The Not Happy Thread

I'll hope for the best, Lewdog. Best wishes.

 

This is what my ankles look like, sorry for the crappy quality my phone camera sucks...and sorry I'm hairy.

 

So my new job isn't going as well as planned. They made me a manager about two weeks ago and everything was basically going fine until recently. Our store officially opened Monday, and I'm under a lot of pressure. Not the "you're a manager now so you have a lot of responsibilities" kind of pressure. But the "you better pick this up quick or you'll get fired" kind of pressure.

My GM Rachel is proving to be a tough cookie to impress. She fired one guy last week, and three others are in her crosshairs this week. Most of them have no reason to be under scrutiny either. One girl, I can kind of understand. She's good at her job, but she has zero personality and never talks. And in a place like Petco, where we only have 10-15 employees, personality and customer interaction is incredibly important. Another girl, I can slightly understand. She had a rocky start. She was messing up a lot, not getting the hang of things. But she's shown a lot of improvement just in the last three days, and she's very excited about her improvement. She came up to me twice yesterday just to tell me how proud she was of herself. So she can be molded and turned into a beneficial employee.

But the other two? I don't understand Rachel's reason for wanting them gone. From where I was standing, she fired that one guy because he annoyed her. He was a talker. Not a conversationalist -- a talker. He'd go on and on and never let you get a word in. Super nice guy, just slightly annoying. But he seemed to be doing his job, so when he was fired, I was genuinely surprised. Rachel told me he asked her the same question every day and was constantly needing help. Well.... He was only with the company for a week or two before he was let go, so of course he had questions. Would she rather he did it wrong instead? The worst part is, she gave him no warning beforehand. Just fired him. If she would've talked to him first, let him know what he needed to improve on, he may have done better. But she didn't give him that chance.

Now Rachel is doing the same thing to this girl Emily. I like Emily a lot. We interviewed together, started the same day, and have worked very closely together since day one. To me, she's a model employee for Petco -- friendly, genuine, hard-working, and passionate about animals. In fact, I like her work ethic so much, I told Rachel I want her to be my specialist. It's a position directly under me, essentially doing my same job just without being a manager. Rachel told me she wanted to see how Emily interacted with customers before giving her a position. Sure. I get that.

But I went into work yesterday and found out Rachel and my Assistant Manager are really upset with Emily. Apparently, their biggest complaint is that she's ferret obsessed, which is true. But if they just talked to her, told her she can't play with the ferrets all day and needs to work, I have faith she would do it. Now they're saying she's not going to work out and that the only reason she still has a job is because I'm vouching for her. And that breaks my heart, on multiple levels. Not only is Emily my friend, but she also deserves that specialist position. She's good at it -- she already proved that to me during store setup. But they see her on the floor for one day and suddenly she isn't cut out for it? So now I'm stuck with possibly one of the other two girls on Rachel's radar, neither of which I trust to be my specialist.

So with one person being suddenly fired and Emily potentially getting fired, I'm nervous. I've only been with the company for a month, and our store just opened three days ago. I don't have experience as a manager, which I told Rachel and my Assistant Manager the day they offered me the position. They promised to train me and work closely with me and not let me drown. And yet they aren't living up to that. They're teaching everyone my job duties except me. They're doing things for me instead of showing me how to do them. Last night was my first closing shift, during which another manager showed me how to close the registers and the store. It was a lot of information to take in. A lot. Now I just found out that my second closing shift with the company, next Wednesday, I'll be on my own. No other manager. No other employee who's been with the company for years. Just me and two newbies. And I'm going to have to rack my brain to remember everything I learned last night.

And I'm a little upset about it. They promised to help me, and now I feel like they're throwing me to the wolves. Show me something once and expect me to just have it. And the way they're judging the other employees, what's going to happen to me if I mess up? Am I going to get fired without warning? Are they going to giving me more time to get adjusted? I don't know. But it's stressing me out. I don't care about getting fired. I don't necessarily need this job. Sure, I want it, but I'll be fine without it. I just don't want to go to work every day feeling like I'm under a microscope. Like I don't have time to adjust and get into the swing of things.

