If the requirement is that someone has to do window, and it is his shift and not yours, then it is not a favor but rather a reminder of his duties. I agree with the posters who say the OP should have just left when the next guy arrived. If he doesn’t work window and it messes up the whole operation, fire his ass.
I’ve been there done that with jobs like this and I totally understand both the stress and the frustration with some fuck-face little newbie who comes in and disrespects coworkers like that. You’re not supposed to wait until you get orders from a supervisor in jobs like that. You’re supposed to take over where you’re needed the most. I know it sounds trivial but it’s exactly the kind of chickenshit little “fuck you” that continues to burn your ass long after it occurs.
I completely agree that the OP’s mistake was that he asked. Grelby should have just said, “Good, you’re here. You’re on window. See you later, buttwad.” Then just left. I actually think the OP should go to supervisor and tell what happened. New kid is showing a supercillious attitude and needs to be taken down a notch. If he keeps this shit up, it’ll bite him in the ass anyway. What comes around goes around.
This is the post of the day.
To sum up.
Worker #1, who was on time, gets called a jerk, and is expected to take the shitty job, because the person currently doing the shitty job wants to get off ASAP.
Worker #2, who is late, is a mature team player who should get the easy job because the shitty job is taken already by #1.
Guess how many minutes early I will arrive for work tomorrow.
A responsible employee works where he’s needed, not where he feels like it. No kitchen I’ve ever worked in would have tolerated that kind of bullshit.
I’ve got to give an “amen!” to this. Also to “what goes around comes around” that Dio posted earlier.
Life’s a team sport, fuck with the team and the team will definitely fuck with you.
IMO, a responsible employee would have taken window and then moved to bowl when the even later woman showed up. See, he takes window and works it for however long it takes, allowing the previous shift to leave. Then when the other person shows up says, “You were late so you get window.”
His “you’re not my supervisor, have a nice night anyway” response would have pissed me right off, too. I would have told him that I was doing him a favor, reminding him of the importance of window, and maybe in the future he might learn to appreciate when his more experienced co-workers give him a hint about his new job. Some day he might have to work a shift with Grelby and how much switching off of shit jobs do you think is gonna happen that night? I’d start watching the schedule for any time you might have to work with Joe–maybe some more hints about working with people are in order.
Before everyone tells me that I can only control my response to other people, if I think this is stress I should try to (insert your hard-luck story here), or whatever other snark you can come up with, may I just pre-emptively say “Bite Me!”. You may note the IMO at the being of my post. Thank you.
And on preview, what **Denis ** said.
P.S. Miller’s suggestion is the best in the thread.
Point of order: Worker #1 was late to begin with, by a couple or three minutes (i.e., not much, and not why I was mad).
Second point of order: Worker #2 should not have been late - I was grateful enough at being able to leave that I overlooked this. On top of that, most of the time she is cheerful and helpful at work. And as I said, being a few minutes late is, 90% of the time, a non-issue at this job, so I am simply not in the habit of giving a shit about it.
Um, that’s all, carry on ;).
Well, ageism isn’t quite the right word. You’re right about that. I only used it because it seems generally to be directed at younger people by older people. I see it a lot when some poor young doper posts a pit a MPSIMS thread, and the usual suspects come in to dump on them for feeling bad, or stressed, or whatever. Like they have no right to be upset, because they aren’t facing familiar or financial ruin. Sometimes folks ARE just being whiny, but why not just tell them that they’re being needlessly whiny and leave it at that? If that’s your opinion about my OP, say it, don’t dump in all this other crap about how I have no idea of what stress really is. So instead of “cynical ageism,” how about I just call it “cynical dickheadery”? Only one more syllable, almost as snappy!
I will say again that busing dishes really IS stressful and it really is hard - not that the tasks are hard, just that it’s a lot of work when things get busy. There’s a very good reason that student employees working mostly in the dishroom have one of the highest starting wages on campus (kids driving buses and working Retail Dining start higher, but that’s about it). There’s a high turnover rate. I will grant that this is because a lot of college students are spoiled and simply not used to actually having to do work, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a cakewalk for the rest of us.
For what it’s worth, this job seems to either make you less sensitive to stupid bullshit, or quit. It’s true - you really need to learn to just let things go, or you won’t be able to hack it on any kind of job, and that holds especially true for a job where your customers are a bunch of college kids who think that glueing plates together with peanut butter and covering their trays with packing peanuts and dropping them in front of you to slow things down (I’m not making this up) is the height of humor. When I first started this job in September, I was all but flipping out on a weekly basis. I’ve mellowed a lot, but I’ve also become a lot more cynical about the average person. Ah well, I suppose that was going to happen eventually anyway.
