Years ago before Sports Authority went out of business I worked there as the hardlines/ receiving manager of one of their stores. Terrible company I’m glad they went out. They were positively obsessed with the possibility of employee theft. Understandable I know but don’t be such ahitheads and you might lower your chances.
Unloading a truck at the store for some bizarre reason required someone to stand on the dock plate while the seal number was called in. Never understood why. One day the guy assisting me with the unload couldn’t find the phone number to call in the seal number where it was written on the desk for some reason. I stepped off the dock plate - not even fully sure I stepped off camera but stepped off the dock plate to point yell at him where it was.
Location Ops manager (glorified head cashier) gives me a warning I guess. I think her name was Robin and she essentially had battered wife syndrome with her job. Okay I’ll stand on the dock plate. Except I have ADD get bored easily and have a penchant for acting in appropriately in situations.
Cue up dancing on the dock plate and riding an imaginary horse while the person calls in the seal number. Did I mention I suck at dancing?
Ops Manager decides I’m not taking this with all the seriousness she can conjure up and reports me to District Loss Prevention manager. Shows him tape of me dancing in the dock plate and asks him what they are going to do about it.
It got back to that his response was “Nothing. He’s doing exactly what we told him to do.”
The manager knew the woman was being a pain and dealt with the situation with grace. Kudos.
As someone who is in upper management, if a lower manager person wants to get rid of a rank-and-file for asinine reasons like this, I always say "Sure. Just remember you're expected to fill in for him at his same or better performance level until you hire and train his replacement."
THANK YOU
Too many manager-lites try to just make someone on minimum wage do that on top of their regular job.
God forbid you look like you’re having fun at work s/
"You're enjoying your work too much. We must punish you."
Later: "The beatings shall continue until morale improves."
"No princes shall be beaten as long as there are serfs to take the beatings instead."
My first semi conductor company we had tons of fun, made our 12 hour shift go by faster. No one cared so long as the job got done. Basically if you didn't strip someone out of their bunny suit, tape them to a seat and have fun with them with it all caught on camera you wouldn't get fired. Yes this happened except for it wasn't caught on camera. Someone who wasn't involved did complain but it wasn't on camera and everyone involved denied it happened so nothing happened.
My next company would write you up or fire you for having fun. God forbid a manager caught you laughing at a joke, that's a write up. Pull a practical prank on someone and there was a good chance you got walked off site on the spot.
They were super PC also, break one of those unwritten PC rules and you were gone. As an example in the blue collar world a pair of dykes is what we call wire cutters, short for diagonal cutters and a name that had been in use for decades. There if you asked for a pair of dykes you were walked for using a derogatory term (this was early 2k). Cover on a motor wire you wire it up is a pecker head, guess what happened if you call it that...The list goes on how you could accidently trip yourself up.
Basically don't crack a smile, be serious at all times and don't use any trigger words and you can remain employed.
Ooohhh, StoicJim!
Many many years ago I read an extremely depressing SF story in that spirit.
Humans are on very different planes of each other when it is about job satisfaction and fullfilment. Some get to choose the careers they aspire to, and get to go home happy after a day's work. Others roll into some or more jobs, untill they find one they fit into and get satisfaction from doing it to their best. And then there are those will never like, let alone love, any job they find themselves having to do.
In the future of this story everything had to be regulated, and everybody would have to be equal. That would include job satisfaction.
So the government has this special bureau where the employees systematically interview everyone in the labor force, and a the slightest sign that you might be enjoying any part of your job, they make sure to have you transfered out of there.
I will never forget the last line of that doomy story, when the narator, who works at that government bureau, after an interview with someone who was caught whistling while doing their job, sighs: "𝙂𝙤𝙙, 𝙄 𝙝𝙖𝙩𝙚 𝙢𝙮 𝙟𝙤𝙗!"
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
(If anyone recognizes the story and knows who the author is, I'd love it if you would share that knowledge. I read the story in a Dutch collection of SF short stories, so it would have been originally written by a British or American writer, in English, and translated to Dutch. But there's a slight chance the author could be Dutch, too.)
P.S.
