Is your manager a monster like mine was

No one ever said that everything would go perfectly as you planned. What is worse is the fact that you bend yourself backwards for a company for so long and everything that you done thus far becomes nothing but a distant memory. Hard work and countless hours of dealing with people and their problems on a daily bases, leaves you sometimes to feel empty almost like a vessel. The sad part about it is, you have bills to pay, so the solitude life that you live for you work is something that you just learn to grow and deal with. I worked for Get-go an affiliation for Giant Eagle it is their gas station and let me tell you. I do not know whether it was just the area I worked in but retail and perusing customer service has its ups and downs. What I have come to learn is you have to lose a lot of yourself to gain a little satisfaction in the world of retail. After countless and monotonous amount of blood, sweat and tears I have learned that in the end it all just becomes a memory.

I must add the picture on the right does not due my old manager justice, though I will not disclose any names, my journey started and ended at the clasp of her vile plague. When I first started I loved my job, I was one of them people who would come in on my day off without the slightest hesitation. I heard my associates talk about the store having a high turnover rate and for awhile I thought they we're just bitter. As time progressed and I got into that mile marker so to speak things begin to turn for the worse. I found my manager to be lazy, rude, disrespectful, incorrigible, and repulsive. It is pretty bad when customers,not associates but customers begin to learn insight on the the experience that goes on behind close doors. For me and the main rule in retail in my opinion is you never cross that boundary with your consumers. There we're a couple of times that incidents would happen among us employees that customers would know and it baffled me, sets you back and makes you think "are you kidding me". There is such thing as keeping an open relationship with the people that you serve but it is also another thing to back talk or bash other employees to consumers and have it set in your mind that it is okay....... because it is not.The one thing my manager loved to do was take "half a vacation day" and leave the employees sometimes by themselves for hours at a time. Funny thing about being a manager in some cases is you do not clock in or out, so nothing is ever documented. Mangers are put in a position to observe and manage a team based off sales and profits, but what people do not know is it also is a position of integrity and power. Granted managers do not have to do everything or even bend themselves backwards like the employees do, but why would you not want to. Especially to a team that looks up to you and gives you the satisfaction of not coming into a shift because they we're well trained to be put in scenarios where little help is needed. It is also time fraud. As a manger you must work at least 40 hours, some work double that and if you get paid to work 40 hours and you do not work that amount, then it is subjected to time fraud. My manager loved that satisfaction of leaving a shift then coming in the next day to complain about things that maybe did not go as expected, and who's faults that they had no one to blame but themselves.

So manager is supposed to open one morning in which the store opened up at 6 o clock. Did not happen. People love their coffee in the morning and their newspaper, and some just wish to get gas on their way to work. Another associate that lived close by took the time on her day off to come in and rectify what the manager could not. Mind you the store was supposed to be open for a few hours by this point so you can imagine how much the business has lost due to ignorance of management. When my manager came in she had the audacity to not even say thank you to the employee who came in, as for her in her mindset maybe she thought that it was to be expected from her employees. This was the start of the downward spiral that caused many issues for the company. It is funny to blame someone for their faults or something that is out of their control when yourself does the same thing..... where do you think they learned it from. One thing is lottery we always had an issue with it being short. Their we're times that I would come into a shift an one of the registers we're 200$ short and the lottery was 195$ over. Lottery tickets we're being paid out on the main store terminal instead of the lottery register, thus creating an issue for employees. I would then have to manage to run the store, and also rectify something I had no idea about because my manager had the audacity to create the problem and do absolutely nothing to solve it as once again she takes the infamous "half a vacation day". We would sign documents stating something an employee did wrong for instance gossiping, there was consequences to people bashing other employees. I do not think my manager understood that it was not your team that gossiped but yourself. There we're times I would work morning with her, because obviously she never wanted to work evenings she knew she would actually have to do some work. That for almost an hour to two hours she would bash and when I say bash I mean completely rip someone apart as some vicious monster would do, and the only thing I could think about is if you talk about people as much as you do to me, I wonder what it is you say about me behind my back.

For me the experience was bad because of management, but what made it worth while was the few customers that you do get close to. You begin to learn their habits and communicate in ways that you would not even imagine. I have cleaned for a cancer patient due to her coming in completely in a wreck because her teen daughter would not help her......go figure. So I stepped up and told her on my day off I would come and help her out without even thinking which completely shocked me in ways I could not imagine. I have worked from 7-3 went home then closed another location down from 4-11, then turned around and my manager asked me to come back and close my location down from 11:15-12:30 and I did not even get a thank you. I have given the company my time and patience and it literally got to a point that I was working so much people would ask on my day off " wheres Paul, is he not working today" almost every time I was away from work. It just in the end goes to show you that when things get rocky, a company is not willing to bend backwards like you have done for them, you are just a statistic and it is just that a number they have to pay on a weekly bases. So a long epic journey of triumph and pride to do things I could not even imagine for my customers all becomes nothing but a distant memory in the past, and it all comes down to who has the power.