ARGH! That’s familial or financial ruin, not familiar.
:smack:
Yeah, I’m still working on it, myself. My challenge is driving - I know I can’t do a thing about what other drivers do, so why work myself up about it? As long as we keep working on it, that’s the important thing. And don’t get too cynical about people; sure they’ll often do crappy things just because they can, but there are also a buttload of incredible people in the world. Don’t let the unpleasant ones sour you too much.
Rick, I’ve known the kind of stress where you don’t have a regular phone because you simply can’t afford it; where every single action is predicated by “Can I afford this?” and the answer isn’t necessarily going to be yes. While I’ve literally been living paycheck-to-paycheck, I’ve had an employer accidentally pay me for one week, rather than two and a paycheck bounce (this was with two different employers). These two situations were corrected. I was stuck high and dry, however, when an employer outright refused to pay me for a week’s work and I had to go to my church to help me pay my rent. I can’t say I had a husband and kids depending on me – one big reason I didn’t marry a man I loved dearly is even with our combined incomes, we couldn’t afford a one bedroom apartment. The scars from those days have made me the bill-dreading tightwad that I am. Do I now qualify as someone who knows what stress is?
What Grelby had to put up with was, in my book, stressful and annoying and worth a good rant. No, the fate of the free world doesn’t rest on it; sometimes the very pettiness of a thing makes it more annoying than something more important because it makes you feel petty in return. The employer whose paycheck bounced because his wife liked to go shopping which meant there was a race to deposit checks on payday is more a tale of how tough life was in Hawaii. The tale of a coworker who was selfish and lazy and who managed to time his quitting before he was fired in such a way that I worked a 3 hour shift starting at 10:00 pm immediately followed by a full day starting at 5 or 6 am has a little more annoyance to it.
People need to whine about the petty stuff. As someone who was told everything that upset her was petty and not worth worrying about to the point where she decided major mental illness was minor and not worth worrying about, let the kid rant! I’ve seen worse around here.
CJ
No, stress is slowly dying of some nameless tropical disease while your husband has already been killed for alleged “crimes against the state,” your son is about to join the army because at least then his short life will have some meaning, one of your daughters is begging in the street and the other vanished 5 years ago and is probably a prostitute, and you’re being forced to leave your mud hut because this week it’s “strategically important.”
What you are describing is a temporary setback. A setback is not stress. Unless you are a serious drama queen, in which case it still isn’t stress, you just think it is. Etc., Etc., Etc.
Just because you’ve had stress and difficulty does not diminish anyone else’s stress and difficulty. Holding up someone else’s unfortunate circumstance to belittle another’s is completely fucking ridiculous and IMO negates whatever point you were trying to make.
That said, I agree that the OP appears to be overreacting. Probably would have made a better online journal post than Pit thread. I agree that everyone has the right to tell him exactly how much they think he’s overreacting. I just think your method is fucking absurd.
Of course there is stress and heavy duty stress. I think I know know what is really bugging the OP. He’s wondering, “Do I have to put up with this bullshit every working day?.”
It appears to me that there is something very wrong with this particular work environment. There should be a supervisor present at least at shift changes . There should also be mandatory periodic rotations during the shift at the various work stations to help prevent repetitive work injurys and relieve boredom. As it stands, it appears to me that employees deliberately come in late to avoid the being saddled with the shitty job which is where the first guy pretty well has to attend to, otherewise he’ll quickly be standing around with his finger up his butt, while the dishes pile up.
So the reward for the early bird is getting saddled with the worst job for the entire shift. It would drive me crazy coming to work every day trying to figure out how to best avoid the shitty job while at the same time trying to get along with everyone and not become the doormat.
Man, this thread is becoming stressful!
Seriously, though, there are many kinds of stress. You don’t have to be a week away from being homeless or starving to know what stress is. To Rick and Duffer, I hate to break it to you, but there are people out there that have had even worse to deal with than the both of you combined. So does that automatically invalidate every stressful situation you’ve ever experienced?
Working in food service can be very, very stressful. Not the “ohmygodiamaweekfrombeingevicted” kind of stressful (which I’ve also experienced), but stressful in its own way. While the OP may have overreacted a little bit, I can sympathise with his anger and he is completely valid in feeling the way he did.
Hopefully this thread has been beneficial to him in that next time, he knows to just walk away at the end of his shift.
The point is that it doesn’t MATTER about the OP’s circumstances. The guy acted like a jerk, and it doesn’t matter if the OP had been working overtime for hours or minutes.