Jin
Wanted the controller SO BAD
Posts: 1,674
This is a small business with only five other staff members. There is no one else between me and my employer, the owner of the store. The store is a hybrid tobacconist, video rental and giftware store. Each of these departments is extenstive and normally requires at least one person per department, but during the day there's only one person on (with a second coming in for a few hours) and only two nights a week are two people there. I work six nights a week, four of those nights being the only person there, trying to handle three departments. The store gets anywhere from 3-500 customers per day, with around 1-150 coming in at night. We're under staffed and stretched thin. Even then, we are able to keep the store running smoothly but just the basic requirements of keeping things orderly take all our time - yet she still expects us to be doing a laundry list of other tasks that are simply impossible to achieve. She's had to work these shifts on her own and concedes there is not enough time to get everything finished (in fact she tends to get nothing completed at all, leaving quite a mess for the next person to clean up) yet still expects us to perform miracles. The real kicker is when we've checked the sales records for the days she's been there and it's been "so busy!" are the days the staff consider to be the slowest.
Initially my desire to leave began with irritation at the paranoia and distrust directed towards myself and the other staff. She'll do things like watch the security cameras (live, or tapes from the pervious night) from her home, and then call to bark orders if we appear to be doing things contrary to how she wants them done. She implimented an extremely complicated, cyber-nanny style security login system on the workstations neutering our ability to perform most basic tasks that we are required to do each and every day, instead having every decision we make have to go through her. This has caused things to become extremely inefficient and has eliminated our ability to actually have any initiative. (She'll then complain about us not showing any initiative.) There is work that is months old just lying around that needs to be checked by her, but she won't look at any of it beause she has no interest in actually doing anything at the store. She just likes to drop by, obsessively check how many sales have been made and how much profit has been taken and having little cartoon dollar-signs pop out of her eyes. She's a control-freak and will take out her insecurities on us, blaming us for her own mistakes and even things entirely out of anyones control. Here's something that happened on the weekend - the machine in our store used for electronic payments and processing things like pre-paid phone credit is old and malfunctions on a regular basis. It has a tendency to reboot itself right in the middle of transactions. We've already determined that one of the reasons for this is some kind of error that happens when the service provider for the machine attempts to contact the device remotely (to do things like check if it needs a software update). Friday night a sheduled update was happening after the store had closed and was completely empty, the error occured and the machine rebooted, but there was no one to log the machine back in so the provider was unable to complete the automated update, leaving the device unable to process pre-paid credit transactions. This somehow was all my fault. A few months ago the machine timed-out in the middle of an EFTPOS payment for a little under $300 dollars, and then rebooted in the middle of processing a paypment reversal. The money didn't come through to us, and it wasn't set back to the customer. They had lost nearly $300, and it took the bank a week to relocate it. Initially this became the fault of the girl operating the machine at the time, but then it became my fault when I attempted to defend her. The best part was it happened on my day off when I wasn't even ****ing there and now she considers me responsible for it. She now double checks all transactions I process with the machine "Just to make sure it doesn't happen again."
Not long ago we discovered under the workplace legislation for this country regarding payment and working coniditions for staff she is actually violating almost half of the requirements, the most serious of which involve unpaid overtime and Rostered Days Off (If we're rostered on a holiday, she'll tell us to not come to work that day and she'll come in to do the shift herself, to avoid paying out holday rates. This is illegal.). She's been ripping us off to the tune of thousands of dollars. We've already placed a complaint with the FairWork commission and it's currently under investigation.
My most recent grievance is regards to how she treats me and my coworkers as children. One recent complaint was that my coworker and I spend too much time talking at work, and that we have poor time management. We work the Friday night shift, the busiest night of the week. It's a five hour shift and we get roughly 150 to 200 customers. That's at least one customer every two minutes. We mostly always leave on time, occasionally staying back a little later to finish things up for the morning crew (which we don't get paid for but we do it anyway). We get everything restocked, cleaned and organised but it's never considered enough. She leaves us lists of crap to do with no time to do any of it without leaving other work incomplete. Whatever doesn't get done she complains about. And then the other day she had a little talk with me about this "issue" and said that we either have to stop talking to each other at work or she'll "have to seperate us."
The discussion got a little heated and when I refused to accept what she was saying she got pissed and left. I've got my shift tonight and she'll be at the store when I get there. Not looking forward to it.
