May 24, 2018

Day job- Part 3- of money and rules and pointless things

I woke up like that one morning...
As much as I hated the whole "atmosphere" of my job, I still enjoyed getting out of the house and the actual "shop" part of it. And the money of course. It paid really well. Unrealistically well...my love of money made me hang in there.
One of  my 2 colleagues didn't share that money love and one day she just didn't show up for work.  That is really how toxic the place is, if honesty and decency are core values for you. When she dropped by to say hello a year later, she was still  crying over her experience.

Preposterous job and rules...
The boss never explained anything to me, my colleagues did. And it had been that way for many many years...so the actual rules and ways the shop should be run were a looooong way off. You know, like that game you play when the first person comes with a sentence, repeats it in the ear of the next player and so on and at the end the sentence is completely different.
Not that it mattered much as it was just a pretend shop where we were getting to actually sell stuff.

As I pointed out earlier, the shop was located across the parking lot from the main office. Still we didn't have a phone landline. Nor the Internet. And we were not supposed to have our mobiles either. But the boss and other people kept calling us on our mobiles...as there was no landline. We were also supposed to call them in case of problem. As long we were not seen in public using our phone, I imagine...After having been told we were not allowed to use our phone during work hours one time too many, one day we just stopped answering when the boss called. After 20 minutes, a furious banshee burst into the shop...WHY IS NO ONE ANSWERING?
Imagine our fake sheepish answer.

Cleaning rules were also a bit odd . We had weekly sheets with all the tasks. And then there were 2-week sheets, monthly sheets and semester sheets. Only, we always got all the sheets every week. Also, the tasks were pretty redundant as they were poorly thought out. Had we followed the sheets, we would have cleaned the same places 3 times on the same day and some other things would have never been cleaned.
There was a binder with all the cleaning instructions, which product to use for which task.
Do I need to point out that the boss had no idea what product had to be used for the different tasks? Once she had my colleague clean the floor with the toilet product.
We were also supposed to clean the walls and ceilings. Without a ladder. The main shop and entry  had 3 meter+ high walls. Maybe we were training for the circus too?

Oh and that time the boss decided we'd give free frozen meat. Two large antique filthy freezers were brought in. "Clean them!" she said. My young skinny colleague ended up inside the freezers as we were all too short to clean the bottom. We didn't have any actual cleaning brush to scrub so we used the floor broom..yeah, gross...really really gross...oh, and we also used the toilet cleaning product as it was the only one strong enough to remove the antique grime. It is a bit sad to think those 2 dirty freezers were coming from a retirement home, and had been used that filthy until recently.

You can read  part 1 here
                      part 2 here

5 comments:

Stephanie Kilgast said...

what a story! I ended up reading part 1 and 2 as well. It's sad that such a useful shop was managed so poorly!

StaroftheEast said...

That place keeps getting weirder, so hard to imagine that it was in Belgium and this year!!

Natalya said...

You write about your experience with humor

Arctida said...

I agree with Star, such a weird place and I it is hard to imagine it was in Belgium...

HolzundLeinen said...

That is so sad to read, please stay strong!!!