ok, so i work in a bookstore. the company has a huge warehouse from which they send the stores i manage books that have these really obnoxious publisher stickers on them. when one such book sells on the internet my staff and i are obliged to remove the stickers before sending the books back to the warehouse to be packed and shipped to the customer. the other day i get an email from the warehouse saying they received a book to be packed from my store that still had a sticker on it. my coworkers are lazy and forgot to do it. so, the warehouse said they were going to send the fucking book back to the store so that we could remove the sticker. this would have delayed a paying customer's order by two business days. i told them it was a waste of time and the customer's patience. i'm a manager. two warehouse guys who are not managers gave me serious tude about it and talked about how they weren't going to "waste their time" "rewarding my staff" by taking the sticker off themselves and just sending the book off like proper fucking gents. so, a whole email exchange unfolded, the general manager stepped in and basically i had had enough and thought to just make a joke of it. so i wrote this email:
"Hi,
I will make sure that the staff is completely clear that they must remove the stickers before boxing the picks and if they do not do so they are not properly completing the job. Heads will roll. Empires will crumble. Despots will be deposed.
If by G-d a sticker should make its way to the warehouse do let me know and I'll try to get to the bottom of the tragedy and assail the culprit(s) with un-rewards. However, should that happen, definitely do not delay a paying customer's order by sending the book back to the store. That would be completely unprofessional.
Anyway, looks like we've duly exerted our energies over the tyrannical sticker in question so I'm going to go make sure my vessels of GOO-Begone! are at the ready and in a condition of flowing over, and this evening I will personally oversee all picks-related hardships. I hope I am up to the challenge.
Alcofribas"
now, this appeared to me to be completely facetious and sarcastic as it did to my other manager who thougt it was the cause of the lols that she emitted whilst reading it.
however, this morning i get an email from the warehouse in which i am told that "managers should act like managers not petulent children who get their feelings hurt when they're told to do their job." the person who sent this is not a manager. and keep in mind this is still just about a fucking sticker on a book.
so my Lady Alcofribas (who works with me) advises me to call the warehouse and clear it up. i call. i calmly and respectfully explain that my email was clearly a joke and i was just trying to make light of the situation but i do apologize for any hurt feelings. i explained that i felt it was completely inappropriate both professionally and personally for me to be called a "petulant child" by a coworker, especially one who i hardly know and who isn't a manager himself. he totally lost his shit. he said he didn't believe me that i was joking and that i just "didn't have the balls to man up." he said he has been in the book business longer than i've been alive (pretty sure he's like 10 years older than me) and thus demands a "great deal of respect" and if i want him to respect me well, he "has no reason to." he explained that if i wanted to have a "linguistic conversation" (i declined) he would "get all structuralist on my ass." i was like, look, there's just no need to call me names and tell me how to do my job. if you have some beef about work jbc, don't be all snooty and send books back to me so my staff can remove a sticker. that's asinine. he then explained that since i said my email was a joke so was his. i told him he was being insincere. he said so what? i said, well, what's the point of that? etc etc etc
the conversation ended with him saying he was too mad to continue.
so, normally upper management would chime in here. but upper management is full of shit. the general manager is a cunning little liar who is constantly bad mouthing me and other managers and lying to people about shit he fucked up so that other people take the blame. he's also a sexist pig. he's rude, dishonest and sadly full of himself even though he's a fucking loser. his boss is the owner. he's useless for this kind of thing (and most things in general). the hr manager? the owner's girlfriend. she didnt come into work this weekend because she was "too broken up about the shootings in CT." if you meet her for one second you'll realize this is complete bs since she's as heartless as it gets.
and i'm not even on the fucking clock right.
p.s. the warehouse workers aren't black, if that's what you were thinking lol
