working title

Holding a Grudge

There are some places I won’t visit again, namely a few of the places I’ve worked. I’ve never been fired, but I’ve felt like I was put in a position where I had little choice but to quit. For instance, the boss who waived a gun around near me and then threatened my coworker and made up stories about how customers hated me. There were more. Am I abnormal in that I have these situations where I can’t go back to a place once I’ve quit? At one place, we had a girl that just stopped showing up for work, so we assumed she had quit. Weeks later, she came back into the place and claimed that someone had told her she wasn’t scheduled, that’s why she didn’t show up for work. I’m pretty sure she was lying, and she felt comfortable enough to show her face in the place she used to work? In the place she took advantage of and left in a not-so-good position by just stopping showing up for work?

One job had yearly evaluations for its regular employees. I had taken on a voluntary position to help tutor new employees in our customer service program (it was a detailed program with different levels and pins to earn and all kinds of complicated things). I was also writing a weekly newsletter for the store and going to weekly meetings. Although I got paid for my extra time doing these things, I didn’t get paid above what other workers (non-tutors) were making. So the tutors got together and asked for some kind of raise or incentive to keep doing what we were doing. We didn’t want to do all this extra work for no extra benefit, and I think that was very reasonable.

The company refused to give us a raise, but they came up with a program for a yearly bonus. If we did everything they asked, we’d get a bonus at the end of the year (it was a few hundred dollars, a nice bonus!), BUT (you knew there was going to be a “but” didn’t you?), we could only get the bonus if the store made an increase in profit over the previous year’s sales.

The managers had the same stipulation in their yearly bonus. With the managers it made sense. Their work directly affected sales. With the tutors, though, we were just training new employees and helping current employees follow the customer service program. Everything ends up coming down to sales, but the two weren’t directly related. Alas, there was nothing we could do. They came up with this program, and we were basically forced to comply with it, and we just hoped our store would have a good profit so we could get our bonuses.

Halfway through the year, we had an evaluation to see where we were on the way to our bonuses. I scored a 90% and the other tutors were similar with their scores. There was some room for improvement, and we all stepped it up for the rest of the year. I was proud of us, actually. We had a lot of work, and we made sure it was done.

Then came the official evaluation at the end of the year where two bombshells were dropped – First, the store didn’t make a profit, so we couldn’t get any kind of bonus. Second, my new score was where two bombshells were dropped – First, the store didn’t make a profit, so we couldn’t get any kind of bonus. Second, my new score was a 45. Half of what my unofficial evaluation had been six months earlier! I was dumbfounded. Again, I said, “If I was doing such a poor job, why did no one tell me along the way so I could improve??”

I was so upset during the “evaluation” that I had asked to leave the room before I just outright quit my job. My manager wouldn’t let me leave, however, so I voiced my opinion on how much bullshit I thought the whole thing was. I quit being a tutor that day.

Where is the motivation to keep working hard if they take away any chance of a reward? And I felt like I had directly been lied to with my performance review. It was a joke. All that hard work, that extra time, and they lied to my face.

It was only a few months later when I found a second job. I asked my department manager if she could cut my hours back just a little, so I wouldn’t be working over 40 hours per week with both jobs combined. She told me she couldn’t cut my hours back because it would be unfair to the other employees. (Seriously? I thought they’d want more hours!) So the next day, I gave me two weeks’ notice. It’s been about seven months since I quit, and I haven’t stepped foot inside the store.