#goddamn it and their customer service days are Monday through friday through a certain time

[puhpandas]

I stg I ordered possessed Fredbear but I checked my email today and it was the normal Fredbear and now I have to contact sanshee to cancel it so I can reorder the one I wanted😭

[fuck-customers]

Warning for a couple walkthroughs of my mild anxiety attacks, mild cursing, and some alcohol and drunkenness mentions. Context: My parents and I just get home from grocery shopping after picking my dad up from work. I get started on my dinner right after we get all the groceries in. It is after 6:30pm. I live on the eastern seaboard. My mom has a private number pop up on her phone and she answers cause we have fucked up legal shit going on and you never know who's calling. "L, it's uh, a guy from /not risking those bastards finding it with even a fake name bullshittery lets call it C corp/ and its for you." My immediate thought is someone from work needs to know if I know a policy question or if I know where a tool might be or how to handle a situation. But then my heart sinks cause my mom knows everyone there and half of them call her mom because she's there early to pick me up all the time. 1. She'd have given me a name, and 2. They'd have texted me first because sometime my phone is off for a week or more because sometimes a can't afford my month by month plan. It happens, I'm poor, but my moms is always on because of legal shit, doctors appointments, job stuff for all of us, and everything else. Thing is. No one who is working tonight really knows that. They're all new or new ish and haven't had thrat happen when they try to call me yet. But it irritates the store manager to no end. She thinks I make enough to not be poor. I make pennies over 11 bucks an hour and close to a quarter of that (like 23%) gets taken out in taxes. Even with our other two incomes right now my family of 6 is broke as fuck. We were homeless for two years (TWO FUCKING YEARS) because our former slumlord neglected to pay his mortgage and the court pushed us out onto the street while charging us with evictions because the bank wanted them to. That is a whole other basket of raging, rapid, monstrous beasts, but that's beside the point. Anyway back to the story, which I now know my manager is involved in because who from corporate would know to call my mothers phone instead of my primary number. So I answer the phone and its a guy from corporate. Technically he works in my region but as far as I'm concerned district manager is corporate. So I'm in the first stages of an anxiety attack and I can barely breathe and I'm shaking and my heart is racing and I'm already tearing up. He wants to talk about a comment I made on the C corps employee resource/announcement/inventory/paperwork page. We are 'encouraged' to make these comments, I believe primarily to out unhappy people, but I had never made a comment before. Last week though, after a few days of other people commenting how unhappy they were regarding the announcement, I felt like I was safe enough to do so. Apparently not. :/ The announcement was about raises in January but with additional 'tenured' 'part/ner' raises. I'm just short of the cutoff for the three year better raise and. I. Am. Livid. Enraged. Pissed. Infuriated. Raging. Antagonized. Outraged. Inflamed. Wrathful. I've been a supervisor for nearly a year and a half. And I've been the only fucking closing one they have been able to keep. I replaced one while she went on her sabbatical, she works mornings now. The other that was there before I was promoted moved to mornings because she got burned out on nights. Which I understand. If you work nights, you get burned out. I only close. I have requested to have at least one mid shift a week, I'm tired and I deserve it. But I'm not allowed. Because this store has been through the first two who are veterans and who trained me, two men one who quit with no notice because he and most of the rest of the team (see, morning crew) and he loathed each other. Another who quit walked out on her last day because she hated the manager, a morning crew member (see a theme? Morning crew hates nights and night crew just sits there, understaffed and denied all there requests off, seething, while the manager only calls out or writes up evening crew). So right now there's me, I close 4 nights a week. I used to be full time but I had to beg for 7 months. SEVEN FUCKING MONTHS. to have one day taken off my schedule. Literally I had tears running down my face as I had to explain to her why I needed go not work t days a week. Finally, convinced I still regularly work an extra day because she's desperate and I need money. But I won't close that extra day because I asked for 3 closes and one mid a week and was still denied it because the morning crews schedules come first. There's a second closing supervisor but she happens to enjoy using racially charged words despite being white as I am and us closing with mostly poc. She sucks at her job and was only promoted because she lied about having experience as a supervisor because she can count cash but she can't run the floor. She forgets everyone else's breaks and runs hers late and literally cannot get done close to being on time. I have been told by at least four closers and preclosers that they will quit or transfer if I do because they cannot stand her. Sorry I'm really pissed and kinda drunk now so I'm getting really off topic but I promise that all of this backs up why I'm fucking pissed. So this guy from not-really-corporate ill call him D, wants to know why I feel the way I do. We have a conversation that was at least 20 minutes long. C corp is obsessed with their 'total pay' style. None of which really helps me. I'm too poor to get their healthcare, I get Medicaid. I never used it but I have to have it so there it is. I use it for glasses and that is it. They offer stock options, which take either two or three years to be available in cash I don't really know all I know is my parents advised me to leave them for when we /really/ need it but I can only.take a small amount of cash out. They offer retirement options and whatnot through a certain financial service but, once again, cannot afford to take money out of my paycheck. They offer a small handful of majors through an online school. Thing is you have to pay upfront for it, and I want to go to art school which obviously isn't offered through this program. We get a food item and free drinks every shift. I can eat a total of 1 food item available to us out of like a hundred. I ate it every day for a year and a half. I can't eat oatmeal anymore. Free drinks are great but even the theatre i worked at offered that. We go over all that. I explain that I have a family of six. I need money now. Not later. Not healthcare. Not a pay up front education (don't worry we'll pay you later if you get good grades). I get sick when I think of eating oatmeal (yeah oatmeal is literally a trigger for me now I used to love oatmeal). I explain that I once applied for the donation fund by part/ners for part/ners on the worst day of my life and when I got the reply email I was told that because I didn't have any utility bills, because my family was FUCKING HOMELESS. He went on to say that if I wanted more money that I should move up in the company. The three people I have watched try to move above a supervisor position have been led along with a carrot attached to a fucking string. One person finally got an ask position and the other even after 9 years is still stuck in the same place I am. I don't want to move up. I want to make a living wage. We discussed this. He asked me how much I thought I should be making. I lied and said 13 an hour. It should be 20. Customer service employees and ESPECIALLY FOOD SERVICE EMPLOYEES should get hazard pay. Forget the raise for managers and supervisors. I do my job. I used to do it better. I left behind two other jobs for this piece of shit company. I have taken shit raises. Pennies. God damned pennies as a raise. I work only closing shifts for three years. I have covered other stores for days to help them out. I have dealt with the shittiest of shitty employees and customers. I have taken panic attack after panic attack and have taken shit from every customer and every single person I have worked with. I like plenty of my team members but goddamn are they catty ass bitches. I take the shift no one else wants. I have taken nothing but shit from my manager who thinks that my dreams don't make money, because its art. He literally didn't care about anything I had to say. Just repeated that there is a cutoff for a reason. Which I fucking I understand. I'm not a goddamned idiot. Doesn't stop me from being fucking enraged. Well ill keep y'all updated when this posts. But its Tuesday and if not friday, I don't think ill have a job by Monday. It's been like an hour since I started this and I'm still crying and still breathing heavily and I hate everything. I fucking hate my job I fucking hate my life and I'm tired.

