And Now For Something Completely Stressful

Ok, I'm gonna have to do this as two separate entries so here's the first:

Man, has it only been ten days since I last wrote? Since like much longer than that. I am currently in an Atlanta hotel room waiting for Mike to return from the closing ceremonies of the convention we have been at. It’s been an interesting and educational weekend. But before I go into that, let me set it all up from the last time I wrote.

I mentioned how fubar things have been going with our calendar kiosks. I swear to God that they are cursed this year. We keep having the worst luck with finding enough good and reliable employees. It so wasn’t this hard the past few years. But then, we weren’t stuck with two kiosks either. Plus, even though the gas prices are going down, people are still not shopping like last year. That should hopefully change later in the season but fiscal September sucked big time.

Anyway, the employee situation. . .we have some really good and reliable people so far (thank you Felicia, Tyler, and Kaitlyn) and I just found another one who stepped up and helped us out a lot last week (thanks Mark). But we have also been having an even bigger problem with others (names being withheld on purpose). The first person to quit was because he didn’t realize that we sold as much “porn” as we do. Ummm. . .ok. Let’s just say that his definition of the word included the swimsuit calendars as well as karma sutra books. Whatever. The second person to quit was because she was bored out of her mind. We warn everyone that the kiosks are mind numbing at this time of year. But it does get better. She set us up for much scheduling headaches because she quit in the middle of her shift without warning. The third major quit was a bigger loss because she seemed like she would have fit in well with us. We lost her because she didn’t realize that we were only hiring seasonal employees with no guarantee that they can stay beyond the end of the holidays. Not sure why this wasn’t clear to begin with but the pay wasn’t what she expected either. I do hope that she does better at her next job. I think I missed someone else on the quitting front but my brain is too fried to remember all.

Then there’s the big headache with another employee who has awesome availability on paper but has proven unreliable in various ways. Let’s see, first off, her interview was fine. Nothing spectacular. She wasn’t super vocal or anything but no major red flags went off. Tony found her to be a little too reticent for his taste but was willing to give her a try. Things started off ok. She had problems with closing the register down but that’s fairly normal the first time so no biggie. But the problem didn’t get better. Over the course of a week and a half she messed up her stuff – even with help – so much that we can’t have her closing for a while. None of the others care for her because of certain attitudes that have been given off so that doesn’t help matters. She called off sick the one night which isn’t a big deal in and of itself but it added fuel. The near final straw came when we realized that she was wandering away from the kiosk without us knowing where she was. That and she was caught texting on her cell phone. We’ve been running spot checks on her and all looked ok but it all just happened too much at once. Too many screw ups in a short amount of time. Tony didn’t want to fire her but instead he wanted to cut her back to two days a week. Considering that she wanted a lot of hours and stuff, I could pretty much guarantee that she was going to quit because of it. He hates to fire people. And he wanted to give her some time to get her act together unless she was caught doing any of the above things again. Well, I haven’t scheduled her at all for next week and I’ll tell you why: she called out at the last minute on Thursday night to say that she couldn’t come in because she’d just been evicted from her apartment and only had the evening to get her stuff out. I know that it doesn’t work that way without warning but that was the final straw for me. I left her off the schedule because I had no way of talking with Tony before I wrote it up. We can’t afford to keep putting up with this stuff. Plus, the eviction puts her into the company’s red flag zone as far as loss/prevention is concerned.

It didn’t help matters that Kaitlyn had already called out earlier in the day because she was really sick (she’d caught what was going around) and we hadn’t yet found someone to replace her. No one could come in except for the new guy. We were also having problems with both kiosk registers all week and on Thursday. The week was very stressful.