Thursday, November 26, 2009

Revival.

I haven't posted a blog in millions of forevers, and there's no other excuse for it apart from me being super lazy. I might try to get back into the swing of things seeing as blogs are popularish again. Who knows.

So I nearly got fired a few months ago.

It was a Saturday and I was doing a close, and after we'd fucked all the Paddy Lasts out of the shop we started our clean up thing. It was all going grand until I got a text from a friend asking if I was going to a party. I said I wasn't, but if he was going that I'd drop by and collect that 200 quid he owed me. He then told me that he had intention of going. I got freaked, clearly, because sure why would someone ask if I was going to a party and then be like "yeah, I hadn't planned on going at all"? I don't know. I knew I wasn't getting my money that night anyway, and that was some bullshit. So anyway, my supervisor saw me texting away, and flipped the lid. "Niall, you can't be having the texting during work" or some shit, and i'm like "Hang on just one second here, you were just in the back for the past half hour chattin' shite to your mate in you native tongue and I said nothing about it...". It kind of went back and forth for a bit and then that was that.
Then when I was washing my hands in the sink, she comes along and dumps a whole load of meat scraps from the panini grill grease catcher into the sink and tells me to clean that. Obviously as I'm in a bad mood about not getting 200 lids later on, I'm going to be a cock about things, so i said something like "You were cleaning the panini grill. I've just cleaned my hands. And I'm not touching any of that seeing as I'm a vegetarian" and walked off to do something else.
Later on we run out of bin bags so I'm sent down to the SuperQuinn in the shopping centre to get some more. I was told to get the cheapest ones going, so I did. I get back and it turns out that the cheapest bin bags that SuperQuinn sell aren't actually the best fitting bin bags for our bins as they're too small. Big surprise there. She shits her shoes and starts screaming at me because they're wrong, and then asks me if I'm normal. She actaully said "Are you normal?". I try to calm the situation by saying to the effect of "I just don't see why you're on my back so much tonight, like what the fuck do you want from me?" and she just walked into the back. I figured it was to crack on with her paperwork or whatever so I just finished off the cleanup and then went in to count my till.
When I got into the office she'd written out a partner file, which is essentially just a report of unsatifactory behaviour or whatever. She had everything in it. The texting thing, the panini grill, the "what the fuck do you want from me?", she even said that it sounded like i was banging the mop into things on purpose when I was cleaning the floor. I signed it anyway and acknowledged that these things had been said/done and I then explained the situation about me being in a bad mood because of my friend owing me 200 euro and then leading me to believe that I'd get it soon and all that, and she made a compromise with me. She said that I was on a weeks probation with her, and that if I didn't get shitty with her during that week, she'd rip the thing up and not show it to the manager. Cool. We go home that night anyway and I have a day off on Sunday. Lovely stuff.
I walk into work on Monday and my manager calls me into the office. He tells me that my supervisor had showed him the partner file on Sunday, and that another manager from another store would be in shortly to conduct an investigation with me about misconduct and disobeying requests and orders from a superior. What a sneaky fucking bitch scumbag. The other manager came in and asked me a few questions, refering to the partner file each time, which was pretty embarrassing seeing as I was super petty that night. I basically had to explain it in much more detail and pretty much every time had to point out that I was half taking the piss. Like the really couldn't actually believe the vegetarian thing, could they? What made it worse was the fact that my manager had to write down the whole investigation, word for word, for Starbucks' records, and that made the whole thing so much slower. Having to repeat some of the ridiculous things that happened was also pretty cringey.
So from there, I had a disciplinary meeting schedualed for the next week with ANOTHER manager, and an assistant manager from another store. In that, they basically read the whole report from the investigation aloud, asked me a few questions about it, explained to me why such a huge deal was made out of it etc. It turned out that because our store had been performing so badly over the past few months, they were looking to cut back on costs, including labour, and were essentially trying to let anyone go for any given reason. Luckily, both people conducting this hearing thing had had dealings with the supervisor in question, and knew that she was balls to the wall mental. They ended up letting me off with a written warning and encouraged me to rat yer wan out the next time she had a mongo fit seeing as they seemed to be pretty keen to get her in the firing line, which was fucking sweet delish. I came back to the store after the meeting feeling absolutely invincible. Fuck yeah.

1 comment:

Ro said...

Disciplinary meetings in work are the worst. What a sneaky cunt. Would you be in trouble if Starbucks read this blog though? I once got in major shit when the company I worked for somehow caught me talking shit on them on the internet. I was totally justified in doing it though, the thieving, lying bastards.