It was a day to celebrate when I
found out that the manager of the store had finally decided to step down, right
before, it so happens, his next performance evaluation. On the whiteboard in
the break room, he’d written a message thanking everyone for their hard work,
along with some unctuous hearts, and signed with his name. A daily annoyance
for months. After he left, someone erased his name. He will be missed.
But work is a dictatorship and, based on the brief history of the store, the joyous mood at the unceremonious fall of the old regime only lasted moments, because the new regime could have been worse. Four minimum qualifications for a leadership role: Sanity. Competence. Maturity. Good sense. Not much to ask and yet no one in management has met all four. No one. People who have all these qualities, I suspect, tend to seek and acquire better jobs. Our world doesn’t have them in abundance and is poorer for it. So, from its inception, the nation of our store has been in turmoil, and I’m the average citizen who’s come to expect nothing but hardship no matter who’s in power.
It was the new leader who informed me of the old leader’s sudden departure. And with that delightful greeting out of the way, he went over the day’s agenda. The old leader, during his ignominious reign, made use of a notebook, in which he’d scrawl a list of tasks larded with such reminders as “I will not accept mediocracy!” Where a few bullet points would suffice, his entries could take up more than a page. (Admittedly, I may have been the only one who read them conscientiously, adding corrections and notes of commentary at times, which he asked me to stop doing. Not as conscientiously, I was tempted to steal it and publish it as a novel.) The new leader, on the other hand, felt no need to write junk essays for me to decipher, because our jobs are, after all, simple and unchanging. Just a few words.
Another difference: Our old leader didn’t believe in the value of basic store maintenance. One hour to clean the store (including interruptions to assist customers) turned into half an hour, which eventually turned into fifteen minutes. It was what he took to calling a “streamlined” clean. In other places I’ve worked, “streamlined” cleaning would get you fired. Unsure of what he meant exactly, I asked him to show me how to clean the entire store—office, break room, hallways, bathrooms, twenty aisles (or, to quote the notebook, “isles”), storage area, cash register area, entrance—in fifteen minutes. I had my watch on, ready to time him. But, despite that, logically, it should have taken no more than fifteen minutes to train me, freeing us from a nightly headache while providing a fully sanitary workplace thereafter, he put it off for another day, which didn’t stop him from criticizing my mediocracy later. Our new leader allotted two hours to clean an entire store. No additional training needed.
Another difference: Other authority figures would bark orders or tail you or otherwise contribute to a hostile workplace, where one is underpaid to do essential work to begin with. The new leader, after letting me know what he wanted, went to his work area. Then he worked. And not a single time did he pester me while I worked.
Near the end of the night, he engaged me in a short conversation about his fatigue at having to clean up the mess, literal (the office) and figurative (incorrect procedure), left behind by the old leader. And at the end of the shift, I didn’t escape wordlessly. We said goodnight. And I, for one, meant it.
During the next shift, I was scheduled to work with one of the old leader’s flunkeys. To take one example of how she works: I counted out a register, placed it at the end of the counter, ten feet away from her, with no one else near it. Then I left to work on my assigned aisle. It takes maybe ten seconds to put a cash register in and, once done, there’s another cashier available to help customers, which is why everyone else does it ASAP. And no one else has ever made an issue out of it. But within moments the flunkey tracked me down and, with voice raised, told me to never leave the cash register unattended. For my next shift, I was again scheduled with her. This time, after counting out a register, I stood next to it and waited. She poked around the counter for a minute, doing what looked like nothing urgent. Then a customer approached and she proceeded to check her out. Still no sign of when she’d ever put in this cash register. In the end I took it, placed it directly behind her, where non-existent thieves would hesitate to trespass, and continued with my assigned work. Within moments she tracked me down and started getting loud about how I was doing my job, a job I had before she was hired. Her instruction, an invention of her own, would have made both of my tasks, putting away products and watching the register, harder. I ignored her.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call her sanity into question. She seemed capable of doing the physical labor required. But she’s a belligerent mook, stoking conflict wherever and whenever she can and blaming anyone but herself for it. Our world has them in abundance and is poorer for it. I wouldn’t hire her to do my job, let alone a job overseeing other people. So I texted the new leader early the next morning and told him, at the risk of losing hours, to never schedule me with this person again. When we met up for a shift, I explained why, reluctantly. The old leader would have listened with bovine dullness of expression and, seemingly forgetting about it the moment the conversation ended, would do nothing about it. (According to a customer, someone eventually called the cops on the subject of those complaints.) But the new leader listened and resolved to take action right then and there. He didn’t make a judgment about who was right or wrong. He recognized that, either way, there was a problem to be addressed and both employees had an equal claim to a functional work environment. His solution: He would change the schedule so we wouldn’t have to work with each other. Problem solved.
