I did not know this. So, follow-up question: is there an ABC store on the Outer Banks somewhere? There must be, right? Because of the rube tourists? This will be my first visit. (Should I just BMO?)
Also: 6 days, 13 hours, 20 minutes.
Started a new job. I’m one week in; the manager has gone on holiday, the supervisor has left, and the two, remaining staff are leaving.
The two remaining staff are young - one’s very keen on his job, and will be a dream to work with; the other is leaving soon, and enjoys the drama of my making mistakes; both are aghast at my ability to make mistakes in the first week of starting.
I make simple mistakes - ringing stuff through the till incorrectly, putting files in the wrong places, not using the tannoy confidently.
The laugh and bicker behind my bank. It sucks. It’s been one week, I should get better, but they’re already smirking and making snide comments about my inabilities - and it’s putting me off and making me miserable.
Supervisor back on wednesday. She seems nice. She doesn’t let things get so out of hand : music blaring out of their phones, creating drama, etc, etc…it’s like being in secondary school again.
So…am I normal? Can I say to myself: it’s the first week, I’ll make mistakes, and screw them for making a massive drama out of it? Or do I need to worry that this job just isnt for me?
The ABC Commission has a site for looking up store locations, but it appears that you have to give very specific information. You could also try doing a Google search for “[county name] ABC store locations”. Also, if your preferred drinks are not a standard name brand, you might as well BYO. (My favorite vodka – Cold River – is not distributed in this state.)
Don’t worry amelie. You’re normal. They’re immature. I hope you don’t have to spend a lot of time with them after you get through the training period.
PS what’s a tannoy?
Stupid telephone/intercom whatnot. Have to call out to shop call, in surround sound. Ick
Update: I was wrong-- it wasn’t that blue jeans were too much fun, it was that the idea wasn’t proposed far enough in advance to be approved by the right stick in the mud. So they’ll try again next month.
Saw several people in jeans anyway.
I ended up wearing a “crazy” tie, despite my best intentions, because a certain co-worker brought in one for everyone in the department, and almost all of us ended up deciding it was easier to wear a tie and make him happier than to resist.
We all know that if we win the $25 gift card, we’ll owe him half.
Come, children, and let me tell you about mistakes at work…
There once was a factory which used what’s quaintly known as “cages”. Cages are 1m[sup]3[/sup] cubic plastic containers, surrounded by a metal cage that’s bolted to the supporting pallet. The pallets are as big as the cages, no more. On the other hand, the “horns” on the machines used to carry them around are longer than the cages and the pallets.
There once was in this factory a new peon. The word isn’t an insult, it was the actual job title for anybody who worked in production or the warehouse and who did not have a supervisory position. Like every new peon, he was to spend one month working weeks for training and then move to be a production/warehouse worker in the weekend shift.
And lo and behold, he had been in the job for but a week and a half, when he was adding a cage to a group of them and in trying to align it just so, he punctured the one behind! Later that same day, as the peons and the maintenance guys and the lab techs were having lunch together, the new worker was too depressed to feel hungry although, as I’m sure you know, making a guy in his early twenties lose his appetite is no mean feat. His coworkers asked “aw, c’mon, what’s the problem?”
“What’s the problem? I poured 1m[sup]3[/sup] of product all over the floor and you ask what’s the problem? I’m roast!”
“Roast? Nah, you’re staying! You’ll be here for a long time!”
“Man, I poured. 1. Cubic. Meter. Of product all over the floor. I haven’t even been here ten days and I broke a cage and poured 1m[sup]3[/sup] of product all over the floor!”
“OK, guys, anybody who’s ever punctured a cage, raise your hand.”
And all the production workers and all the warehouse workers and most of the lab techs (but not all, because one of the lab techs had been hired directly as a lab tech and had therefore not moved cages around) raised their hands. And they told the guy “you punctured the cage because you were trying to leave the group of cages all lined up and pretty, so did we. Welcome to our team :D”
Now, children, what does this story teach us? It reminds us that nobody was born learned, and that it is better to be nice than nasty.
The TLDR version: your coworkers weren’t born learned, do you think you’re the only one who made mistakes in the first week? All of them did, maybe more than you! But, unlike my former coworkers, some of yours forgot that it’s better to be nice than nasty.
Talking to my dad last weekend about starting as an Employee on Thursday. He says I need to go out and buy 3 new suits. I look at him like he’s completely insane.
“Dad, Wednesday morning me, my fellow contractor and our team lead are all standing around. I notice that all three of us are wearing jeans and polo shirts, and my shirt was the only one tucked in. Then in the middle of this, in walks one of our high level technical people (explain how high level). He’s wearing shorts, a t-shirt and sandals. In the middle of the week. I’m pretty sure I don’t need to buy any suits.”
My father was absolutely flabbergasted. Says in his day you were required to wear suits. Yeah dad, I remember those days too, but even 20-30 years ago doing the IT thing I almost never wore a suit except to interviews*. It varied by company. Now I’m working for Very Large Company and while you’d think they’d require more formal dress (if only by the industry we’re in), I’ve read the dress code and it pretty much says don’t wear anything torn or inappropriate - and that’s about it!
- Hell, I worked at Allianz Life in the 90’s, where men were required to wear a suit and tie and have their suit coat on at all times when they left their desks. I was the ONLY man in IT who never wore a suit or a tie, and never got called out on it.
