Day Job, part 7 - in the office

Random photo of a work space with a cat

We never heard again  about the middle of the night alarm incident. But sure enough when we went back to the shop everything had been moved around and things were missing.

Some days, when you were really unlucky the boss would ask for help in her office.
You'd just have to file some papers, plastify some sheets...but mainly you'd do nothing at all...you'd just wait there. Not that she was working much either.
Let me tell you about my first afternoon there...I had to file about 20 sheets of paper, which took me about 5 minutes...and I took my time. That's all I did. From 1.30 to 4.30. Meanwhile, my boss made several doc appointments, called some friends, made some online personal payments...that's about it. But, "that was a great work day!I did so much!"
And you should have heard her, how she was compeletely overhelmed by the amount of work she had to do. Worst part, I think she was absolutely convinced she was overwhelmed. But she also knew she was not working much as she would pretend to work when someone else would enter her office.
An when she was actually doing something , it was so slow and so unefficient.  It usually took a whole afternoon to place ONE order...and every single time, she'd close the page without saving and we would have to start over.
My last full day there, we had to check 2 bills we had gotten for the same orders...so we had to compare the 2 lists. I just wanted to do it, quickly, by myself. But nope, I had a sheet, she had the  other...after half an hour (and not much progress) she decided she needed her glasses she had forgotten at home. So she left, just like that...she disappeared for 40 minutes and came back without any glasses.
Thankfully I had my phone.
She had very limited computer skills...her computer would take over 10 minutes to open in the mornin as she never closed any programs. And it was a mess. She never quite understood what a network was either, so she kept "losing"  files. Seriously at first I thought she was joking when she was making stupid things on her computer.
The look on her face when I once told her to "click right and scroll down"...like I was suddenly speaking Chinese. And that time she thought "customer helpdesk" was a person's name...
I quickly learned to never volunteer any help...but sometimes I would just burst out  out of frustration.
And the bizarre things she'd ask for her Excel files...making it obvious she never had any training.
Yet, pretty much everyone seems completely oblivious of what she was really like...she was always being so nice and helpful...
And you know what the scary part is (yes, because there is a scary part)? She was the one in charge of workers safety. She was the one who had to be up-to-date with emergency procedures.
So there was nifty signs all over then place, exit signs, fire alarm signs...But on the other hand, we had only one set of keys for the shop. There were bars on every window in the shop and only 3 doors, the 2 back doors had to be locked all the time, the front one could only stay unlocked during the shop opening hours. 3 locked doors, one set of keys...with 4 people working there we spent half of our time looking for those damned keys...imagine in case of fire...I brought up the problem, no answer...as usual.
Normal from someone who could not understand that a product we received frozen with the mention "has previously been frozen, cannot be frozen again" is a MAJOR health hazard. That was the last fight I had with her, I had to insist and insist (though I was, I didn't know yet,  in the middle of a major infection and battling high fever) for her to call the company who had sent those frozen products to us. And you know, though I was obviously unwell, she had me wait 45 minutes before she called. In retrospect I should have just left...after all, not my problem, not my responsability. But I stayed. She was instructed to destroy the products right away.

Read           part 1 here                    part 2 here                    part 3 here                    part  4 here                    part 5 here                    part 6 here

I could go on and on about that...but this will be the last installment. It didn't leave me in a good place and the dramatic ending didn't help...

Day job, part 6 - money hungry...

Dino at a Jamie Oliver restaurant in London...greedy much? 

