So I'm calling yesterday my last day at the Sharper Image, mainly because the boss started back today, and it wouldn't do for me to be in her company a minute longer than absolutely necessary. Once I found out that, by giving them the courtesy of a 2-week notice I was cutting myself out of commission for the period, I stopped worrying about courtesy and got more pragmatic in a hurry.
I started giving away my sales again, and managed to hook up some of my cow-orkers with some pretty sweet deals, including several RSGs. It gets tricky deciding whom to give which sale to, since you don't want to screw up anybody's RSG percentage or units/transaction average, or any of the other asinine ways they rate us.
Anyway, at one point some poor sucker decided he had to have a $10 HugOO pillow. It was originally $30, so I couldn't talk him out of it, but I had to decide who the benefactor of the commission ($0.04) would be. I logged in the register as me (which I'm required to do by the policy), and when the register presented me with a list of employees to choose whose sale it was, I got a singularly evil idea. It was the closest thing to a little devil on my shoulder that I've had in a long time. I think they call him the Imp of the Perverse, but I'm not sure.
It turns out that the first name on the list is the full-time stock boy, who isn't officially a Sales Associate. One might ask, "If he isn't a sales associate, then why was his number listed under the heading Sales Associates?" If one had asked my manager that, she would've probably gone off on a tirade about how short-staffed we are, and how our IT people can't be bothered with little details like that. Probably the same reason she makes me sort through a clipboard with 200 pages of emailed pieces of time-sensitive data instead of allowing me to take 400 milliseconds to search in the computer. But back to my story...
The stock boy is pretty cool, despite being an old friend of the PHB. He gets to use tape, box cutters, stickers, and ladders all day, which makes me jealous, since I'm already bored with all our products, and tape never gets old. Since he's a full-time stocker, he didn't go through the sales training, and isn't elligible for commission, and (according to my boss) can't sell anything.
So I figured, "If he's not a sales associate, what happens if I credit him with this $10 sale? It's about time he sold something anyway, always hiding in the back room watching DVDs and sucking up to the boss." Plus, since I was tired of trying to explain the virtues of well-designed (or at least half-debugged) software to my boss, I figured she deserved an example. She's always quick to throw the book at me, so my thinking was, if it's paperwork she likes, I'll give her some.
I typed in the stock boy's number (only one digit different to an actual sales associate, so if anybody asks, my finger slipped). The transaction went on as usual, and at the end of the day, the computer listed him among the sales associates. This was on Sunday, and nobody said anything about it when we closed.
So far, you're thinking, this is a pretty lame story. You may have to have worked in a similarly braindead beuracracy to understand how much trouble one mistyped digit can cause. In this case, Adam was instantaneously semi-promoted to sales associate, now has a customer history, and will probably get a commission report and RSG lesson (since he's at 0%, having only sold one item). I bet he also gets a letter telling him his sales productivity isn't high enough in a few weeks, although by that time he'll be using a different number to log in.
The reason he needs a new number is because now my boss has to terminate him as a stocker, re-hire him as a sales associate, then terminate him and re-re-hire him as a stocker. I wouldn't be surprised if he gets three W-2s in January from TSI, having now been spliced into more than one person. So, in the fraction of a second it took me to type one digit out of place, I've created probably dozens of pages of paperwork for the higher-ups who were so keen to keep me down. The district manager noticed, naturally, but the official story was that it was an accident. I'll take the fifth on that one, although I should probably start watching what I type here, seeing as how I'm gonna be investigated by Uncle Sam and all.
The moral of the story is, people living in glass libraries shouldn't throw books. That, and don't try to bury me in a loophole, if you're still close enough to the ground to fall into one yourself.
I started giving away my sales again, and managed to hook up some of my cow-orkers with some pretty sweet deals, including several RSGs. It gets tricky deciding whom to give which sale to, since you don't want to screw up anybody's RSG percentage or units/transaction average, or any of the other asinine ways they rate us.
Anyway, at one point some poor sucker decided he had to have a $10 HugOO pillow. It was originally $30, so I couldn't talk him out of it, but I had to decide who the benefactor of the commission ($0.04) would be. I logged in the register as me (which I'm required to do by the policy), and when the register presented me with a list of employees to choose whose sale it was, I got a singularly evil idea. It was the closest thing to a little devil on my shoulder that I've had in a long time. I think they call him the Imp of the Perverse, but I'm not sure.
It turns out that the first name on the list is the full-time stock boy, who isn't officially a Sales Associate. One might ask, "If he isn't a sales associate, then why was his number listed under the heading Sales Associates?" If one had asked my manager that, she would've probably gone off on a tirade about how short-staffed we are, and how our IT people can't be bothered with little details like that. Probably the same reason she makes me sort through a clipboard with 200 pages of emailed pieces of time-sensitive data instead of allowing me to take 400 milliseconds to search in the computer. But back to my story...
The stock boy is pretty cool, despite being an old friend of the PHB. He gets to use tape, box cutters, stickers, and ladders all day, which makes me jealous, since I'm already bored with all our products, and tape never gets old. Since he's a full-time stocker, he didn't go through the sales training, and isn't elligible for commission, and (according to my boss) can't sell anything.
So I figured, "If he's not a sales associate, what happens if I credit him with this $10 sale? It's about time he sold something anyway, always hiding in the back room watching DVDs and sucking up to the boss." Plus, since I was tired of trying to explain the virtues of well-designed (or at least half-debugged) software to my boss, I figured she deserved an example. She's always quick to throw the book at me, so my thinking was, if it's paperwork she likes, I'll give her some.
I typed in the stock boy's number (only one digit different to an actual sales associate, so if anybody asks, my finger slipped). The transaction went on as usual, and at the end of the day, the computer listed him among the sales associates. This was on Sunday, and nobody said anything about it when we closed.
So far, you're thinking, this is a pretty lame story. You may have to have worked in a similarly braindead beuracracy to understand how much trouble one mistyped digit can cause. In this case, Adam was instantaneously semi-promoted to sales associate, now has a customer history, and will probably get a commission report and RSG lesson (since he's at 0%, having only sold one item). I bet he also gets a letter telling him his sales productivity isn't high enough in a few weeks, although by that time he'll be using a different number to log in.
The reason he needs a new number is because now my boss has to terminate him as a stocker, re-hire him as a sales associate, then terminate him and re-re-hire him as a stocker. I wouldn't be surprised if he gets three W-2s in January from TSI, having now been spliced into more than one person. So, in the fraction of a second it took me to type one digit out of place, I've created probably dozens of pages of paperwork for the higher-ups who were so keen to keep me down. The district manager noticed, naturally, but the official story was that it was an accident. I'll take the fifth on that one, although I should probably start watching what I type here, seeing as how I'm gonna be investigated by Uncle Sam and all.
The moral of the story is, people living in glass libraries shouldn't throw books. That, and don't try to bury me in a loophole, if you're still close enough to the ground to fall into one yourself.
