All the updates!

So, it's been over a month since I last updated this thing so it's more than overdue.

A lot has happened since then and it's mostly to the good.

I'm basically the acting assistant manager of my store now. The senior sales lead Kelsey has completely shit the bed over the past several weeks and it's to the point that the territory manager wants her gone. The things I've been dealing with at the store level while I'm in charge are things that she would have flat out lost it over - badly clogged toilet that was bad enough to affect the business directly beside us, and the cooler compressor completely died. On the same weekend, no less. But after a brief freak-out on my part I got the toilet issue sorted in time to not have to close the store for the night (can't be open if there is no washroom access for staff, and we're the only 24/7 business in the strip mall) and stayed at the store until it was all taken care of and even cleaned the bathroom from top to bottom myself. And I'm the one who moved the milk and other perishable items from the cooler before we lost it all, and cleared out the 2-door cooler in the backroom to use for storage so we could keep enough milk stock on hand for our usual level of sales.

That weekend apparently impressed the territory manager enough that he made a point of coming in to meet me last Monday. And he said that when the time comes to replace Kelsey and/or pick an actual assistant manager for my boss that he would be asking questions about why it isn't me. I was upfront about my worry about not being able to pass a credit check due to student loan and credit card debt, but the territory manager said that it wouldn't be an issue because I was upfront about it and he's the one who makes the final decision. And Kelsey decided that she wasn't going to return for her shifts this past weekend so that meant shuffling things around for me to ensure that we had somebody in the office. And because nobody expects her to come back, her name is on the schedule but without any hours for next week, and then gone on the next because she hasn't even had the decency to tell our boss that she's not coming back. Hell, she left the province without having a return ticket booked and when our boss reached out to her to ask when we could expect her back she freaked out because apparently everything is just 'so stressful for her right now'...as I can well imagine because EasyLoan has actually called the store looking for her because she's defaulted on her loan with them and they're looking for her and their money. Kinda hard to make loan payments when you're not working and your no longer getting paid for shifts you don't show up for and are not longer getting away with claiming you were there for your full 8 hours on those days you do actually show up to work. Something the territory manager has discovered and is less than impressed about.

Then the discussion came up about the potential for me to move up to manage one of the territory stores that currently doesn't have a store manager. My boss has been at that store two days a week helping to keep it running - that store does have an actual assistant manager but the person has not made any effort to prove that they want that position, especially as they assumed that it would be handed to them after the removal of the store manager. Too bad it doesn't actually work that way. Honestly, I really don't want quite that level of responsibility, and I'm happy where I am. Besides, it's close to where my daughter lives and that means that if the buses go off the road I've got a place to crash - I wouldn't have that ability if I were to go to manage that other store. Besides, I really like where I'm at right now, to be entirely honest.

I do feel kinda bad for my boss over the whole thing with Kelsey. Apparently she used to be a really good worker, but things went to shit at some point after she had to move to the next city over. Yes, buses suck, but our boss was willing to work within her stated availability. And then she decided that she hated buses and couldn't take them so she was relying on her mother or stepfather to give her rides to work...instead of being an adult about it and finding her own way in instead of blaming somebody else for her not being able to get into work. Or blaming her phone for her alarm not going off. Or any number of excuses. Not to mention that there were days when she wouldn't show up for her shift and she wouldn't answer calls or texts, only to say that her phone wasn't working right. It just got to the point where I firmly believe that she was full of shit and instead of being honest about everything she lied through her teeth. And she used our boss' kindness in her favour for the longest time. He's feeling like an idiot for allowing her to carry on the way she has while he tried to cover her ass, and now he's going to be working with our territory manager to terminate Kelsey's employment with our company - she'll never be able to work at another of our stores across the entire country as a result. Job abandonment has serious consequences, folks. Plus it doesn't help that she was texting one of the other employees about not coming back and not wanting the employee to tell our boss - instead he told me and I told our boss. And when our boss advised her that he knows about what she said to the employee Kelsey was all wishy-washy - no real statement either way about what her intentions are concerning her job. Either way, the wage theft she committed is more than enough for her to get fired over. So, there it is. I mean, if she was so good of an employee, couldn't she have requested a transfer to a store closer to where she moved to? Mind you, she couldn't have gotten away with as much as she had at our store.