I was really uncomfortable most of the time as I absolutely didn't trusted the boss and many of the regular employees there. Within 2 weeks I knew they were being less than honest with public money. And soon the boss knew I knew and the situtation grew really akward as I always refused to be bribed.
You see, after 2 weeks in the job there was what they called a "special sale". A big shop brand regularly gave large amount of non edible items they no longer had use for, like items used for their photo catalogue or discontinued items. Bedsheets, cutlery, plates, napkins, stationery, toys, school supplies and all sorts of decoration trinkets. The sale was taking place in the office building, not the shop and I volunteered to help that day (because my 2 other colleagues had already been there long enough to know they didn't want to do that LOL).
My job was to follow the customers, one at a time (like in the shop by the way, because as the boss stated: we have a special public here, you can't trust them). We were repeatedly told that we couldn't choose anything for ourselves until all the regular customers had gone. Like I wanted anything but that's another story.
My boss was at the till. No tickets. Nothing recorded...only the boss writing things down, very randomly, in a spiral notebook...and making up prices as she went. Let's say that several pages were torn out of that notebook...and as the day went by, the pile of stuff behind my boss just grew and grew as she was getting all sorts of junk for herself and her friends (she kept calling them all day). As the look of dispapproval of my face grew as the day went by, she felt she had to tell me several times that she was paying for that...
As I spent the whole day there and have a pretty good memory,  I had a fairly accurate idea of what was left at the end of the day...

Then there was the cash fund of about 60 euros. We were only supposed to count it at the end of the day after counting the day taking. It was locked in the boss's safe every day. When the boss was not there it was always interesting to find someone to open the safe for us. On several occasion we found no one...and had to use our own money as cash fund :/
When I put the money in the till in the morning, I couldn't help but count it...I mean, I did it without thinking much...one day 10 euros were missing...we didn't dare say anything...and put the money back out of our own pocket. Then it happened again with smaller amounts...I refused to put the money back, so we just said we probably had made mistakes when we gave back change. And one day there was 40 euros extra. On 60 euros, it's hard not to notice a  40 euro excess. Wow, we were just a stupid dishonest bunch, how could we make a 40 euro mistake. Because it had to be our fault, right, that 40 euros appeared in the safe overnight.
Let's say we never had any explanation.
A year goes by, and the special sale event is organized again. I am not volunteering this time...but bad luck, the room where it was usually held is not available...so the special sale would be held at the shop. Damn.
Also this time we knew what would be on sale as we had carried the boxes in the locked cellars ourselves. A single worker (not from the shop) was supposed to do that...but there was just too much for one person so he asked us to help. Our boss was less than happy about that...but had no valid reason to refuse.
A few days before the sale, I was in the boss's office when the side-boss (remember, the chick who hated our guts because she hated our boss?) came in and said, "I have noticed a lot of things have gone missing in the cellars, like every year" and left. Boss pretended nothing happened. And indeed, stuff was missing.
The day before the sale, we had a group meeting and the boss told us we had to make at least 4000 euros (like there was anyhing we could do to make people buy more junk)...on the day of the sale, the boss's boss comes in and tells us we have to make 3000 euros. Boss's face remained perfectly blank.
And yes, the spiral notebook was back...and pages went missing again. And she accused us of not only stealing but putting and hiding stuff for ourselves. The shop was tiny and crammed to the brim with stuff...seriously if we had wanted to hide or steal something it would have been soooo easy. After the first day sale, I was so pissed with her that I took the ugliest blanket there was (and that nobody had wanted because it was shit-ugly) and sort of hid it...you know, where I was sure she would see it...and sure enough, on the next day suddenly the blanket was in the pile of stuff she was "buying".

And that time one of my colleagues saw the boss steal 20 euros from the till. My colleague didn't say anything right away but in the afternoon, when she counted the day taking in the office, she said to the boss"here's the money minus the 20 you took earlier". Boss explained it was to test us. Right.

And there were all those shop papers I knew I had filed, lying around, with the numbers obviously tempered with...and the office supplies that were obviously taken from the "special sale cellars" hidden in the boss's shelves...and the stuff she ordered for herself and told everyone that it was for the shop clients  (we couldn't even put aside a pack of paper napkins for the customers...so sure, she would have special orders for some...) . I am still waiting for the money for some of that stuff, like a Tefal baking tray...and the stuff she took "to give Christmas presents to the old people in the retirement home".

There was an alarm in the shop...as the code has never been changed, pretty much everyone in town knew it...Well, the night after all the special sale items had been brought in, the alarm rang in the middle of the night. Usually the workmen boss would be in charge and would go check what happened. Oddly (or not) it's our boss who was informed and went to check...with the help of the big boss (who happens to be our boss's BF, if you remember). And the next morning, the big boss came in our boss's office when we were all there (I had never seen her there before) and exclaimed "How odd that alarm went off in the middle of the night!"