The best SF tropes that scare people are those that hit too close home for our feelings, the stories that make us feel like it's a simple daily thing that gets upended, and that it could happen anyday to anyone of us. No need for time-travel, space ships, laser, nor aliens. Just humans... behaving un-humanly.
(This is why people hated Dolores Umbridge so much in the Harry Potter universe. She could have been your teacher right here and now.)
After the chain shutdown, a work crew showed up to remove the 4 ft. tall letters. The store was near my workplace so I was often at that strip mall for lunch. I walked up to crew leader and asked one simple question, “Can I buy a vowel please?” Crew chief laughed and said, “No.” As a Jeopardy fan, I just had to ask the question.
I think you mean the show just before Jeopardy - Wheel of Fortune. 😉
wait... for me Jeopardy came before Wheel... can it really be the other way around sometimes? My world is shattering before my eyes...
Yes, here at my local stations, Wheel of Fortune has always been before Jeopardy! I was shocked when I went on vacation somewhere years ago, and the local stations there had Jeopardy on before Wheel of Fortune.
That's blasphemy! Wheel comes on before Jeopardy in my area, too. It has for decades. I honestly thought it was the shown in the same order everywhere.
All local purchases. Other than Morning news, evening news, the prime time through the late network show it was up to each station.
We had cable. Jeopardy and WoF were on 2 of the stations simultanously, but reversed.
So on channel 12: 19:00 Wheel of Fortune, 19:30 Jeopardy.
On channel 14: 19:00 Jeopardy, 19:30 Wheel of Fortune.
My young nephews, who sometimes would join me in watching, were very impressed with my ability to recognize words, and with my vast knowledge of about every subject in the universe. Really, I wasn't cheating, I 𝘢𝘮 smart, but actually very good at taking educated guesses. (⬅️Those makes about 60% of the answers on Jeopardy!)
But the day they found out about the repeat thing, they started to doubt my intellect. It took a couple of very strict monitored watching sessions to convince them, yeah, your aunt is pretty smart!
(It was also an excellent oportunity to teach them about the "educated guesses" matter!)
You caught me on WOF. Off by 1/2 hour.
What better way to make sure someone gives minimum effort than by insulting their will to simply be happy
Its possible there were "no horseplay" rules
Fair.
Happy cake day!
tl;dr: When you unloaded Sports merchandise, you didn't have the Authority to step off the dock plate.
Yeah left that under the radar huh.
That’s because he knew she was full of horseshit. She sounds like a total night mare.
I see what you did there.
Fuck Robin. LP told her what she needed to hear.
Shut, I cashier and we are in camera. I dance and do all sorts of silly things. It gets boring out there sometimes
How much stock was getting shoplifted under the managers nose while they obsessively watched their staff on cameras?
20% of stock visible on cameras
80% of stock walking out the back door
Sometimes during the downtime in the hotel job I currently tolerate I just stare into the camera in the back office where I have my "down time" just to creep out and waste the time of my manager who is a littler too much living on the ball. Seriously what am I going to steal? The stationary with the hotel name or the 200 bucks in the cash drawers?
[deleted]
Pardon my spelling errors. Also cheers, love the sarcasm mate.
I was hoping they'd offer you some dance lessons.
Best buy receiving has to touch and shake every box, tractor takes hours to unload
In college I worked in the cafeteria. One day lunch was dreadful. Cold cuts on a hoagie roll, really bad shepherd’s pie, and some soup I don’t remember. People began to complain. So I told them the soup was borscht, the sandwich was filet mignon, and I don’t remember what I called the shepherd’s pie (it was 1968). People laughed and ate it. I got a reprimand.
I remember going there once to buy some competition weight Frisbees. And they had no Frisbees. I asked two employees, and they both said they didn't carry any Frisbees or other brand discs, and I kept asking them what the name of their store was, as I laughed and walked out. "And this place is called what?" "Sports Authority." "Sports what?" "Authority." "Are you sure?
They were a re-buyer of merchandise. A lot of lot what they sold was what someone else couldn’t sell. They would buy it at a discount and pawn it off on whoever they could. The didn’t have set lineup of merchandise just whatever they could get the best deal on.
