[TRENCHES] Thursday, August 30, 2012 - Commonality
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Commonality
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/commonality
The Winter Months are Hard on Some
AnonymousI was working 3rd Key at Gamestop a few years ago and we were preparing for the winter holiday. My shop was in a lower income area and was prone to an incredible amount of theft, so throughout the year we had been stockpiling “locking, theft-proof” peg hooks for our controllers from other stores.
Over time, we’d managed to get enough so that every controller and accessory in the store was theft proof… Until the District Manager arrived to give his pre-holiday inspection.
We being his only real non-mall store, the locked up merchandise seemed wrong because it wasn’t “convenient” for the customer.
$2500 dollars in accessories was stolen in the first month. The thefts were mostly blamed on the staff and we were all individually questioned and then fired that following January. The same district manager still works there to this day.
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The optimist in me thinks it's the former.
How would one address this? Where can one be fully educated on how employment law works?
In this case though firing the entire staff like that to cover his ass is definitely worth a lawsuit.
You do this in retail and the dm/gm will make your life a nightmare if they dont just fire you for "any reason" to stop you from making them look bad.
This seems like the general thought in retail. first week in from college and working at radioshack again for the summer, we did an inventory of the store. Manager finds a empty $5 usb drive container that someone must have gutted and walked out of the store with. She walks over to me screaming about loosing the $5 product on my watch and noones stolen from the store. My first response: "when was the last time you did inventory? when was that stolen? I dont think ive even ever seen that product in the store" last time they did inventory, it was like a year. I had been there a week. The store only had that one product stolen it turned out after we were done with inventory. I honestly wouldn't of been surprized if she didnt steal it, as she just happened to find the package by digging hard under a shelf to yank out the package while scanning products.
edit: I am calling it now, isaac was a famous guy in the industry, and used a different name at the time. thats why noone recognizes him or knows his name.
Wasn't that explicitly stated in the first arc? He called himself "I.C." or something and make a real stinker.
I don't quite follow the dialogue in this one. "Other than that, my story is exactly the same." Other than what? It would almost make more sense if Isaac's speech reads right to left so that the "A temporary personal failure..." line comes first.
The joke is that his story is "exactly the same" except everything she said ("other than that"; 'that' being all she spoke of).
So his story is nothing alike hers. Hence the paradox and the joke.
Essentially, Issac is narcissistic egotistical asshole. That's the joke.
There's probably a pretty low point of diminishing returns for fighting for a gamestop-level job.
It depends on where you live. In some places the rights that the employee has in no way exceed basic human rights. Take for example the state that I live in, South Carolina. An employer in SC can fire you for any reason, or no reason at all. The only employment laws that apply are the national civil rights laws which cover discrimination and whistle-blowers. It's tough to win a suit in those arenas, even if the firing was because of discrimination or whistle-blowing. And furthermore, if you did win such a suit, what does it gain you? You get to keep your crappy minimum-wage job, only to be laid off 24 hours later because of "over-staffing"? More than likely the real reason for the firing was to cover the manager ass. The reason given to the employees was theft. And the reason stated on the termination documents was left blank.
Simply put, the US (particularly the southern and western states) have shitty employment laws. The only thing that protects workers here are unions. And that's why it's such a sad situation that they have grown too greedy over the decades. Unions which were once the engines of change that brought about the 40 hour work week, over time pay, health and safety standards, and so much else that we take for granted these days, now get a bad rap. On the other hand from the employers point of view if the employment laws were more strict then they would find it too difficult to prune back the dead wood without making a federal case about it.
Like most real world problems there are no easy answers. Just realize that if you lack marketable skills and experience you will be exploited by employers looking for cheap expendable labor. Learn a marketable skill, or go into business for yourself.
That store is closed now. Miraculously, it's not because of the boss' poor management but because the letter didn't want to renew the rental contract.
Then they experience their first Black Friday.
In my head it plays out like Isaac never stopped talking, he just barreled into his own story right after asking the question. So when she's finished her story it cuts back to him and he's wrapping up an entire practiced spiel.
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What the hell? I'm starting to think 99 percent of these stories are bullshit.
But back to anecdotal evidence, yes, if you work in the video game industry at a low level and have a manager who treats you like a human being you are incredibly lucky.
I never experienced stuff that extreme myself but then I am not a tester or working retail. I lived through instances where my bosses hanged me out to dry for their personal reasons but I was not entirely blameless in those situations.
My best friend works in retail and he has plenty of stories of management making stupid decisions that would make his job hell if it was not for the fact that the store chain is unionized and the union fights them on the really stupid (and usually illegal) stuff.
That's the expected thing, and the point of the Tales is to show the abuses of employees in the system. My brother tried to explained how Gamestop paid him (they don't use your HUMAN concept of "paychecks") and my eyes glazed over and I wondered how this was fucking legal.
EDIT: Also, anonymity or not, few people are going to submit stories that cast them in the role of doofus.
Although I will agree that we will get a lot of exaggerations if not fabrications. These are anonymous letters from people who are a bit bitter about losing their jobs.
I have, quite a lot. At motivational speeches and people talking about their learning and growing up experiences, maturing as a professional, so on.
The gist of it is always basically: You're going to make a lot of mistakes along the way, learn from them and don't be afraid to try and fail and make them...just don't repeat them afterwards.
However, when it comes to Internet Stories, the interest is in horrible or extreme experiences which many may relate to. The purpose is not to teach you something, other than I suppose "watch out and know your rights and responsibilities".
It's mainly a black-humour form of entertainment. And that's the purpose of Tales from the Trenches here. To 'entertain'.
If you want to hear about people admitting to fucking up, then you should see some professionals speaking of their early career.
Although you'd be unlikely to find a manager-level person ever admitting fault.
I am going to have to be the jackass bad guy right now and just say that at that point it's the employees fault. I'm not a badass or anything but I just simply refuse to work for someone who doesn't show me some basic sense of respect. THere have been one or two times when I realized the person I was working for was a complete jackass and wasn't respecting what I felt my 'rights' were. I didn't make a stand or a big scene. I simply looked for another job, found one, and quit on their asses.
And yeah, I have worked in jobs where I was a 'temporary' hand. Where I had to get it 'on the ground level' for less than minimum wage then given ridiculous goals to achieve as soon as I was about to hit a point where I was going to receive a raise. One such thing was a transcribing agency for financial businesses. My QA basically walked over to me at the end of a certain week and said "Your doing a great job! I'll see you next week!" then sent me an email that night that said my errors were too high and I needed to transcribe the next week without having a single error in any of my transcripts.
Something like that simply isn't possible at the speed that they demand you to transcribe at (Somewhere around ninety words a minute) and, of course, I got about four errors that week and got canned.
However and this is something everyone here should heed with project based work expect to be laid off at the end of the project if you haven't been tasked, briefed, assigned, etc with another project. Its not just video game development either, research and constrution do that when projects are finished.