Snoskred - Life in the Country

Great Metallica song, that. I think it might be my present, though. As in, at the moment, I am unforgiven and I suspect I will continue to be unforgiven for quite some time.

Let me try and make it clearer. I work for my parents. My parents were sent to this store because it was seriously underperforming. The previous owner was rarely in the shop for an entire day and preferred to spend most of his time out having coffee or at his home instead of at his work. His staff then decided - why should they do any work? He doesn’t care, why should they? A culture developed within the store where the girls would sit around and chat, the boys would work and resent the girls, and many of the staff were guaranteed an extra amount of money in their paypacket each week so they would not leave and go work for the competition - and we’re not talking peanuts, either. We’re talking almost enough to be a salary on its own! So why bother to serve customers? Where is the motivation to sell sell sell and earn more money? Most of the staff were working one weekend in three. People were making up their own rosters. They had stock sitting there that had been there for years and not sold. Staff would take orders from customers without a deposit, order the stock in, and then the customer would cancel and they were left with the goods.

So my Dad has turned up here, and changed a lot of stuff around. These people don’t like it. I doubt most of them will last much longer, really. There is one person in particular (yes, our favourite birdsnest) who seems to think she will outlast *us* but I have news for her and it’s all bad.

What I have done is tried to keep out of all the politics. I just want to do my job and go home. I usually keep my mouth firmly shut when any of them complain and whinge - and they do that a lot. However the other day, I made a mistake. I opened my mouth.

There’s a brand of vacuum cleaners that I absolutely despise. They are well known, expensive, bagless, and in my opinion absolute crap - 50 cents worth of plastic hyped up to be something special. We have a demonstrator who comes in every now and then and last Saturday was one of those days. There’s two people who work in that area and let us quickly nickname them. Loose Lips (LL from here on in) is over 50, and cannot stop talking - if you want something spread around, tell her and within 5 minutes everyone will know. Young Dumb (YD from here on in) was actually pretty good until she started hanging out with birdsnest and they now go out at night together and most of the time stand around chatting all day. On Saturday birdsnest was having a weekend off (YAY) and YD spent most of the morning ignoring customers in order to hang around the demonstrator hoping to pick up any sales without having to do any work. One lot of customers were there for an hour - during which time YD just stood there listening, she did not actually sell anything at all.

While she was out at lunch, the customers came back and bought the vac from LL. LL put the sale in her name. As soon as YD got back from lunch, she checked the computer and she saw one of those vacuums had been sold, so she came up to LL and I and asked LL “Did those customers come back for that ?” “Yes, they did” “Oh” and then YD walked off and started whinging to any of the other sales people who were free (and even those who were serving) “LL stole my sale”. She was obviously quite upset about it and after about half an hour she’d whinged to everyone else in the shop, then she comes up to me and has a whinge. I said “If it were your sale, your name would be on the invoice” I also mentioned that she had gone to lunch early and that’s why she missed the sale, normally she goes at 2pm.

All of a sudden, the next thing I know, YD starts bawling her eyes out. She proceeded to cry all over the place for the next hour, at which point she decided to go home. LL had put the sale into my Dad’s name by then, and on the way out the door I told her that - she said (in between gasps of air and tears and coughing etc due to the hysterical state she’d worked herself up into) “I wasn’t upset about the sale, I was upset about how you spoke to me”. Whoa! I was blown away.

Now lets face it, whatever I had done, I’d have been in the wrong - unless I patted her on the arm and said “there there dear it’ll all be fine and isn’t LL a BEYOTCH from HELL”. But for the first time ever, I said my opinion, not in a nasty way. If anything, in a sigh i wish you salespeople would stop fighting over sales type of way. And she didn’t like it.

Anyway my Dad spoke to her the next day, tried to sort it all out, then he said to me that I should talk to her - he said I was in the right but it would have been better if I had kept my mouth shut (duh!), so yesterday I did have a chat with her - I got her to go outside with me and I just told her I was sorry if what I said upset her but I had to be honest and say I wasn’t sorry I said it, because it was how I felt. It wasn’t intended to be mean to her or have a go at her or anything like that. But now most of the people in there think I am some kind of evil person because she went around saying I said this, that or the other (none of which I said, but all of which she must have *heard* out of what I said) and how difficult it is for me to work there every day, sitting there watching people not be served while staff chat. I used to get up and serve them but then I got told off for not being where I was supposed to be when I was needed, so I couldn’ t win whatever I did! She told me it doesn’t matter because she’s leaving. I said I thought that was pretty stupid, and that she should have a think about it.

Then last night we had a product night, and during the evening she made some pretty nasty comments and her face was pretty much the bitch face from hell or during alternate moments a black sunset. There was a dinner afterwards and she didn’t go, but birdsnest did, and never again am I going to dinner if she is. Hang on, I think I said that before. But this time I didn’t know she was going when I said I would go. It was a nice dinner but the company absolutely sucked. I’d rather eat with the homeless - but lets face it, she smelt like them, so I virtually did anyway.

So, I have no idea what will happen now, but what I do know is I’ll probably get the blame for it, whatever it will be. I’m a bit sick of being the scapegoat. I also know this is nothing personal - birdsnest knows nothing about me, nothing at all. She has never bothered to speak to me. She is currently treating 3 other people in the shop the same way she treats me - and my Dad is really ready to sort it out this time, he’s sick of it. We all are!

If I am honest with you, blog readers, I sincerely hope she does leave - but birdsnest is the person I blame for turning her into the mess she currently is. And she *is* a mess. And I am SOOOOOO angry with birdsnest for using YD like a pawn in her little game of cliques at work.