"He's lucky he isn't dead"

resignedtoretail submitted 76 days ago

Here now, the sad tale of Assistant Manager Fred, (Not his real name) who was hired on at my store a year and a half ago, and lasted only a couple months.

During that short time, Fred was guilty of the following offenses:

*Frequent liquid breakfasts, lunches and dinners that caused him to miss work without the courtesy of a call to explain his absence, or be unable to return to work after going home for lunch. (Fred, sadly, had a terrible problem with alcohol)

*On those occasions where Fred was feeling well enough to complete his shifts, he'd still be too sloshed to function properly. People would ask him what tasks they were supposed to be doing and he'd get lost in his notes. He'd be stumbling around in a daze, reeking of alcohol so strongly employees and customers would report it to management.

*Fred, being so hooked on alcohol, would lock himself in the receiving clerk's office in the stockroom and drink cough syrup. We don't know if he brought it with him from home or if he stole it off our shelves. The door to the office is locked when the receiving clerk isn't in there, but Fred simply jimmied it open. While in there he'd ignore any and all phone calls and pages directed to him. One night, a normally soft-spoken employee, angry and frustrated that she could not get ahold of him, told me "He's lucky he isn't dead. People have been trying to reach him for hours already"

Fred never caught on to how frustrated we were with him. One night he left a note for his supervisor coming in the next morning, warning "There are a lot of stressed-out people here and some of them could snap at any time."

*Fred also chewed tobacco and left cups full of tobacco juice in his desk, in the stockroom behind the baler, and hidden in other places. One morning the pricing supervisor came into work, opened her desk drawer to find a cup of tobacco juice stashed in there, and dashed off to the bathroom with the dry heaves. If he went outside to chew his tobacco while on break, he'd spit on the sidewalk. Sometimes if he was chewing in his office, he'd walk out the automatic doors and spit right into the parking lot.

The store manager told Fred not to chew his tobacco in the store any more. A couple days later he found a pouch of tobacco Fred had hidden in there.

And now, the grand finale. The straw that broke the camel's back.

Fred closed Thanksgiving night. After the store had closed and the employees had gone home, Fred left--without turning on the store's burglar alarms.

Or locking the doors when he left.

Yup, he left the store open with no alarms on the eve of the biggest shopping day of the year. We had merchandise down every aisle and anyplace else we could put it. We had expensive LCD TVs, portable DVD players, stereo systems and video game consoles down the aisle in front of electronics. Thieves could have dashed in, cleaned out the store and dashed out without any alarms going off, and therefore no police notification because the alarm company contacts the police for us if an alarm goes off with no apparent explanation.

The store manager only found out about this when the alarm company called him late that night to inquire why the store alarms weren't turned on. He arrived to find the doors open and unlocked. The following morning he remarked "If I had a gun, I would've shot him."

Fred came in for his shift at 1 pm on Black Friday. Corporate was waiting for him. By 1:30 he was fired and out the door.