So there is a girl at work.
A lazy girl who often leaves work unfinished so others have to do it (mainly the delivery for the bakery which she shares with myself and another girl along with just generally wasting time them leaving things by claiming she didn't have time to do them). This is, of course, not unique to any work place. There are always degrees of work in what you think you do & what you actually do.
The problem is exacerbated by this girl being unable to take ANY CRITICISM WHATSOEVER! On top of which she is generally quite unpleasant about others and regularly criticises their mistakes over the most minor of problems and tiny details. However she has been in the bakery for over a year, during which she was in constant contact with the lady who normally runs it (and who fully trained her) although this lady is now off for several months after an extensive shoulder operation. I had 1 day with this girl before being thrown in the deep end and had to learn everything on the fly under pressure from angry customers and her. And I've only done that part of the job for a month and a half.
Despite this I'm more well versed in how to order deliveries, check off incoming deliveries & everything else that's required for the job & somehow have ended up basically as the one most responsible for the running of the section. She didn't even bother to learn deliveries fully and merely let our normal baker take all the responsibility.
When she has ordered she often gets it wrong as (in a very notable and ongoing problem) when she ordered 36 cases of iced finger buns rather than 1. When you realise that you have to go through 3 check screens in order to confirm the amount and send the request....that's a bit baffling. However it's not this error (which takes up an entire cage in our limited freezer and which has cost us a lot of money) which bothers me the most, I understand mistakes happen & we all make them from time to time. I myself have made some massive fuck-ups at my other job besides this one and more than a few in this retail job.
No, what insults me the most is that she still has the sheer gall to insult and criticise (excessively & unhelpfully) the errors of others. If she made an effort to learn from hers and accept responsibility for them (incidentally her way of apologising for the iced fingers was to come to me as I was sorting our newspaper delivery of a morning and proceed to blame everybody else for her errors) I would be fine with it. I don't think less of her for any mistake, I think less of her for the complete lack of fairness, consideration & insight into the fact that she isn't the only inhabitant of a subjective realm of self.
And on top of this I have been to her firsthand a few times (including today) to ask her to empty deliveries & fill the bread boxes instead of leaving it for the next person in the bakery, amongst other issues, and I've done it without backstabbing or gossip (in contrast to her shit-stirring and moaning about me and others to the manager behind our backs) and in a calm and reasonable way, to try and induce a sense of working as some kind of a team rather than being at each other's throats all the time.
Today for example I quietly asked her to empty deliveries and not leave them because I had more than a few customers give me a lot of grief over items not being on the shelf because she hadn't trayed them up because she couldn't be bothered to go into the freezer and lift some boxes. So I had to do it, along with sorting out what hadn't been downstacked. She also creates problems by engaging in false obligations to customers.
As an example there is a pretty horrible old woman who comes in with a terrible attitude. She demanded that we save her two cheese twists (89p) on a Friday because she would be in on that day at 9:30am every week. Well heres the thing, I know that this girl isn't saving any extra back for her because of the stock levels, so she's baking 10 like normal, but keeping 2 back for this demanding and ungrateful individual. However if that woman comes in and there are still two or more left then she can buy two then and it's the same profit, but if she comes in and there isn't any, well we don't bake throughout the day so we've still made the same money. And from what I've seen she doesn't even come in at a consistent time as she professed. Instead she came in at 11:07am last Friday and proceeded to rant at me about not having her twists ready. I politely pointed out that A) I'd not been told & B) it's not worth my time as expressed above. I have enough responsibilities as it is without having to remember petty stuff like that for customers who I don't like and who don't contribute much anyway.
Like I said: She just creates problems.
There's another issue in that her perception of her own worth and work ethic is completely out of proportion to the reality and her reactions to any kind of critique or advice are instantaneous and volatile. In today's episode I had only got part way through the sentence of "Please could you sort out the delivery when it comes in as it makes the job easier for the next per.." "I HAVEN'T GOT TIME FOR THAT, IT'S ONLY A SMALL DELIVERY" *eyes start welling up with tears*.
Now I could feel myself getting sucked into her amygdala hijack so after I'd brought some things up about her moaning about others when she makes worse mistakes, I mentally stepped back and left it at that (especially since her defence appeared to consist of trying to turn the conversation into a court hearing "when did I do that then, huh?" "When did that happen, be specific" *chapter and verse* and I don't play that bullshit game). So now I've got the eggshell tension treatment for the next few days, which is infuriating when I was trying to be reasonable about something that is so unreasonable (in terms of the problems she creates for myself and others in the bakery). One of the reasons I walked out of my last retail job was because going the direct, non-passive aggressive & non-backstabbing manipulative route to solve interpersonal work issues didn't get any results, but it's the method I understand & use because I see the others as having long-term, corrosive effects on the work environment. And for larger reasons of knock-on stress spreading which I won't go into with this post.
That and I consider it the decent thing to do.
There actually was another girl who has now left to work in human resources who used to come to me on Sunday practically in tears of rage because this other girl had left her with all the delivery and the boxes to fill and she suffered from a chronic bad back. I used to help her sort it out when I could get off the till.
This is an ongoing problem and even the manager has had conflict with her (resulting in more of her crying and more eggshells). Frankly I think he should be doing something more to solve it or else the HR girl won't be the only person who left quite quickly.
I hate upsetting people too, largely because the emotional unsettlement affects my ability to perform, not so much from a caring of whether people like me (in fact I'd prefer neutral to anything), but because I can't seem to shut out other's emotional energy very well. Having said that I respect that you have to go through conflicts and confrontation as a bit of a right of passage, not to mention a fair bit of criticism (in which case take on the helpful and learn from it while shutting out the unhelpful). But over something as insignificant as this.....it just bothers me.
I just want to work days where the only issues are my own mistakes and the external variables of customers/outside world.
I'm exhausted with this shit.
PS: I know that in these matters it's easy to forget that this is only a slanted perspective from my position, but I would be fascinated to hear her side of the story and see how she perceives the issue.
what, wait I feel like I've missed part of the conversation here, Not sure what the overall context is.
