I think it’s fine to tell this story now that my store closed down. For legal reasons, and slightly paranoid reasons, I won’t mention the name of the store just as a precaution.
Once upon a time I was a manager at a retail store. I took the position serious, most of the time. I’d say I was a serious manager 95% of the time. But that 5%….well…..
In my defense, I always wanted my staff to be able to look forward to coming to work, so if I bent the rules slightly, it was only with pure intentions.
Now that I got the justification out of the way, and because nothing remotely interesting has happened as of lately and I have nothing else to talk about for this post, I thought it’d be fun to roll down memory lane, so to speak.
One summer afternoon, I was the closing manager with a few of my sales staff and the mall was dead. We’re talking ‘ghost town’ empty. It was going to be a beautiful day, if anyone was smart, they were either living it up at Canada’s Wonderland, or spending the weekend at the cottage. I, on the other hand, was rotting away in my store.
My staff and I had a good chemistry and we liked to get into some shenanigans at work, especially when there were no customers. Looking back, it’s funny to think that we never got busted for the other stuff we did because we got into some mischief to say the least.
In every retail store, there’s a pole that has a hook at the end of it, normally it’s used to grab items that are on higher shelves. It’s a pretty long stick, so every now and then, when the store was empty of course, I would often grab this stick and imagine it was a golf club, a hockey stick, and in this case, a pool cue. It was just something to fiddle around with. Most of the time I used it to hold me up in case I wanted to pass out from the boredom.
On this particular day, for a total of 15 seconds, as my co-workers and I stood in a semi-circle shooting the shit, I decided to take the stick and practicing my pool shooting skills by using said stick on the side of the cash desk. Practice makes perfect, that’s what I always say.
Pretty harmless though, right? I thought it was. You know who didn’t think so? The owner of the company.
The next week I found myself in the office with my district manager and the owner of the company watching myself using a hook as a pool cue on the camera footage from that day. I had to sit in a chair holding in my laughter because I couldn’t believe I was getting told off for something this asinine. In my defense, it’s not like I was taking money out of the cash drawer.
I’m not sure what was worse, the fact that I was being written up for this, or the fact that the entire time I was being reprimanded I was analyzing my form on the footage. I almost wanted to tell them to rewind the footage so I could analyze my form a bit better, but I didn’t want to add oil to the flame.
I mean, look, there’s a couple of ways to look at this.
A. I can beat myself up about this until it destroys my confidence
B. I can acknowledge what happened, apologize, strive to do better as a manager, and be able to look back on this as a funny lesson to learn from.
I don’t know about you but I choose option B.
That’s my takeaway, that and don’t do stupid shit in full view of a camera.
Comments