275 - The face is no index to the heart.

Many hours have passed now since I left my last day of employment at a local catalogue store* for the last time, and I feel it's about time we got down and dirty for the record. I can say "last time" so confidently due to the vast amount of unfathomable ineptitude, unprofessionalism and unsavy business-sense* I witnessed in my time there, being part of the 'machine'.

To begin with, I started with the best intentions. Damn it, I was young, I was poor (kind of) and I wanted to do my bit for society - you know, all that giving back something nonsense. My enthusiasm for both the job and doing my part for society lasted about 5 minutes into my first contact with a manager, of which there seemed to be 2 or 3 of at any one time - although which one was anybody's guess. Sure, he was a nice guy and a great manager in times when all that needed to be done is sit around, make jokes and waste time. However, when you're making gargantuan losses every financial month, let alone year, and falling further and further behind your closest and only rival, wasting time is something you really can't afford to do. I knew this, the store must have known this, but neither of us did a god-damn thing to stop the sinking ship from sinking any further. The brainchild of a rich and incompetent executive (or few) who will insist to his (or their) dying day(s) that shareholders can still make money on the unholy beast of an operation this whole sub-division has become.

Any way, going back in time, I'm 5 minutes into a rushed and inpromptue 'interview' in which I'm told what shop I'm going for a job in and shown how to order a product from their catalogue, which is all very useful except that I would never need to order anything in my time there, nor have the desire to having seen the goods close-up and in storage for the hundreds of hours I did. But all that came later. My initiation, which really could have lasted 10 minutes based on the complexity of the business at work here, lasted roughly 3 weeks. At this point it should be noted that I was never given any satefy guidelines or even shown were emergency exits were. Indeed, had I not been the sharp-witted and independent learner I am, had a fire ever occured and burnt say the left half of my face off, I would have been one large and unwelcome lawsuit. I didn't see one word in print of my employment contract until over 6 months into the job, and even then the more valuable dealing was still with the manager who had interviewed me all that time ago who himself employed a full-on flexibility approach in exchange for efficiently running a profitable business. The latter sounds so much less fun though doesn't it?

To blame this all on him though is of course unfair, it isn't his job to make the store profitable, but an effective human-resource-wasteage-appraisal system wouldn't have been too oustretched an idea. Even when they (new management) finally did get around to addressing the issue of employee optimisation (which isn't the basis of the problem by any account, the basis being the fact that branches can NEVER be profitable whatever they do, but merely a way of at least denouncing progress) the only concrete action I ever saw them take was to sack the newest of all the store employees - a 16-year-old part-time boy who only worked on saturdays. Sure they would be saving the wretched £3.20 or whatever I heard they were paying him every hour, but this is only the equivalent of selling a couple of pillow covers and bed sheets more each day of every week than they did before. And god knows, a boom in the bed-cover industry will only ever have a small impact on the fast-paced and exciting trading of highstreet catalogue stores.

Some of the main problems arising on a weekly basis seemed entirely down to the lack of routine in operations. Employees arrived sporadically in and around the 30-minutes prior to the store opening, and clocked in at various times before and after the supposedly-allocated 5-minutes before opening. Personally, I tended to arrive 5 minutes before the store opened and go straight to sitting in my chair waiting for something to happen. On most days I worked I didn't even know which manager I was working for, let alone see or recieve guidence from any of them. A few simple shut-down processes existed, which if implemented properly were actually fairly good ideas. However, I was left in charge of them. I who had recieved no proper training and was not even being checked on more than once a month by any senior staff members, so naturally the whole affair was doomed to be ineffient, perpetuated by the fact that any article by any persons on the matter would be made more interesting if negative. Also, for some bizarre reason in my last month of employment, my hours changed from the simple shop opening times (10.30 - 4.30) to 10.45 until 4.15 (15 minutes before and after the new opening times of 11.00 - 4.00). At first the new times confused me, was this some kind of new Sunday-working-time directive or ingenious new initiative to get people shopping again at the weekend? Well no, I was simply being naive, from what I gather the reducing on hours on a Sunday was merely so that all employees no longer required a lunch break. My contract stated however, that since I was under 18 years old at the time, I was fully entitled to a 30-minute break every 5 hours, but I never saw the point in bringing it up. The idea of searching the building for the slightest hint of a manager was enough to glue me to my chair with apathy. I was however making .5hrs worth of pay for nothing since I was never early and never stayed until the Official time I finished.

In my time at The Store I began working one day a week, was upgraded to two and then later removed back to one. I was absent for health reasons at least 10 times (way over the amount at which a manager should be alerted) including 3 on which I didn't even ring to say I wouldn't be working. Only once did somebody bring up one of these times. In my last 8 weeks of employment, I took 6 weeks paid holiday despite my allowance only being 3 after being moved back to only one day a week. I was late 25% of the days I worked including my personal best day on which I arrived a full 2 hours and 35 minutes late. I worked for a new manager (who's name I never learnt) a good month or so before we first spoke and on at least 2 occasions promised to do overtime that I never showed up to (never mentioned). Some may say, I contributed to the problems of the firm but I say I was just a product of my environment. I was unmotivated, untrained and uninformed. I did my job well in all it's simplicities but the problem is far greater than the behaviour of one part-time employee and the few small instances highlighted above show that the problems start at home - the management. The entire hierachy is full of useless and corrupt people in positions of power, and the entire workforce is full of people who wish they weren't in the workforce, or wish they were at least paid enough to not care either way.

The only person I met in my time there whom I admired was a 30-year-old guy who left a couple of weeks after teaching me the basics to become joint-manager of a pub. He was surely onto a better gig there, flowing booze, good atmosphere, somewhere you can look forward to working. Sadly in my second to last week I saw him for a few moments when he came into my stockroom. Later I checked the schedule and saw he was back working full-time at The Store. I guess it never worked out for him, but hopefully someday he'll try again for something better.


*Actual name removed at insistence of lawyer, and shall be referred to herein as "The Store".

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Thursday 9th September 2004, update by jay at 02:50