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24.06.08: Cliques, Customer Comments, Hypocracy, and Mindgames

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Tonight has been another bad night.  Kind of to be expected, I am working with Slaphead and The Blonde Bombshell.  Seperately, they are both really nice people, but when they work together, they are very cliquey.  They have private jokes they won't let me in on, and they'll talk about things then suddenly stop when I come over.  That or I'll be sent away whilst they continue talking to each other.  A prime example of this is what happened literally 30 seconds ago as I typed this.  Slaphead walked past the canteen, and I smiled at him, he gave me a look of absolute daggers and said "shut up" then continued walking off whistling to himself.  It's nights like tonight that make me run away inside myself.  It's what I've been doing all night actually.  Well, I guess I asked for a return to the old days, and now I have it.

We have been given some nice advice from head office.  We shoud now actively seek out customer comments on the customer comments forms.  Well, the thing is I did this about a year ago.  A customer wanted to make a complaint and has Dyslexia, so I helped him fill out the form and helped with the wording of it.  For all my help and assistance I got a formal warning from the deputy manager for wasting time.  Somewhat ironic that the thing that got me said warning is the same thing that we now have to do. 

Now, I don't like constantly b*tching about the same person, but as with the above comment, I do feel the need to point out hypocracy with the people I work with.  Like The Blonde Bombshell.  A couple of weeks ago he screamed in my face for not working the multipck crisps with the single pack crisps.  But yet tonight when he worked the single pack crisps, it was fine for him to ignore the multipacks.

I've also been brought right down by the pair of them.  Always fun.  It started because Slaphead asked me if the store was faced up.  I told him it was and he laughed and said "glad I'm not doing the store walk in the morning".  So I asked him what he meant and he said that the store was faced up to my usual cr*p standard.  He disappeared out the back and then a few minutes later The Blonde Bombshell came out and asked if the store was faced up.  I told him it was, and he told me that he would check it before I was allowed to go to lunch.  And that was it, that kicked my depression into gear.  I asked him if he could hurry up as I had an appointment to hang myself in the warehouse.  He laughed and said that I was being ridiculous, I looked him in the eye and said "seriously? 50/50 whether I do or not".  He looked at the time and said "ok, go to your lunch". 

But this is the thing that is really grinding me down in this place.  The standard of the facing up has suddenly become all my responsibility.  And I have no-one I can talk to within the store about how deeply unfair this is.  Plus, the other thing that really gets me about this place is that I have been told not to interupt people when they are on their breaks.  But, it's perfectly ok for people not to just interupt me on my breaks, but to reprimand me, physically stop my break to make me do work, and to pass the canteen and make snide comments at me whilst I am trying to relax.  Yes, that's fair.  I can't interupt their breaks but they can do pretty much whatever the hell they like to mine.  And of course the best part is, if I complain, I get accused of being melodramatic or blowing things out of proportion...  Ok, rant over.

And then the delivery arrived.  I was on fire last night.  I worked pretty much the entire ambient delivery.  By the time The Clique finished chatting and messing around with the chilled delivery, I had about a dozen cases of stock left for them to work.  Now, in most places, finishing a task way ahead of time gets you praise.  Not in our place.  No, The Bombshell came over, looked at a pile of wet cardboard and said "You break something again?"  So I turned around and said "Nope" and then continued working my stock.  He asked if I needed any help, so I said "Nope" and continued working.  Then he said to me "Why are you angry?"  I simply told him I wasn't, just focused, and he laughed and said "Yeah, right, grrrrr, focus!"  That was the beginning of a huge downward spiral.  He got annoyed that I was on a mass efficiency trip, putting stock out that he had missed, doing his job for him in recording the temperatures of the chillers, and then taking the cages over to the compound.  So he told me that I should go back to school, starting at year one.  I have an IQ of 190 and two A Levels in Computer Science and Computer Studies, so when he told me that, it was a massive kick in the teeth, and I always take comments like that personally.  Slaphead leapt in and said that I often spoke a lot but I didn't have any brains to back it up.

I got my chance to get my own back on The Clique.  Princess Chav asked me what the letter I left for Queen Chav was about.  I looked at The Clique and said it was a couple of things that management needed to know about.  She asked what things, and I asked if Pedro had looked at the letter.  She said he did, and I told her that it was a good thing because he needed to know those things.  The Bombshell snorted and said I'd told them nothing.  I told him there were a few things that I had told Pedro and Queen Chav, and he turned pale, before grabbing a knife and saying "Yeah, sure, you tell to them anything and I kill you".  So I laughed and said "See?  He's threatening me with a knife, you see why I needed to write to them?"  So he yelled across the store "You shut the f*ck up!"  And then came over and called me a Jew.  I told him this was exactly what I meant, that just in that time he had threatened me with a knife, sworn at me via shouting across the store, and then insulted my faith.  Slaphead laughed and said I'd done nothing, and I told him he wasn't faultless either, as he had called me a Gypsy a few minutes earlier.  So The Bombshell told me that he'd tell Pedro things too.  I laughed and told him I'd simply tell Pedro that he frequently threatens me with violence, has wild mood swings, is frequently racist, and that he rarely completes paperwork properly.  He went pale and quiet.  Of course, the letter to Queen Chav was simply to tell her I needed Thursday off to attend my Grandfather's funeral.  But I do so love playing mind games with people.  It gets things done far better than physical violence, and is so much harder to detect on CCTV.
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