Tattletale

More drama in the store. I swear we could make a soap opera about our employees. One of the newer but not very new employees quit. Surprise, surprise, right? Well it's not the fact that she quit that's the surprise. It's HOW she quit.

The current managers didn't want to hire her in the first place, telling the then-manager that we had a bad feeling about her. But the then-store manager didn't care what anyone else thought so hired her anyway. (That manager is now at another store.)

She never fit in with our other employees, was always concerned with when her next break was; she was slow and made lots of mistakes and didn't do her share of the work. I showed her the same thing 5+ times and she STILL couldn't do it correctly. My friend's 11-year-old could have done the same thing after 2 or 3 demonstrations, no exaggeration! That's just some of the MANY, MANY problems we had with her. Had she not quit, she would have been fired within the next month or so anyway. I went into her further in Problem Employees.

So, on to HOW she quit: this employee called the REGIONAL manager, a close personal friend of hers, to quit. She told a lot of lies about the store and how it's run………we let regular employees do returns and voids, the managers don't work their scheduled hours, we treated her badly, etc. etc. Of course, no notice was given, so we're even more short-handed. Luckily, despite the relationship between the regional manager and the employee, the regional manager realized that we wouldn't be stupid enough to do the things that the employee said we did. So, bullet dodged, we're not getting into trouble or getting extra scrutiny.

A couple of things she said are sometimes true in special circumstances. Case in point: if I'm dealing with a difficult customer and another customer has a simple exchange, no money changing hands, I'll toss my keys to a long-term employee whom I trust and let her do the exchange. This lets me continue resolving the difficult situation without making the good customer wait. Officially against company policy, but keeping with the spirit of customer service. Another example: yes, I am sometimes late to work. But considering all the extra time I put in at night fixing that particular cashier's screw-ups, helping a customer when I'm on my way out the door, etc., I work my hours PLUS some.

We suspect that the employee thought she could tattletale, "quit," and then have the regional manager come in and give us all a good thrashing and give her the job back. Nope. Had that happened, we would have found ways to make her life a living hell, while following company rules to a "T." {sinister laugh}