Crappy Customer Service

Gettin On Wi It

December 5 - Let Go What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?

I let go of my old job, obviously.  I had no idea it would be so emotionally difficult, because at the time I had a grievance list a mile long and was clutching my desk so I didn't just walk out every day.  But I loved working for my supervisor, and I enjoyed working with apparel.  I still kinda miss them both.

Part of me is in mourning for the ideal of the job, not the reality of it.  The job I wanted at the Sporting Company doesn't exist anymore, and never will again.  This was confirmed for me when I ran into someone who still works there.  She aired a laundry list of grievances I recognized. 

She also didn't ask me how I was doing because she was tied up with her own devils.  She is of a certain age, but unable to retire from the Sporting Company's pittiful wage (never mind that, there's no retirement planning either).  I'm certain that she also feels her age is a challenge to finding new work.  Her life is tough enough without me being petty or spiteful, even though she was terrible to me at the beginning of my tenure there.  So I let go of that, too.

Or Lose a Tooth

I'm about ready to just walk completely naked through the world. 

Fashion is just awful right now.  Everything looks like it was washed in a mud puddle and dried by hanging it off a car bumper.  The world doesn't make shoes for my feet and I'm ready to give up my half-assed attempt at high heel training because I'm afraid of doing permanent damage.  My eyeballs don't like contacts.  My hair is super scraggly.  I don't know *what* happened to my skin last month but I seem to be consuming myself from the inside out.  What's left that could happen to make me look any worse?

I could rip out an earring.

Is It Wrong...

To be so, so tired of the "bohemian" look jammed down the throats of plus-size women?

To walk a wide berth around loitering groups of surly-looking First Nations teens?

To pay 10¢ extra per bus ride for air conditioning?  (Hypothetically.)

To have this huge summer entertainment extravaganza taking place outside the front door, yet stay indoors for a meal and a nap on my lunch hour?

That Sound Still Haunts Me

PlazaJen's latest post reminded me of something that I accepted/railed against, depending on which day it was, while working at The Sporting Company.  It sure did piss me off back then.

I've mentioned the crazy ass building The Sporting Company used to house their production facilities.  The one tippy-top thing that used to drive me batshit about it was that the A/C and the heat were on, simultaneously, year 'round.

Let me be even more clear:  The building was heated by a combination of forced air and radiant heat.  So TWO heat systems and the A/C were on, all at once.  And my desk was under a vent.  So random blasts of hot/icy air would be farted into my office without any warning but mysterious bumping/crashing sounds that resembled those of a greased Groundskeeper Willie chasing Santa's Little Helper through the ducts.  It was just the fucking capper on my day. 

In an attempt to control the climate chaos, my supervisor and I spent half a day going up a ladder, opening the dropped ceiling and turning the hex keys attached to the ducts, thus closing them in our area.  This caused a hurricane-force blast of A/C in another area of the building, which we didn't know about until a blue-tinged cow-orker turned up on our office doorstep.  The gale was so loud she couldn't even hear her phone ringing.

It was a disgusting waste of resources, time and money.  But I can laugh now.

No wait!  The real capper was that they sold the building to some other poor sucker for around $2 million.

Check Out Guitar George, She Knows All The Chords

I disappear into tasks.  I am the person to whom you give your massive time-sink of a job that no one wants - I'll do the hell out of it.  Filing?  Yes please!  Alpha or numerical?

Do you want to spend your long weekend editing the ID tags of your *entire* music collection?  I just did.  (The weather was shitty, mind.)  And put those album covers on, no matter how obscure.

At work I am using spare parts of the day to categorize a massive vendor contact file.

I became the essential employee at The Sporting Company when I read every.  Last.  Catalog.  You need me to find something out?  I'll find out ten things, and learn another language so I can find an eleventh in another country.

No one else in my family is like this.  Where does it come from?

Why I Left (You May Not Care, But I Need To Write It Down For Posterity's Sake. The Summary Is At The Bottom.)