As for the hotel and the bullshit that's been going on there, well, I'm not as up to date as I used to be. My best friend finally up and quit after the hotel manager dumped EVERYTHING on her lap. As it the guy that was hired to replace me and my co-AGM. While I understand that what took two people to do was too much to dump on one person, how he went about 'delegating' things was completely ass-backwards. Not to mention that he was knowingly renting rooms to major players in the local drug trade, and trying to play it off as all the staff being perfectly okay with the amount of drugs going in and out of that particular room.

I had been trying to talk my friend out of leaving there pretty much shortly after I quit, but she stubbornly kept trying to hold on. She even spoke to the owner and seemed pretty confident that things were going to change after that. Despite me having told her that nothing will change, that as soon as the ops manager came back from her honeymoon/vacation that shit would go right back to the way it was. As it was, before OM came back, three people up and quit - partially due to OM but also in part because the new hotel manager was a fuckwit who didn't do his own job. I mean, ffs, he had been getting the clinic receptionist to the schedule for the hotel and B&B staff, as well as leaving her to run the entire desk for days on end - there really wasn't anybody else available to work the hotel desk M-F. And then he left a good chunk of his job to whomever was in on the weekend - namely, my friend. Including the hotel audit, despite her having no clue at all how to do it. Oh well.

She quit the Saturday before the OM got back, and was not surprised when the OM called her up and tried everything possible to get my friend to go back. Including offering her a supervisor role...which was pointless, honestly, because how can somebody be a supervisor when they can only work 1-2 shifts a week? I bet the OM is seriously regretting how she treated me now. I already know that she's still fucking terrified of me and whatever I may decide to do when it comes to her.

OM fired the new hotel manager not long after she got back from her time off, and how he didn't see it coming is beyond me. But narcissists always seem to turn a blind eye to their failings, regardless of how big their fuck-up is. As it was, his wife quit right after my friend did and before OM got back, because she knew that she had stirred up more than enough shit with the rest of the staff that she was going to end up fired. Deservedly so.

All that seems to be left for the hotel staff now is the predator, a completely clueless missus hired after I left, the housekeeping supervisor, the cook, and OM. In order to keep things more or less going, OM has been having one of the housekeepers from the B&B over to help with cleaning, laundry, and cooking on the weekends, but the housekeeper that's been doing this is at her wit's end now too because she hasn't had a weekend off since the last weekend cook up and quit without any notice!

Right now the hotel has a really shitty reputation and it's all on OM's head. If she knew how to treat staff properly and respectfully she wouldn't have lost so many of us so quickly. Nine months since she found a way to push Wendy out the door - a lady who KNEW how to keep staff happy and treated us all with respect - and look at what's going on. I guess the last time she was in charge she didn't learn that she was the cause of the massive amount of staff turn-over, and neither did the owner, for that matter.