Read part   part 1 here
                   part 2 here
                   part 3 here
                  part  4 here
                  part 5 here

Day Job , part 5 - poor unfortunate souls...

By now you already know that we were treated like dog poop most of the time. We also always had second hand work equipment. Thanks heaven we didn't have a uniform like the cleaners because I am sure those would have been hand-me-downs too. The till chair was an old battered desk chair, all crooked with a bit of broken plastic coming through the fabric where  you had to sit. On a rare occasion when the boss visited us, she sat on it and she finally noticed the dangerous  bit of plastic. She had the chair thrown away and we got a second hand plastic garden chair to replace it. A chair  without wheels, which was a real pain as we couldn't open the till drawer.
One of my colleagues showed up with a desk chair she found in the trash on the streets one day. The chair is still in use there now.
You would think that the clients would be treated better. Ha! To my boss (and quite a few of the office workers) they were just scroungers, low life scroungers. The boss once accidentally refered to them as "my paupers" one day. That went well with me.
There were all sorts of complicated rules to gain access to the shop. You had to have an access card, that the boss printed when she thought of it. I never understood the point of that card as all clients were listed in the computer and you could check there whether they had access or not.
Then there was a spending limit on food items, hygiene items and cleaning items, but not on some of those items. And it was only one visit a week, or 2 if it was a bigger family and if the boss felt like it.
The rules were pretty complicated and changed often...so try imagining explaining them to Syrian refugees with no knowledge of French or English...
And let's say that the rules were a lot more flexible if the client was white.
The other very odd part is that the boss was adamant the social workers who sent people to our shop were not supposed to know the shop rules. In a grand spirit of openness and transparency. Then again, the social workers would have soon noticed the rules kept changing and were different from one group of people to another...
My joke was: "You're entitled to the free stuff on Mondays every 3 weeks if it falls on an even date and your family name begins with X and it's not a full Moon. "
Every morning we would get free fruits, vegetables and dairy products that we gave to the clients. They were not supposed to choose. "If you're hungry, you take what you're given" dixit you-know-who. Also some of the products were wayyyy past their prime, like mushrooms reeking of amonia. We were supposed to give them anyway.
Once a month we got large boxes of random stuff from shops. Unsold items, either because the packaging was damaged, or the dates were too close or the items were discontinued. All good on paper. Well, sometimes it was ok. Sometimes not so much. The cleaning products, washing powders were in the same boxes as food products...everything was mixed up...which makes food products unfit for eating, that's the law. But who cares? Not my boss. Everything is drenched in Detol, fine, no problem. Everything is covered in mice or rat pee and feces...no problem, just clean the boxes. And twice we had to clean worms -_-  I have no problems with insects, they don't disgust me or anything...but seriously...on food items?
Then every week we'd get fresh products like cold cuts and pizzas, lasagnas...new, but wow, no respect for the cold chain. And they ended up in our all rotten fridge anyway....the fridge with a completely illegal temperature of 12° inside in the summer.
Oh, yeah, disgressing again, but no air conditionning in the shop...during summer we had tempearures up to 40° inside....We were allowed breaks in the air conditionned room...in the other building across the parking lot...and were given 3 water bottles for 4 on the first day, 2 on the second days, 1 on the third day...and nothing afterwards...We were also instructed we had to use glasses and not drink directly from the bottles. NO, I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP!
Some clients openly told us they were embarrassed coming to the shop :(  If only they had known.
I took it upon myself and threw away a LOT of stuff because I really didn't want to poison anyone even if it was not my responsability.
The boss always threatened us with visits from the health and hygiene services. We didn't see them once in all the time I worked there. I sure would have like to meet them.

Read part   part 1 here
                   part 2 here
                   part 3 here
                  part  4 here

Day Job , part 4 - Feeble minded peasants

Gratuitous photo of Frank

Condescension pretty much sums up the general feel I got from that job.