This explains everything. I had no idea.
So they were basically the Marshalls/TJ Maxx/TJX of sporting equipment then.
I used to work at Marshalls. If those types of stores actually cared about reducing shrink, they'd treat their customers like they do their employees and insist on bag/cart checks before letting them out of the stores. (Worked at Marshalls for 2 years, always on closing shift)
At Sports Authority we had to stand at the front door till someone check us out before leaving. We then had to twirl in front of the camera with arms elevated so that they could see 360 degrees of our belt line. Also a bag check at this point. I don’t think we had to lift our shirt a little.
I quit working at Marshalls in around 2002-3, so my memory is a little fuzzy on this and their procedures have very likely changed, but I don't recall anything beyond bag checks and having to have a manager let us out.
Also - asking an employee to LIFT THEIR SHIRT? As a woman, the first time anyone did that as a condition of employment would have been my last shift working for that person.
Neither of those employees had anything say in what the store carries.
I worked at a shoe store and would regularly get asked why we didn't have a specific shoe or a specific size. Not even the local store managers had any control over what the inventory was. Corporate would send what they thought we were supposed to have and I would put it on the shelf in the way that corporate told me to. The managers just made sure I followed the plan.
As someone who wears a US women's size 7.5 EEE shoe, I'm pleasantly surprised whenever a shoe store DOES have my size in stock. I also recognize that it's probably not the store's fault when it isn't in stock.
It was about 15 years ago when I worked there but when someone came in and needed a size we didn't have I could help them order it online for delivery. Might be worth asking the store if they can do that next time you shop for shoes.
... And after you walked out, you walked into Radio Shack and asked for a radio, right? Right?
Back in the day, they would've handed you a hundred components and told you how to build it yourself.
Damn right they would have, and it was GLORIOUS.
And the guy behind the counter could have drawn a circuit for you from memory that worked better than anything commercial in the shop.
Loved Radio Shack as a kid. These days? Bah.
These days? They still exist? Where?
They were rebranded to The Source, and now apparently they're being rebranded again to Best Buy Express.
The last time I was in The Source, hmm last year? in London Ontario, one of the malls, I forget which. Before that was Saskatoon a few times.
It's just a Canadian thing, apparently.
Here. Here’s a bag of the little stuff you need, a box of the big stuff you need, here’s the instruction book, have fun. No returns or refunds.
You can still buy DIY sets for clocks, radios and electric motors. It's a fun afternoon with the kids to built one of those. All you need is a wire cutter and a soldering iron.
Absolutely. When my son was 8 or 9 we spent the afternoon building my wife a clock for her birthday.
I'm pretty sure it's far less than a hundred unless the wires are precut(which would be ridiculous).
What more proof does one need that frisbee golf is not a sport when the authority on sports doesn’t recognize it as a sport? JK- I couldn’t care less one way or the other about frisbee golf, this was just a funny thought that popped into my head.
Um actually, it's disc golf (joking, I really don't care)(I'm not a sports authority)
Nice! My friends and I were more into distance throwing and Ultimate.
Did they have hacky sacks? Marbles?
Jk. But that's what I imagine them talking about when you left.
Pick up sticks?
Do you think those 2 employees named the store, or were the ones deciding not to carry frisbees?
Seriously, enough with that boomer shit.
[deleted]
I'm taking part in a conversation about another comment, "original content" has nothing to do with this.
Now stop whining about me, unofficial sub janitor.
[deleted]
And STAY OFF my lawn!
I thought millennials were the sensitive snowflakes, yet seems my comment struck a nerve with you.
Oh, and yet another hallmark of being a boomer- telling someone to get a job when they already have a job.
I went to Big 5 sporting goods for a parks pass to a very-nearby National Forest. I asked if they had maps. No. They’ll sell you a gun and hiking poles but maps, what tf is a map for? They didn’t even say where in town I could get a map. Big 5 can suck it.
Hoping you were at least riding the pony.
whats the maliciousness? i mean its funny, but whats malicious about dancing?
[deleted]
You also have ADD and got bored?