I feel like they showed me how to walk in a straight line and now they're throwing me up on a tight rope fifty feet in the air and yelling at me not to fall. It's very overwhelming.

 

Y'know, I never talked at all about the city I came from -- mostly because I was taught never to reveal my location and thought revealing my city's name would be bad. But finally, for the first time ever...I feel like I need to do it.

I'm worried. Basically, in my city a white officer shot a black teen and now everyone's worried that what happened in Ferguson could happen here. Suffice to say, within the next year...if you read on the news of a little town in the Deep South going to Hell...

...That's where I am.

So yeah, I'm afraid.

 

I think I saw an FB post about this a couple hours ago, a reposted thing telling people to call the number of <redacted/forgotten> PD and ask for the public information officer.

Best of luck, and may Justice (capital J) have the upper hand.

 

Wow, that's a lot of pressure to take on. So much newness, change and expectation without much support is never good. I really hope that things start to settle a bit soon for you. Unfortunately, to make a new team feel so insecure is not going to build any confidence, and as such people will make mistakes that would otherwise be totally capable. I know it's not easy, but maybe a schedule discussion with your manager over how things are going and your concerns on how things are going to be going forward may help you?

Try to stay positive, after all, they had the confidence to give you the role so they must think you are capable, don't let this undermine your confidence in your ability to do the job.

 

Is it possible it could simply be Urticaria? In it's chronic form it ticks all the boxes you've mentioned, particularly the standing up for long periods one. I found that the lumps tend to come up near joints then attempt to migrate into each other, getting bigger over the course of a week or so. Then I'd have a few days without, where generally I was healing the lumps I'd raked into with my nails. Then it would start all over again. Joint pain was a big issue too. Sometimes my knees locked so bad I couldn't walk. Mine runs in cycles of approx. 7 years, then appears to becomes dormant. Urticaria was the name they gave it, but my docs all agree that Urticaria is only part of the picture. It's been mentioned that whatever it is has many of the hallmarks of Lupus too, but they don't as yet have further classification of it.

 

But mine aren't raised and don't really itch, it's just basically red blotches and they usually look like circles, and despite being on pain medication for my back, my lower legs and feet will hurt so bad I'll almost cry.

 

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only truly financially responsible one in my friend group (besides two other friends... but two other friends out of a decently-sized group of friends). I'm going on a roadtrip for a week starting Tuesday with a friend and we're splitting the cost of everything, but he's paying me back for his half of things at a later date. Now, I trust him completely - I wouldn't have agreed to this arrangement if I didn't - and I know he'll pay me back. And I have the money to pay for things myself, thankfully. The problem is that I don't know WHEN, exactly, he'll pay me back, or in what kind of amounts, which is stressful considering I have a security deposit and rent to pay as soon as I get back. I also have two other friends who owe me money and my mom who also owes me money. I know I can trust all these people to pay me back, but it's frustrating because I'm always extremely prompt with paying people back in the rare cases I ever borrow money (or, more commonly, paying my half of rent/utilities promptly) and I hate that I'm usually the only one in the friend group with any kind of savings account. It's not even that we're economically different - my parents are actually lower-middle class - it's that no one except me and those two other friends seems to understand how to manage money.

 

After three days off work and the blotches had pretty much gone away, then after working tonight, they look worse than before.

 

WARNING: ADVICE SCREED AHEAD.

First off, I sympathize with your stress. I work retail, and sometimes the thinking of upper management can be blindingly Byzantine. It's awful not to know where you stand, and it sucks to live in fear that you could be canned for, well, whatever, and not given a chance to make things better. I've had jobs like that, and it stinks.

I'm wondering if GM Rachel's job is on the line, too, and she's not handling the HR part of it too well herself. Didn't Petco bring in some experienced people (associates and department managers) from some other stores to help train the new help and get things up and running? From your post, it sounds like they've handed her nothing but newbies, you're all floundering, and Rachel's throwing people overboard to keep from being swamped herself. Bad management, but understandable.

