nobody asked for and which are less functional than the old ones and riddled with problems. So BL is tired. And I'm tired. It makes us cranky. It reduces the number of fucks we have left to give and our politeness capacity has gone way downhill. I had an argument today with another Beryl who parked in the loading bay, which made the lorry driver block the road for 25 minutes and then she used foul language at me when it was 9 hours into my shift, raining, and I hadn't eaten my lunch. Don't mess with me, Beryl. You're now banned from our store, don't come back.

Poor Demiboss is similarly exhausted and the big bosses keep asking us to go off and help other stores as well (!!!) with the excuse that we're "well-staffed". Excuse me. We're four cashiers down (of 12), five if you count the one that they've given a special task to, and now poor Demiboss is pulled out of her job to cover the manager. We are not well-staffed. I tried lamenting how hard it was to cover shifts and I got "be more positive!" and then "at least we're not as bad as other stores". What a pathetic by-line. We have a staffing crisis, they pile too much on every single level, and when inevitably someone struggles, someone else steps into their role, leaving someone below or beside them scrambling to take on the tasks, and it cascades right down to the cashiers. At every level people are leaving in droves and the company is struggling to replace them, a vicious cycle of more manure thrown onto more manure. And they wonder why they cannot retain staff...

I am eating Oreos. I ran my 5k in under 30 minutes today at the gym and then I went and bought McDonalds. Don't care. Have updated my CV and started job hunting. Me leaving would be a disaster to my store. Don't care.