Belgian administration ( I'm sure it's not the only one) has a lot of bosses and chiefs and presidents and heads. It is often joked that there are more bosses than workers, it sure felt that way there.
I never quite understood the structure of the hierarchy, I never tried to either. Our boss had a boss2 who had a boss3 who worked for a president...then there was a side boss...
When we signed our "poor worker" contract, we were instructed by boss3 to greet everyone in the morning, to the chagrin of most other bosses and employees. When I saw how most were annoyed by the simple fact we, feeble minded peasants, would say hello to them, I really felt it was my duty to go say hello to every single  person present in the offices when I arrived EVERY SINGLE MORNING. To be fair, some people working there are very nice and didn't treat us differently from anyone else...
To our boss we were all dumb and lazy-assed thieves and liars. Still, paradoxically she left us to our own devices over 99% of the time. She enjoyed making odd threats...like "I have spies all over town, they'll know", "they can see you from their homes", or when we'd get boxes full  of random stuff, "I know exactly what's in those boxes!" (so surely you'll  have notive it is covered in mice/rats feces? ....but that's a story for a future post)
Oddly though she hated our guts, she still defended us against the other bosses...probably because it's her they were attacking through us. Especially the side boss. They hated each other. Well, I can understand why she'd hate our boss as that side boss was the only one who seemed to see/mind that weird shop. I really didn't appreciate she'd try to get to her through us. Everything we did bothered her. In the morning we had to wait for our boss to arrive to get the shop keys and till. But we couldn't wait in the hallway. So we waited in the lobby, but that was disorderly too. After 6 months of that, someone finally decided to  let us access the shop keys without our boss being there.
Oh, and  though we had to punch our presence cards in the main offices, we didn't have any keys to enter the building and basically had to wait until someone let us in. When I asked for a key I was told off, I didn't need one (still it bothered them to open the door for us).

Every day we also had to fax the baker. The fax machine was in a locked office. And sometimes there was no one in that office and we had to find the key to access the fax. And not too many people had one...the side boss had one...but "how dare we, the half-baked minions,  disturb the management?"...
I don't know what was so precious in that office that they were afraid we'd steal... the fax machine...like, who still uses a fax machine in the 21st century? I had not sent one in...20 years...

I could never figure out boss2. He seemed completely oblivious to how the shop was run. I don't know if he really didn't notice, if he didn't care or if he was complicit. Boss3 was a friend of out boss...I am not sure why as they didn't seem to have anything in common...but I imagine that's why our boss was still there, being compelely incompetent for the job and being disliked by pretty much everyone.
Of course everyone pretended to like our  boss as she was responsible (why, of why?) of the clocking machine. It was, I am not kidding, the only computer software she could use. That program was always opened on her desktop. She was super skilled at fidgeting in there...she had tons of overtime :'D . We, on the other hand, had a fixed work sechedule so we never had overtime...and even when we worked overtime, she'd usually just remove it from the records :/

What I really hated the most though was how they'd talk  among themselves like we were not there, or how they'd go hush hush not to talk in front of us sometimes. How we were never invited when they had office parties. How we never were informed of the office events (though they were legally bound to do it).

To be continued...
Read part   part 1 here
                   part 2 here
                   part 3 here

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

Dayjob, part 2 - Second Day

The neverending story...

The least I can say is that I was majorly under impressed by my first day.

Comes day 2...I finally met my boss...and, well, trust your first impression...this is not going to be a smooth ride. One of the first things she told me is that she had many lovers. Do.I. look.like.I.care? If she couldn't find anything more important to tell me on our first meeting...
I also met my new colleagues as the Polish girl was gone. Turns out I already knew one of them, so that was cool. Also turned out that she hated the boss...with a passion...
On top of my 2 colleagues there was also a "volunteer". I never found out what she was doing there (other than spilling coffee and bread crumbs all over the place, no we're not supposed to eat here but she had hypoglycemia, or so she said)...why would you choose to "work" for free...in a shop anyway? Thankfully she left after a couple of months. Maybe she was just a spy for our boss, a thing we really can't put past her...just kind of funny the "spy" was not too strict about the rules. I won't say more as I don't want to get anyone into trouble.
Colleagues were less than kind with their comments on the boss...everything they told me was true and still not quite strong enough as I soon found out.