I did wind up staying until Tuesday at my old job.  They wound up bringing a total of three new people in to run my department - one of which started last Monday.  I told them before I left that it took two years for me to learn my job, so training this person for two days wasn't going to do much.  I guess they'll take what they can get.

Six months ago, I was the junior buyer with only 4.5 years under my belt.  When I left last week, the average employment time was two weeks.  Recently hired are the people I asked for six months ago after my former boss was forced into retirement, my office mate left on undetermined sick/stress leave and the other co-worker quit to start her own day care.  They didn't hire more people until after I gave them my resignation.

After having worked through the peak Christmas season with 60% less staff than usual, one of the execs forced through a $1.50/hour raise for me.  I thought this was generous until I found out two things:  a) He put the raise through over the objections of the company's president and the COO, and b) My wage was still laughable when compared to my classmates, who don't get out of bed for less than $20/hour.

And this is after I took over my boss's responsibilities, again with no raise.

So the short version is this-

I gave them 5 years.  They kicked my boss out - who is the COO's sister-in-law and a stellar employee.  My teammates left.  They didn't give me more money or more staff.  They expected me to do the work of four people for cheap wages.

So I left.  And they are going to be in the shit bucket, having lost an entire department with 30 years of experience.  More people are leaving shortly in other departments.

The lesson?  If you can avoid it, don't work for companies that are managed by a family.  I won't do it again.  I really liked my co-workers and will miss many of them, but my sanity was slipping away. 

Heart Not Light Yet

I gave my notice at The Sporting Company on the 17th.  I just couldn't hack it anymore.  My last day is March 5th.  I don't have another job to go to yet.

I've been subsisting on 4-5 hours' sleep a night for the last six months - I spend the balance of night hours lying in bed, my heart racing over 100 bpm thinking about going to work the next day.  My doctor recently doubled my blood pressure meds.  However I feel about it, it's time to move on.  I'm not well-paid enough to sacrifice my health and my relationships.

And how do I feel about resigning from this job?  Like a failure.  Like I'm letting people down.  Like I'm an asshole for leaving a job when unemployment is high.  And most of all, like I'm letting my husband down.  My poor husband who has stuck by my many career crises and never complained about all the drama that seems to swirl around me.

Like my former boss says, I'm a great employee who is shitty at choosing jobs.

Hey, Wait A Minute....

Let me try to be as obscure about this as possible.

One of the owners of The Sporting Company won a business award on Friday.  He won a Business Guy Of The Year type thingy from a professional association.

First of all, he couldn't be bothered to show up to accept the award, so one of the other owners went.  The other guy not only accepted the award, he walked through the building thanking all the employees & telling them the award is really for them because they're worked so hard.  He also e-mailed this sentiment to make certain everyone heard it.  Now THAT's appropriate behaviour - and this guy wasn't even the guy who won.

The guy who won?  Had a major injury last November and was recuperating in Hawaii for three months.  He was in the rehab hospital for three months and at home learning to move again until this past September *coughkarmacough*, went on a two week cruise and is currently in BC.  So he was gone from the business for more than nine months of 2009.

We employees were initially pleased with the award, then we thought about it for the amount of time it took you to read this post.

Carolyn's Late Addendum to the Magna Carta

Let every pair of pants, for whatever purpose, for whichever gender or for non-gendered persons, have at least one (1) pocket sized to contain a small piece of paper or a coin.

I figure this is at least as important as the right of habeas corpus!

A Request

My spirits are low in the middle of the day.  When I look at the clock at noon, and think about spending five more hours at work with a fist-shaped lump in my gut, I am not happy.

This is how I know it's time to move on to another job. My heart is no longer in it.  My boss took it with her when she left.  I am just marking time for forty hours a week and it seems like a waste of my life.

Which is why, even though I dread the job search/interview process with the mother of all dreads, I am going through with it and I've sent out a few resumes, thus actually doing something I said I was going to do (just this once).

Soooo...if you have something funny or nice to say I'd appreciate hearing it.  Even something completely random or a link that'll make me laugh.  Cute Overload served up this cute little bugger today.