Going from what you wrote, I can see how management might have had a problem with the talker guy. Was he doing that with the customers? One thing I've learned these past three years is to shut my mind up and just listen to what the customer wants and needs. After that I can think and respond. And as for his asking Rachel the same question several days running, if it was literally the same question, and if it was something straightforward and simple (like, "Collapse all cartons you empty and take them to the crusher at the end of your shift") yeah, I'd get annoyed, too. I'd think he was incapable of learning. On the other hand, if they threw him into complicated stuff like cycle counts and daily safety checks, that's bad job assignment on their part.

I was thinking about your associate Emily. Your interaction with her tells you she's hardworking; the GM's and ASM's observation tells them she's playing with the ferrets all day and needs to work. There's a big truth gap there. Did they just happen to catch her on a shift when she was giving in to ferret-temptation? Or does she do that every time? If there were customers going unserved and shelves left unstocked while she indulged her passion, I can understand upper management's alarm. It should go without saying that she's not there to spend all her time with her favorite critters; they shouldn't have to tell her.

If she doesn't understand, it might work best if you speak to her about it, yourself. And . . . if she's anything like I was when I was in my early 20s, you may not want to give her the standard Good-Bad-Good crit sandwich. She may take in the praise only and fail to hear and act on the Improvement-Needed. So, "Emily, you need to get the ferret cages cleaned as quickly as possible, then get back out in the aisles serving the customers. If you want to spend more time with the ferrets, you may do it on your own time." If the animals need a given amount of time of human contact every day, she needs to know how long that is, and not exceed it while she's on the clock. Does she know her job is on the line? She needs to, with no sugar-coating.

We'll be pulling for you for your first solo store closing this coming Wednesday. Is there a checklist of essential tasks? If there isn't, maybe you can write one up before then. Tell them you think it would help all the managers and be of benefit to the store. Insist on being shown how to do things, and don't let them go ahead and do it themselves: butt in and demand to go hands-on. And however flustered and annoyed you feel, don't show it, don't be passive-aggressive. (I know the temptation, believe me.) Brace yourself, stand tall, tell yourself you're smart and capable, remember you're there for the customers and their pets, and get in there and whip this.

 

Thanks for the advice and support, everybody. Turns out, I made a bigger deal about it than I should have.

First, Rachel brought five experienced associates with her to our store. Her, the Assistant Manager, another manager, a sales associate, and two dog trainers (who double as sales associates). Then there were eight newbies including me and the guy who was fired. So it's almost a 50/50 split.

Second, the guy who was fired didn't get a chance to work with customers. He was fired before the store opened. I can't even guess at the kind of questions he was asking, but I know he wasn't given difficult tasks, like inventory or pricing. Our basic collective duties involved stocking the week leading up to his release. But, unfortunately, Virginia is an employment-at-will state, meaning people can get fired for any or no reason at any time. So he didn't even need a warning to be fired. I'll never know whether he deserved it.

As for Emily, again, I wasn't there so I don't know the situation. But I worked with her today, and if she was the same then as she was today, I can understand their frustration with her. We were slammed and she was showing her friends around the store, letting them play with animals and stuff instead of helping actual customers. When I told her I needed her on the floor, she got back to work. But then went to another employee and said, "I'll just wait for her [me] to get busy then I'll go play with the ferrets again." The employee immediately told me, of course, and I was furious. When I told my Assistant, he said she might be written up for insubordination. But considering how much she's irritated the managers already, she'll probably just get fired. And at this point, I'm okay with that. That's how mad she made me today. lol

Finally, my worries for my own job seem to be non-issues. I approached Rachel about closing alone and told her I don't think I learned enough from my one closing shift. As soon as she realized I'd only done it once before, she changed my shift to opening instead. So just the fact that she accommodated me immediately without question made me feel so much more secure in my position.

All in all, I'm feeling much better. Thanks again for all your kind words.

 

Aaauuuugggghhhhhhh!!!!!

