They won’t put him on an IP, apparently
TL;DR: I have a coworker who is extremely lazy and irresponsible, frequently dodging tasks or hiding in the office, screwing over other keyholders or just the booksellers as a whole. He is not on an IP.
There’s this coworker I mentioned here before a year or two ago. I believe I called him Doug.
Doug is going to be the reason somebody in this store snaps. I would say it’d be me but I’d have to get in line because I’m the one he’s technically offended the least. And how has he offended us, you ask? Not with a slur, not with questioning our competence, but with his sheer and utter laziness.
The only real argument you can make is that he’s been working with the company for years and is probably burned out and waiting to retire. But I don’t think that that’s a valid enough excuse: We’re all burned out! There’s other coworkers who’ve not only been with the company for years, but also work other full-time jobs on top of this, yet never display a fraction of the disinterest and responsibility-avoidance this guy does.
He could be scheduled for cashwrap for only half an hour instead of the standard two hours even some keyholders get, and he’ll do what he can to pretend he didn’t see it and either relieve the cashier late or just not show at all.
If cashwrap calls for backup, his response isn’t, “Heading over” nearly as much as it is “Is anyone else available to get that?” Same with phones: Back before we had to start using portables, a phone ringing would result in him getting on headset to say we needed help on phones. He, himself, was never on the phone at the time. Or doing anything that the rest of us weren’t already doing that would require him to pass on that task to another.
One time, there was a theft and even though he was the shift lead, he dropped looking over the CCTV footage onto one of the new keyholders — who’d only barely just been trained on that stuff. Because oh yeah, by the way, he is, in fact, a keyholder himself. But you wouldn’t be able to tell based on how he behaves and how much I’ve seen him do compared to the other keyholders that have had to do more because he chooses to do less.
Doug screwed over another keyholder by leaving her as the only body on the floor while the skeleton crew was at cashwrap. Why? Because he decided that that was the perfect time to go across the street and get the air in his tires checked. It was her lunch time. She told him this. He shrugged and left anyway.
Sometimes he doesn’t even bother with assigning break times on the DAS. One time, he plopped it out with no breaks and I wound up doing them to the best of my ability. It was the last time I did it, but it wasn’t the last time he did it.
Just the other day, he let cafe get screwed over because all the backups, save for him and one other person were unavailable at that moment. The other person was already over there, but they needed a third person and even though he is technically trained for register over there and was very aware of the requests, he made no move to head over. In fact, he waited until one of the backups came back from break (most of which was spent in the cafe line) and told her to go backup cafe. (She was supposed to go to cashwrap and the line had mostly died by then.)
Another time, I had a bunch of tasks thrown on me with a deadline two days away and was given *no* allotted time for this. I eventually had to shoot straight with the SM and tell him I wasn’t going to get anything done unless he found somebody to swap out with me to do a shifting project. While he’s looking through the schedule to find somebody, I hear cafe call for backup. If I answer, that’s 30+ minutes at best. I don’t respond, I’m not even the only crosstrained person on shift anymore so why should I.
But you know who does respond and with what?
“Has anyone seen Wasteofspace?”
Doug literally. Hunts me down. And tells me cafe needs help. Reminder: He can go and ring. He may not even have to write on cups or bags if one of the baristas is expediting.
He would still do pre-paid orders to the store after we’d been told not to and consequently bred some monsters who would specifically only ask for him because they knew he’d just jump the rules for them. We would then pay the consequences when something about these orders would go wrong and the guys would blow up at us like we had anything to do with it. This was eventually nipped in the bud but the guys still ask for him so his legacy with them is sealed.
A lady we suspected of theft was in the store and I go to tell him per the MOD’s orders so we can keep an eye on her? He keeps repeating and talking over me about how “so long as she isn’t a nuisance, she’s allowed to be in here”. ??? My guy, that isn’t the point I’m trying to make here????
And so freaking on and so freaking forth.
And yeah, this sounds like little whining stuff but it trust me, it does add up — and quickly, considering how often this happens.
And it constantly happens because he’s never on an IP. Complaints have been lodged, “talks” were had. If we’re lucky, he maybe might do better for about a week. Then it’s back to normal. Maybe it’s to do with seniority; maybe it’s lingering sexism since the store is mostly women but one of our old SMs clearly favored the guys more than the girls and let them get away with murder.
I would*** ***almost consider seeking advice but I don’t even know if there’s really anything to be done that matters. I don’t trust We Listen to really do anything, and I know store management is unlikely to suddenly do something after all this time. And reminder: I’m the one he’s screwed over the least, trust me. The complaints have been made, but progress hasn’t, and it’s burning people out while still expecting them to do better than him.
If I tried to do even half the stuff he does, I’d get pulled to the side and scolded about how they “expect better from me” or “hold me to a higher standard than this”. Well, hold Doug to a higher standard!!!