Black Friday

I suppose it wasn't all that bad, but at the time, believe me, it was terrible.

This all began with the Personel Manager not wearing her back brace when she felt her back giving out the week previous. She's still not better and the condition aggravated by all the lifting and bending she has to do or, rather, insists on doing. By Thursday she was in such misery that she had to cut out early in the day. By Friday morning she was unable to walk and called in saying she wouldn't be in to work that day.

That left Lynn and I to run the store for the majority of the day. Fortunately it turned out to be a very slow day so it wasn't a super big problem. But there was one hitch in the otherwise finely laid plan ... Lynn has to leave at 5.00 pm to pick her daughter up from daycare. That would leave me by myself for an hour and there's no way one person can run the store by themselves, period. The obvious answer was that we going to close an hour early unless someone else could be found to come in for a few hours and help close the store.

The Boss had a previous engagement with people who were going out of town and she couldn't do it. No one else on the staff could be rustled up and the General Manager who is supposed to cover the lunch breaks on a Friday refused to stay later than his scheduled time but insisted that the store remain open. And then he got all bitchy about everything saying that it wasn't his job to ask Lynn to stay late since it was a Personel Manager issue and that he wasn't staying late because he wasn't supposed to be doing "Management work on a Friday" (wtf?) and that Paul just wants to close early because he wants to go downstairs and have a martini. This spun all out of control and for the next hour and a half we were subjected to all kinds of rumours and inuendo and general petulance. Eventually he just cut out saying "I'm leaving you guys to solve this mess." Some General Manager. Good to know that you can count on him when things get rough.

By the end of this drama Lynn and I were in a collective foul mood. As it turned out, she made arrangements for her daughter to be picked up from daycare and stayed the extra hour. Not that it was so super busy, but at least she made the effort ... unlike other people.

I'm really getting fed up with this job and the daily dramatics. If someone isn't whiney and mopey then they're creating mountains out of molehills, endlessly hashing over a simple problem that could have been resolved long ago. Besides, I've hit the glass ceiling and there's no further advancement possible for me. It's getting to the point where I spend my weekends de-stressing from the previous week and dreading having to go in to work again the following Monday. Dreading is proabably an overly strong word ... let's just say that I'm less than enthusiastic on Monday morning.

I really need to push along and make some forward progress.