Oh gosh. Oh gosh. One simply doesn't do that.

I work in a big DIY store, and some of the new hires are driving me crazy, too. Somebody, I'm not sure who, keeps sticking merchandise on the shelves over the wrong price labels, and I have to spend a good chunk of any given shift correcting the problem. The department manager has so much on his plate he just wants to know if it's taken care of. Management has us scheduled so there's usually no more than one of us in the department at any one time, so I can't observe if it's one of our new kids or not. The evening I was able to bring it up with the new girl, she said yes, that frustrated her, too, and she blamed it on the night stocking crew. But later that same shift I caught her doing that very thing. Not to mention that some price labels have specific locations printed on them, I'm finding examples of those stuck up in the wrong bays, and the Night Stock guys wouldn't print out a label to save their souls. So I have my suspicions, but I can't prove them.

Then Saturday morning a product rep came in to do training in custom-ordering their line. The new girl had to go home sick the day before and couldn't be there (not her fault). The new guy, by his own admission, stayed up too late partying Friday night and went home early--- barely an hour into the training. I was the only one who got the whole dose of it. This is fine for me, but the way the scheduling goes, how am I going to pass on the info to my new colleagues? Not that the new girl will be willing to listen--- she has this attitude that since she's full time and I'm "only" part time, she outranks me. O rly?

I have to remember: "I am the adult. She's only 19. I am the adult." But it's hard when, like me, you hate, hate, hate being patronized. You want a Not Happy? There you have it.

Oh, and sorry, @Lea`Brooks. It looks like I highjacked your thread. I'm glad GM Rachel's seeing sense on letting you get more experience before you close solo, and that things are clearer about Emily's performance, even if the picture isn't good.

 

The other day I was so angry that I found myself lying in bed stock still, afraid that if I moved at all I would do nothing but break things.

 

Most of you know that I've been in a lengthy battle fighting a wrongful arrest for a DWI charge. A couple of days ago was the hearing to assess whether or not the DPS would suspend my license. This has nothing to do with the criminal case, and is purely an administrative discipline based on the fact that I refused a breathalyzer. I had no idea that the DPS automatically suspended your license over exercising your rights, and I had no idea whether or not I should opt to take the breathalyzer in this case. I had heard that you should always refuse one because they can be inaccurate, and a blood test is a better option, but they won't go through the trouble of administering it unless you refuse the initial test and they still think you're drunk. I asked the police officer time and time again what I should do, and he kept giving me cues that I should refuse (repeatedly emphasizing my right to refuse, I can't tell you what to do, all I can tell you is that YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE. Again, I can't tell you what to do, all I can tell you is that YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE). So hesitantly, I refused because I thought ignorantly that maybe he was trying to throw me a bone. He didn't tell me until afterward that he was taking my license, nor did he bother to arrange for a blood test.

So after all of that, I get a lawyer and we appeal to the DPS, asking them not to suspend my license on the grounds that the officer acted outside of my rights by questioning me in the first place, according to his own testimony on the stand. My lawyer thought it was a very strong argument. Essentially, he pulled me over thinking I was someone else, realized that I wasn't who he was looking for as he started to approach my car (again, all according to his own testimony), and proceeded to question me anyway. The law states that you absolutely cannot pull someone over and question them when they give you no reason to do so. I hadn't broken any laws or committed any traffic violations. He had no right to ask me to roll down my window and chat with me. He should have said, "I'm sorry I have the wrong person" and sent me on my way.

No matter, because the DPS decided today that they don't give a shit about my rights, and they are suspending my license for 6 months, even though this charge will more than likely be dismissed. I now have to pay a shit load of money to get an occupational drivers license, and they are going to make me go to AA meetings in order to keep it. AA meetings?! I haven't even been charged with a crime, my lawyer hasn't even received any kind of evidence from the city, and yet they have decided based on a police officer's shady ass "police work" that I'm an alcoholic?

If there is one thing I've learned from this, it's that individual rights are an illusion, my friends. If the state has any opportunity to fuck you sideways (pardon my language) for a little bit of money, they will absolutely do it.