I started using the "in house" shop software. Very dated. Very poorly written. Full of bugs. Full of loopholes. Cost 5000 euros according to boss. Not sure if it was that badly designed on purpose or just out of sheer incompetence. How can I describe it? In a couple of weeks I basically discovered that you could change whatever you wanted in there...stocks, prices, tickets. I still have no idea why we could access that as there would have been easy ways to lock us out of those options.
Then there was the  ticket issue. We were supposed to print out the tickets on a regular office printer (as our cash register was just  a regular desk computer). Boss was adamant we had to print tickets on a sheet of paper cut in 4. But it was not possible. The paper would get stuck in the printer EVERY SINGLE TIME. Also the ticket was blank  as we couldn't center the print and everything would get "ghost printed" before it reached the paper. And we didn't have administrator access so we could change that ouserselves...Right, we could change everything we wanted in the shop software but not in the printer settings.
I gave up telling the boss after the third attempts...and we kept a pile of pretend cut-in-4 sheets by the computer and printed on a whole sheet. And when the boss would come to the shop, and saw us printing on a whole sheet...we just kept saying we forgot...and each time we were lectured about the waste of paper. Really.
We were soon accused of not only using lots of paper but also ink, and cleaning products. Oh, and water too. Not very suprising as we learned through customers and previous workers that the  teams before us never printed anything (no, no tickets) and never cleaned anything either (I could tell). So, yeah, we were indeed using more ink, paper, cleaning products and water.
But to our boss, she were printing stuff for ourselves (not sure what), stole the cleaning products and probably did our laundry with the shop washing machine too. Oddly (or not) we didn't have any laundry detergent  even though we were supposed to wash the shop stuff there. When I asked for some, boss said there was no budget for that. So laundry was done with hand soap. Whatever.


You can read part 1 here.

Day Job Part1

Whiling away the hours...

When I got offered that full time job 5 minutes away from home in late 2016, I seriously couldn't refuse. I needed/wanted the money,and well, in the Belgian job market it was quite unexpected. Of course I knew it would be way below my skills and education but I sincerely didn't mind. I felt a bit guilty  because that position was usually for people without high school education, but as I just said, job market is so bad, even those types of jobs are being taken by people with higher education.
So, there...I was going to work in a "social shop". A shop for people with very low income where food is cheaper and where you can also get free European Union aid.
I, very naively, thought it would be like any small grocery shops. Ha ha ha, right, a shop run by the Belgian administration.
Day one. When I arrived on the first day I was told that my direct boss and 2 colleagues were absent that day...and that  a former worker had been called back and was going to guide me through day one.
OK. Fine. A nice Polish girl with medium knowldedge of French and... 8-month pregnant.
Second surprise, the shop is located in another building...across the parking lot from the main offices...and  we work there unsupervised. OK.
The shop itself was the third surprise. It was an old grand house with stairs everywhere, turned into a shop on the ground floor and flats on the other levels. Though it was clean, the whole place looked kind of decrepit...and not suited to be a shop. To get to the storage room you had to go down 2 high steps and then up 2 higher still steps...so practical when you're carrying boxes...and to get the stuff in that room to start with...well, muscles required as there was no way a truck, nor a car, not even a cart could come near the building.
The main shopping space had super high ceiling, was lit by ancient neon tubes...and had a large fridge dating back to the disco era...and it was barely...staying alive...staying alive. When it turned on, the noise would make everything vibrate and the electric tension would drop in the whole building. New tennants above the shop always came to check what was making that horrendous noise.

Shop was only opened in the morning and  the afternoons were for re-stocking and cleaning.
The morning went by very slowly...the afternoon was even worse as there was nothing left in the storage room and cleaning was not really necessary after our 5 clients.

What I learned on my first day:
(Imagine the Polish accent) :"You never count the till money here, but we always count the till money here" and "we cannot have lunch in this building  but we usually have lunch here".
Fine, I'm flexible  😹 I was now officially a civil servant!

To be continued....