All I want is a little respect!

It has recently come to my attention that I really really REALLY hate my job. Well okay, let’s be honest; I’ve rather disliked my job for quite some time, but the positives outweighed the negative aspects so I was able to deal adequately with the things that I disliked. Unfortunately, the situation has come to the point where I can no longer enjoy the majority of my time at work, and if I had a better option I would leave and never look back. So because I am in a rather pissy mood with work, I am going to name names, and point fingers, and tell you all (dear readers) exactly what it is that I hate about my job.

Case One: Management. It all boils down to two little people, who unfortunately have quite a big say over my time at work. Since I am not going to actually name names, since that could get me in trouble legally, you all get to know them as simply S and T. We’ll start with S, since according to the alphabetic index that categorizes my life he comes first. Also because he is the main problem, due to his amount of authority. To put it simply, he’s a gossip, who likes to engage in malicious rumor-mongering, and uses said rumours to his advantage to turn people against eachother. Thankfully this doesn’t usually work to his favour, since he tends to pick on people whom the Group has befriended, and once in the Group, membership is permanent and loyalty of other members is guaranteed. He knows exactly how our Group functions at work, and since he is not included has made moves to break up the Group. He has fired two people who were accepted Group members (though admittedly new members), and has turned our main ally in management against us. To move on to T, who is also an ally of S, his crimes are many. I am not going to waste words and effort expounding upon his many ill deeds, but will leave you with this list instead: negligence, chauvanistic behavior, disrespect of team-members, know-it-all attitude when in realirty he’s completely green, sexual harrassment, and general jerkitude. I’m sure at some point one of my fellow bloggers will expand upon this list in greater detail, so I charge all of my blog readers to go and read those blogs as well!

Case Two: Customers. They’re all jerks. With no respect for our employees. They are consistently rude, messy, and inconsiderate of our work environment. What I would like to say to each and every one of our customers who makes our lives hell is “Do WE come to YOUR workplace and treat you in this manner?” The answer is NO, we do not. At least on my part. Because I have worked at a variety of retail and food industry jobs I respect the people who work there. Sure I find some of them to be lacking in intelligence and some of them I rather dislike, but I am nevertheless polite to them when I have to interact with them. I am never rude to cashiers (unless they are rude to me of course), I always follow the rules of an establishment (whether it be amount of items per fitting room, or putting my trash in the designated space), and I never ever leave a mess for the employees to deal with. Our customers constantly break these three rules, that I feel are simply part of common courtesy, but aspparently the rest of the population does not care to regard. I constantly see customers berating our staff for things that are not their fault (and have experienced this personally as well), a blatant disregard of the rules (even when the rules are explained to them in the nicest of tones), and am constantly astounded at the amount of stuff that gets dropped on the floor and not picked up by the person who dropped it. The other day I witnessed a girl drop a packaged wig on the floor, and instead of picking it up, she instead chose to kick it under the display. Thank the pagan gods that I have some authority in my temporary department of new merchadise, so I confronted the girl and told her to PICK IT UP IMMEDIATELY. She of course complied, and looked rather embarassed to have been caught. Hopefully she will never do it again. If only we had the authority to chastise every single customer who treated employees badly, or had the chance to treat them exactly the same way they treated us, and then maybe the population would learn to respect eachother more.

Case Three: Wage. I’ve been at my current job for about a year now, and can you guess how many raises I’ve gotten? None. That’s right, none. They may have hired me at a higher wage than normal (a whole $0.60 more…), but they also used this as an excuse not to give me a raise at my 6 month review. Since I am going to be sitting down with my manager rather soon for my yearly evaluation he’s going to be getting quite an earful about the raise that I feel I am entitled to. I am about as close to a perfect employee as any workplace is likely to ever see. I never call in sick unless I am physically incapable of doing my job. I don’t consider hangovers to be a legitimate excuse to not come to work. I get along with my team and most of my managers, and generally don’t try to rock the boat when I don’t like someone. I have never been late. In fact I am usually quite early for my shifts. And when I am at work, I get the job done. I may spend some time socializing, and slacking off, but when it comes to crunch time I get it done and I am meticulous in what I do. I’ve also taken on more responsibilities in the last few months; becoming a designated cashier (which is basically a substitute supervisor when needed), and have headed up the Halloween Team (against my first instincts) and done a damn good job of running the department better than it has ever been run. They had better agree to a decent sized wage or I am SO outta there.

Case Four: Respect. The most important aspect of any job, I feel, is respect. This needs to come from everyone: from management, from teammembers, and from customers. We all know that customers are never going to be respectful, regardless of workplace, but we can all hope that as a team the employees can have a mutual respect for eachother. Without respect in the workplace, how do management expect to keep their team motivated to do their jobs well? A happy workplace is key to keeping employees, and to making work seem less like drudgery. Management cannot expect to immediately get respect from their team; they have to earn it. If they lead by example, and treat their team well then their employees will respect them. As for inter-team respect it is something that is tricky at any workplace, since not everyone is going to get along with eachother, but everyone still has to work together, so unless the issue is a legitimate problem (such as bullying, harassment, physical/mental/sexual abuse, etc) then everyone should try to put aside their differences and work together as a united team.