I'm already in therapy over this. My therapist wants to evaluate me for PTSD, in fact, and now I'm worried that because of all of this money that I'm bleeding, I'm going to lose my damn business.

 

That sucks. Don't want to be a downer, but the Supreme Court has just ruled the 4th amendment irrelevant too.

Maybe call the Freedom From Religion Foundation (I don't know your personal beliefs), they've been arguing for a while that since AA is religiously based, the courts can't compel people to go? I'm not a lawyer, just a thought.

 

This is awful. I'd been wondering how this came out. Is there any way you can appeal the suspension?

And what the H are you supposed to say at the bloody AA meetings? "Hi, I'm No-Name, and I am NOT an alcoholic"?

Meanwhile, maybe you can figure out some way to work this crap into a novel. The best revenge and all that.

 

Don't say that. I had a friend who went through (military) court mandated AA-style meetings, and denial is considered proof of addiction. Catch-22

 

That's happy! Hard work, but happy!

 

Reminds me of the time my mothers dog bit me in the face in a completely unprovoked attack. I'd simply bent down to pick up a toy my cot bound brother had tossed onto the floor. There I stood with the blood pissing out of my cheek, daschund hanging off it, the necessity of stitches a given, and my father was too busy trying to assign blame to realise that I needed hospital treatment. I ended up walking the mile and a half to my local A&E myself, with a wad of rolled up lint stuck to the afflicted part.

I hated that damn dog after that. Was rather pissed at my Da too for missing the bigger picture. A dog that bites has no business being in the same room as a toddler.

 

Well, it might have been protecting the toddler. It might like the toddler, and have felt you were threatening. You've got to remember, dogs aren't humans. They haven't different social rules, and follow more paranoid cues in a wild mindset. And we have to take special efforts to be able to communicate human social rules without the aid of language. And human social rules are bloody fiddly, take it from me as someone with Asperger's. I totally feel why dogs might just go for their instinct sometimes, much less confusing. Of course, that doesn't mean the dog can't learn though, and should definitely be encouraged in the right direction.

 

@Oscar Leigh I understand canine behaviour well enough. Have to, my daughter keeps pitbulls. I failed to point out that the dog in question had already bitten several people, all requiring hospital treatment, mostly family members, and postmen. I don't blame the dog so much as I blame the owner for not taking preemptive action. Basically, my parents own agenda regarding the dog, was more important than the reality of owning that dog. They just chose to close their eyes to what was going on around them. The dog should have been sent to socialisation classes, rehomed or euthanised. A dog that constantly bites is a fearful, unhappy dog.

 

I'm at a loss. This is so unfair from start to finish. And you have other issues to deal with as well, I expect. I'm so sorry. No advice. Just try to ride it out and wait for the wheel? At least keep us posted and let us know if there is any specific thing we can do to help. Like maybe fashion a policeman voodoo doll and strap him inside the toilet?

 

Thanks for the support guys. For a moment I thought I'd just Uber everywhere and save myself the money and humiliation of being forced to go to AA meetings, but I'm applying to be an educator for the product line I sell in my salon which means I will have to drive all over to different salons in the area and travel a bit. I just can't rely on Uber to take me everywhere, so I'm going to have to bite the bullet. I'm going to talk to my lawyer today to see if we can swing it to where my regular therapy can count as "drug and alcohol counseling." I doubt it, but it's worth a shot.

 

Today I went to my college awards and saw everyone (bar one) for the last time. I cried like a baby all the way home. No one wanted to have a photo with me. That seems so petty and small but I've came to the realisation that in five years time there'll be no photo I can look back on. It hurt me, it made me feel foolish to consider those people my friends and only two lads gave me a proper good bye. I'd spent two years with that lot and not one gave a damn. I hate moaning about this kind of thing but it hurt me much more than I realised it would. I feel extremely alone right now, knowing that chances are I'll never see them again and from the way they were, they were fine with it, glad even. I'm terrible at making friends and keeping them.