Saturday, September 29, 2012

Stupid Employee Tricks

Just some random employee stupidity...

A cop comes into my Hollywood Video and asks me if I am the manager.  I tell him that I am and he asks me if I have seen my employee Charlie lately.  I said that he was supposed to come in to work that afternoon but that he never showed up.  I was all worried at this point and I ask if something bad had happened to him.  The cop proceeds to tell me that Charlie stole a car and when they pulled him over downtown he fled the vehicle on foot and took everything with him--except for his name tag from work. He called me a few days later and asked if I could hold his job until he got out of jail.

As a DM at Happy Time Portraits, I do a surprise visit to a studio far away from my house and walk in on a girl looking very bored sitting behind a computer.  When she finally notices me she gets up quickly and pretends that she was getting some paperwork done and starts fiddling with things on the computer.  I tell her that I need to see some random thing and she goes in the back to get it and when I go to look at the computer screen I see that she left a NotePad document open that says "Things to Buy:  1. Bed room set  2. Dishes (potts, pans, ext.)  3.Bed spread  4. Curtains" and it went on and on.   She had an awesome command of the English language and a great work ethic!

Another fun NotePad story was at a different store and someone had written a very graphic love letter to their boyfriend and all of the things they wanted to do to/with him. 

There was a manager in our district before I was a DM and everyone thought she was so nice and liked her and stuff but I kinda thought she was fake.  One day she called tech support and they warn you that the "calls may be recorded for quality assurance."  Well, that day they were.  This manager called in and went off on the poor guy at tech support and cussed him out pretty badly.  And I got to hear it because they forwarded the recording to the DM at the time who happened to be in my store that day as well as the RD and the VP.  It was pretty sweet.

I was really busy one day and I gave this girl a list of stores to call in our area that we needed to pass a message along to.  She calls everyone and comes up to me a few minutes later and says "It's the weirdest thing, most of the numbers were disconnected."  I looked at her strangely and ask her to show me which ones were disconnected.  It turned out to be all of the ones outside of our area code.  "Uh, did you happen to press '1' before dialing the number?"  "No, why?"  /facepalm

I get a call one afternoon from one of my employee's cell phones.  "Oh my God.  I was taking the freight elevator down to the basement to take out the trash and the elevator is stuck.  I'm freaking out!  It's been like twenty minutes and no one has come!"  "Oh, wow.  Okay.  Did you try calling the store?"  "I don't have their number!  Can you please call and have them get me out?"   So I call the store and they have someone go down there and it turned out that the elevator was working perfectly fine, she just didn't realize that she had to pull the handle on the door.

I like to use this story for why phrasing is important!  At Happy Time Portraits we have to call the customer to confirm their appointment for the next day and figure out what they are going to be doing.  When I was a manager I was trying to show a new associate how we made these calls.  One of the things we try to figure out is what kind of outfit they will have for the shoot.  So after explaining all of the steps to him, he calls up a customer and is going through the list of questions and he gets to the outfit part and he gets all nervous and says, "Uh, so um... What are you wearing?"  And I can't help but laugh because it sounds like it was his first time calling into a phone sex hotline and he catches himself and makes it worse.  "I mean-- No, ma'am!  Not what are you wearing right now, but, um, what are you wearing tomorrow?  Sorry!  Sorry!"  Loved that kid to bits, haha!

I walked into a store and thought that no one was there, but the employee was just hiding behind the cash wrap, sitting on the floor, eating Doritos and reading Twilight

There was this chick who worked with me at Hollywood that moved from Ohio to the coast and she was just a hot mess of a person.  Her name was Taryn and she was a super big white girl with kinky hair, horrible skin and glasses that were too small for her face.  She was one of those people that you spent five minutes with and realized that they were what was wrong with America.  She openly loved George Bush, drank a giant plastic thermos cup of "pop" from 7-11 everyday and used the word "nigger" in the most horribly offhanded fashion I have ever seen.  If they ever let her breed she would be that lady whose kids would always be apologizing for her.  Anyway she got hired to work at the video store when I was the assistant manager and only managers had the ability to open the cash register if there wasn't a purchase being made.  Like I said this girl was big and with the largest size shirt that our company made, she still couldn't tuck her shirt into her pants.  So one day I was in the back of the store and she calls out my name.  I head up to the front and she calls out again before I can get there and yells "Help me!"  I get up to the cash wrap and this girl locked the bottom of her damn shirt into the register.  I tried really hard not to laugh, but wasn't totally successful.  She shot me a terrible look and I apologized.  I unlocked the register and she went about her business.  About two hours later I am in the back office and I hear, "It happened again!"

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