Help Me Out
The best way I’ve gotten back at a boss? Brutal honesty. I worked at a bookstore. I used to be on the overnight shift, shelving books, but they did away with that to try and save some money and brought us all into the daytime shift. When they enforced that change, I was doomed to eight-hour shifts—usually by myself—at the registers.
Now, our store manager at the time was totally useless. He’d lock himself in his office filled with pictures of his ballerina boyfriend and do absolutely nothing during his shifts. One morning, in particular, I was at the register, and I had a line. I tried paging for backup, and no one came. I assumed everyone was busy, so I just did my best to bust out the line.
Meanwhile, our phone started ringing. No one went to get it because everyone was busy helping customers…or so I thought. After three rings, our intercom system beeped and the manager started saying: “Backup to phones…back up to the phones”. The brilliant part was that you had to pick up the phone to even use the paging system.
Meanwhile, I was nearly through my line, and a sweet old lady tottered up and told me she ordered a book and got a phone call about it being in. I got her details and went hunting through our order shelves. I couldn’t find it. I verified that I had all the info right and tried again. The order just wasn’t up there. So I paged for a supervisor or manager, and then the store manager paged for me to call him at his office extension.
So I called the manager’s office and explained the situation to him. He told me to look at the hold shelves again. I tried to tell him I’d already done that, but he just hung up on me. The lady was looking unhappier by the second, and I was worried I was going to get yelled at. So I paged the manager again, asking him to come to the front register.
He paged me back, telling me to call him at his office extension. I do. He asked me what I wanted from him. I told him I still couldn’t find the lady’s order and that I could really use some help—but he cut me off mid-sentence and told me he’d check in the office to see if there were any additional orders back there. Meanwhile, I kept telling the woman how sorry I was, and I asked her if she can move aside while we kept looking and I continued ringing up other people.
I was nearly done, there were maybe two people left in line. I’d handled three more pages from the incompetent manager—all of which were to tell me he couldn’t find this book—and I was forced to tell the lady we can’t find it. She still looks annoyed, but she patted my hand and told me she knew I did all I could. She called the manager a useless piece of trash for not getting off his behind and coming out to help like a good manager should do, and then she breezed out of the store.
Two minutes after that happened, the line was gone, and I was alone. Three people come up to the registers, claiming that the manager sent them up there to “help me out” and he told one of them to have me go into the back “to talk” when I had a free moment. When I got back there, he was all buddy-buddy. “Hey what’s wrong, you sounded stressed…everything okay”?
And I remembered that old lady. And I told him that no, it wasn’t okay. So he asked me what was going on—and I told him exactly what frustrated me. I told him it was the first time ever that I felt a manager didn’t have my back. I said he was unprofessional and complete nonsense. I also told him—word for word—what the old woman said. He just stood there and stared at me. I asked him if I could go back out there and do my job since it was awfully busy out there (I sort of expected him to fire me)…He didn’t speak, just nodded. So I flounced back out.
Apparently, he locked himself in his office and cried for the rest of the day.
Story credit: Reddit / Narmie