Let's see...I quit on September 12. Colin left less than two weeks later. George was hired a week before Colin left and couldn't get fully trained in because he still had his other job he had to work at for at least a week, and OM's head was focused on her vacation so that's a wash right there. Ashley quit without notice, leaving them with no weekend cook, because she landed a new job that started right away. Jenn gave her notice but held back in the hopes that George would manage to hold things together, only to find out that George was a fraud in more than one way, so she quit without notice. The receptionist for one of the clinics gave notice because she got tired of being fucked around and fucked over, and she's gone now too. Bree quit before the end of her first week after seeing how shitty things were being run - and she already knew OM because her brother lives in OM's basement suite AND is a good friend of the clinic receptionist at the hotel, but only took the job because it was a job at the time, not that she really intended to stick it out much past finding another job. Trish, the housekeeper from the B&B who was told she was now the hotel's weekend cook, has recently had enough and posted on FB how over the bullshit she is, and that she's tired of the disrespect from OM. Cindy, who finally is getting the correct pay for being the housekeeping supervisor, is currently the only actual hotel housekeeper they've got - they finally fired Sharron for being a useless lying piece of shit who creeped the spa attendants out and there is no replacement as of yet - has been looking to get out there since before I left and even reached out to me finally to ask if I still had the spare room available. Yeah, sorry, but that ship has sailed...especially as I'm starting to look at potentially moving closer to work, and I honestly don't want to inflict my craziness on anybody else. Jenna, the clinic receptionist at the hotel, has been dealing with both mental and physical health issues and has been essentially bullied by OM over having to be off sick yet again with COVID. And, of course, because Jenna has been upfront about her mental health OM has been basically accusing her mental health being the reason why Jenna is always missing days from work and that it really isn't due to COVID - despite Jenna doing a rapid test AT WORK ffs and it popping positive in order to prove that she really does have COVID again. Like, fucking seriously? It's that sort of bullshit that is causing Jenna's continuing mental health issues, and mental health issues can also affect physical health...been there, got the t-shirt. So, Jenna reached out to me to ask if my offer to be a professional reference was still on the table - of course it is, and I told her that any place that hired her would be blessed to have somebody as amazing and capable as her on their team.

So, yeah, the hotel is crumbling around OM's head. Figuratively AND literally. Let's not forget that the maintenance person can't seem to keep staff either and is constantly pulled to do everything but the much needed repairs for the hotel. Tubs, a/c units, and so much more are consistently failing, and OM seems to think that guests will turn a blind eye to those failings and pay an obscene nightly rate for a shitty room that looks run down and dingy. The hotel used to have a four-star rating and now they're lucky if they can scrape a 1.5-star rating. Can't get/keep good staff, can't get shit fixed or replaced, can't even put on events anymore because there's not enough fucking staff even if there was somebody who knew how to plan, price, and pull off a semi-decent event.

Meanwhile, I've only been with my store for a little over two months and I'm already on the management team simply because I'm not afraid to work my ass off. Especially when it's appreciated. My boss knows that while I could be trained to do his entire job that I don't want it, but even if I wanted to be a store manager he's more than willing to help me learn and move up in the company if that's what I want. There is none of this fear that I will outshine him and manage to get him removed from his position and the company. If anything, he knows that my successes reflect well on him. My boss' boss seem to think I shit rainbows and fart glitter, and is more than pleased that from Day One that I've been willing to support my boss and teach him what I brought with me after years of management experience - my boss is only 23 but he's doing a pretty damn good job despite his lack of experience - and that was even with me originally saying that I didn't want to jump into management again any time soon.

It really is amazing what working with a good supportive team can be like. I'm still dealing with the trauma and PTSD left from the last nine months of my hotel job, but I can honestly say that I'm happier than I've been in a long time. At the moment I'm also physically exhausted - I've put in six shifts this week of at least 8 hours each, four of those shifts in a management capacity. My next paycheque should be a nice one with all the overtime I'll be getting paid. Which is nice to not have to fight over because OM refused to pay it unless she specifically authorized it...which it kind of hard to do when she wouldn't answer her phone or messages. Ugh.

In the meantime, I should head to bed shortly. I'm running my first inventory as part of the management team in the morning and I have to be at the store by 6am. Normally it's the store manager who is supposed to be there for inventory but he's at another store on Mondays and Tuesdays for the foreseeable future...or until I cave and say I'll take the store manager position at that store. I did offer to do an office shift of two at the other store if it means giving my boss a break from there. I just need to get safe and register codes for the other store, and a set of keys if they are different from the ones for my store. Woo?