This isn’t directly workplace griping, but it’s kinda related.
I’m overeducated and underemployed. I have my days when I ponder the idea of going back to school, and I have days when I can’t face it (and can’t figure out what would be a good balance of energy and expense for value). And what if I still couldn’t get a job?
And other days when I ponder just looking for work.
And other days when I feel like my job isn’t great, but could suck a lot more.
Anyway, I went to a Shindig the other evening and ended up telling someone a fair bit of my life history. Which lead to a discussion about yes, I’m underemployed.
Which is no fun.
Seriously, yes, I know I’m overeducated and underemployed. But I don’t know how to get out of the rut that I’m in-- I’m not exactly a dream candidate in my field-- too long out of school, not enough experience, and (maybe some other issues). There’s not that many jobs in my field anyway–especially in the present economy. Life on a day to day basis doesn’t suck too bad, but, honestly, I hate talking about myself. It’s better when people don’t ask certain kinds of nosy questions.
[armchair psychologist]But do you hate it because it makes you think about things that you’d rather not think about, or because of well-meaning people trying to tell you how to live your life and/or asking the wrong question?
Examples of “the wrong question”: asking an industrial engineer who works as a maintenance manager whether he wouldn’t rather work in “his field”. Uhhhh… what do you think “my field” is and what kind of degrees do you think maintenance managers have?[/ap]
A supposition directly contradicted by the story and your telling of it here.
I Ching, hexagram 47: Oppression
Six at the top (changes the hexagram to 6: Conflict)
*He is oppressed by creeping vines.
He moves uncertainly and says, “Movement brings remorse.”
If one feels remorse over this and makes a start,
Good fortune comes.
*
Feelings and situations clinging to you and holding you in place. When you think about it, you feel remorse, shame, anger, etc, and it makes you uncertain and hesitant. Recognize that and make a move. Pull off the vines and be free of them.
But here’s different-- if you annoy me or make me squirm, I can call you on it without worrying about hurting your feelings.
Or I can just “forget” about the thread.
Having said that, you aren’t wrong. And that’s enough depressing self-analysis before I go to work for one day.
I have to work today, grumps the whole house slept and the drive in was amazing because no traffic and I get two days off in lieu of and next week is my vacation…
But I have to work on the holiday. grumps
Water main break out in front of our buildings, and our bathrooms are out of commission. We have been given permission to leave the building to seek out restrooms. I think my boss went all the way to Walmart because she needed to pick something up, anyway. I was going to go to Dunkin Donuts, but they’d make me buy something, and coffee would just make the situation worse in a couple hours.
Upside, I can get up and leave the building pretty much whenever I want today.
Draelin, what sort of job do you have where you can’t normally leave the building during the day??
Oh, we can go out to lunch and stuff, but most of us typically have to pee more than once a day. 
Unfortunately, there is nothing close enough to our building that we could just walk next door to use the bathroom.
Interesting - they may not be legally be able to require you to work at ALL today under these circumstances. 30+ years ago, that happened at my job, and they had to send us all home for the day (and this was an employer NOT noted for their generosity).
I think that if I were to go looking, I would find out you’re correct, and it’s illegal to keep us here with no working bathrooms. I believe that they’re looking into porta-potty delivery, which is naturally the best news ever. :rolleyes:
We recently had a situation where one bathroom in our multi-floor multi-loo building was out of operation and they let us go home. Something about the person-to-toilet ratio being out of whack. Of course, it took almost two weeks for HR to straighten out the debacle that caused with our time cards, because nobody just came out and told management to mark us as taking time off with pay, because heaven forbid anybody in our HR department might have their shit (heh) together.
(Not ragging all of HR, BTW - I have worked places with excellent HR departments. Our particular HR department is just completely kookoonanners.)
In other news: I’m about to go completely postal up in this joint, because Manager is on vacation this week, and she called into a conference call that SHE scheduled, even though she KNEW she was going to be out (she is ALWAYS out for the first two weeks in August, ever since I started here 10 years ago). And if SHE can call in to a conference call, then why can’t I take care of this testing while I’m away? That same foolishness again.
I just don’t understand how people can tell me, “You really look like you could use a vacation,” (because DUH, DODO) and in the very next breath give a dissertation on the myriad ways they want me to violate the sanctity of my MUCH EARNED AND MUCH NEEDED time off. Gah.
Next time someone says anything to me, I am going to tell them that I will be absolutely unavailable because I have scheduled myself for some outpatient psychological treatment with my therapists, Dr. Beach and Dr. Sand. Is it too much to hope that they’ll hear “outpatient psychological treatment” and jump to the (intended) wrong conclusions and just LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE?
Job search idiocy:
-
I applied for a job via a web application that does not allow cut-n-paste. Not only did I have to upload my resume, I had to re-fucking-type the entire thing section by section into their stupid form.
-
I received an email this morning requesting a video interview. Instead of talking to a person on the phone like in the good-ole-days (getoffmylawn), I now have to pretty myself up to sit in my own living room, prop my damn cell phone to get a good angle, and talk to the stupid thing while it records me. I freaking live less than 10 miles from their damn office.
I am not afraid of the technology, but damn it, I hate talking on the phone under the best of circumstances, and now I have to get over a certain amount of stage fright to talk to a fucking recording.
I hate looking for a job.