Sanity. Competence. Maturity. Good sense. The first true leader the store had ever seen.
Initially I spoke of him with nothing but appreciation, amused at how easy he made it seem. Which it is, really. The store was cleaner than it had ever been and everything else got done too. A corporate review of our store was favorable (unlike the store that had incubated the old manager). And I never had a problem with him. But over the next month or so, I had to look past a few things. Sometimes I’d be searching for him and wouldn’t find him. Eventually I discovered he went outside periodically to smoke in the middle of a shift. I certainly wouldn’t be allowed to stop working and stand around whenever I felt like it. A minor fault. I didn’t always find him there, though, and in such cases I simply gave up. …Okay, that could turn into a real problem. Not yet though! And one night, against the instruction in one of our training videos to lock up the store in pairs as a precautionary measure, he decided to lock up by himself without explanation. It was only once? And one afternoon, I went to the storage area to look for him. He was going out the emergency door, pushing a U-boat. I called his name. He didn’t reply, so I followed him. Once outside, a man I didn’t recognize turned quickly on his heel and walked around the corner. No one other than employees should be in the area outside the emergency doors. It can’t be mistaken for the entrance. The new leader didn’t acknowledge him, just puffed on his pipe. That night, in describing the day to my brother, I added, with a laugh, that his behavior seemed a bit shady to me. My praise was now tempered.
The next morning, the new leader asked me to be especially careful about watching the register because his boss, the district manager, was in the parking lot. The DM came in and went to the back office with our new leader. I worked as usual. Before long, the DM found me and introduced me to a temp leader and informed me that the new leader, the best employee we’d ever had, was under investigation and suspended until further notice.
Corruption scandal. Forced resignation from office.
At some point during the day, the temp leader asked me how I liked the job. I explained to him that it’d been quite chaotic since the store opened, actually, that the old leader was one of the worst I’ve ever worked with, that the new leader knew what he was doing, so it came as a shock (more for the timing than the accusation, I suppose) that he was now gone. I was worried, frankly, that we’d be returning to chaos.
The temp leader replied: “Oh, that’s good.”
During my next shift, another regime change meant I found myself paired up with the mook once more. Upon seeing her, I groaned: “Oh no.” I signed in and started trudging to the back. She called loudly after me: “Come get this cash register!” I ignored her. When I returned, she handed me a phone number and said I could go. The number belonged to the temp leader. They’d hatched a plan to deal with my insolence. Using the office phone, I called him and he picked up. I explained the situation and said the previous leader rearranged our schedules so that I wouldn’t have to work with the mook.
“Well, I am not Lance. I’m Lester. I do things a little differently,” he began.* Scandal had discredited everything the prior regime stood for. Instead he’d be looking, without proper context, at the security footage, which doesn’t have audio.
I wanted a clarification. I was facing what amounted to a punishment. The mook was not. Are you going to listen to my side of the story? When the previous leader—
“No. I’ll be looking at the security video. I am not Lance. I’m Lester. I—”
I hung up. Time to immigrate.