[originaldetectivesheep]

The Thirty and One Nights' Momentary Diversion - On the Graveyard Shift

Tonight's story goes out to all the other ground-down, worn-out on-call 'resources' out there who've ever had to put down their fork, tie their boots up again, and go back to work on a problem the customer should've been able to solve themselves -- please don't do this in real life.

On The Graveyard Shift

Dan rolled his beer in his hands, thinking.  He was still new, just at the end of his first week, barely done with his basic training, still not all the way through the syntax doc for Jokol Communications' proprietary scripting language, so he felt kind of weird about bringing it up, but it was Friday, and nearly everyone was packed into the kitchen, drinking; maybe this was how they did it back in Sweden too, and this wasn't just about taking some time to blow off steam and team-bond, but to make him less uncomfortable.  If that was how it was, it was working – two of the Lagunitas cans had definitely loosened him up, and it was just a question, right?  What was the harm in asking?

"I'm sorry if this is, like, weird," he said, kind of cutting in on the end of James' story about the truck his cousin had just bottomed out for the second time, "but I think I know everyone in the office by now – but I still don't think I know who has that office behind me.  Are they just on vacation this week?"

It was an innocent question, but it was like if he'd asked if anyone was up to shoot a bunch of heroin over the weekend.  Karen looked away and bit her lip; Yichuen slammed down the last of his Pacifico all at once and almost jogged around the refrigerator to pitch it in the trash and split; Allen shot a look over at Janak, who crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows to the sky like he was goddamn sure not touching this with a ten-foot pole.  Debbie was suddenly very interested in something on her phone, and Siba took a call or 'took a call' as an excuse to get the hell out.  Dan was left just looking around, stunned dead, not sure what the hell he'd done to kill the conversation or what he was supposed to do from here.  What the heck was this even?  And if this got back to Pierre or Ravi – would they like fire him on his trial period for screwing up the office chemistry?  What had he done?

At last, Brian spun around in the one rolly chair, looking him dead in the eye, knuckles tight around the neck of his Fat Tire.  "That office, don't worry about it.  Don't talk about it too much – it's nothing to worry about."

"But –" Dan was looking around, not sure what the hell to make of this, because it was sure as shit that everyone else at Jokol was worried about it or something.

"You live in Medford, right?  Meet me at P.J.'s in Teele tomorrow for the game; I'll explain it more there.  It's kind of wicked long, and I want to go home – I just come off on-call, and it's not healthy to stick around work longer than you have to."  He slugged the last bit out of the bottom of his beer and clunked it into the recycling bin.  "That's that; if you're gonna hang around to dry out, find something else to talk about – something lighter than that, huh? Isn't the Walking Dead starting up again?"  Janak threw out a reference in response, and Dan sat dumb as Brian left and his co-workers started discussing zombie dismemberment – as something lighter than whatever was the matter with that office that they weren't supposed to talk about.

Dan had no idea what 'game' Brian was going to be at P.J. O'Toole's for, and was surprised to find him already parked at the bar, most of an Irish breakfast gone and a second Guinness, at least, half-empty in front of him when he came into the bar at eleven.  He tried to contain his shock, but while Brian definitely noticed, he snorted like he didn't care, and motioned at a seat.  "Took you damn long enough; it's good that the second game's Chelsea kicking the shit out of West Brom, I won't be missing anything while we talk." He picked up a last forkful of beans, and Dan slid gingerly into a chair, looking uneasily at the Guinness that the dreadlocked Brazilian bartender set in front of him, apparently certain that anyone who was friends with Brian would be all about thowing down stouts first thing in the morning.

Dan picked up his beer and took a tentative sip.  "Then – right, about the office.  I'm sorry if I, like said something wrong back there – it's only my first week, and I don't really know anything yet.  Is there like something wrong with it?"

Brian arched an eyebrow over his beer.  "That office?  Yeah, it's cursed.  That's why it's empty – and people don't like to talk about it."

Dan's face flattened out, unbelieving.  "Cursed?  Cursed?  Like –"

"Like whoever takes it leaves.  The last guy Pierre sat in there was this guy Rich, a cold-call sales rep. He got zero hits in two weeks in the office and quit out of depression.  Before him there was a project manager called Wade – he made all kinds of shit undeliverable promises and nearly fucked us out of our biggest customer, so he had to go. Before him it was one of a couple Chrises – and that's the other curse, if you don't know it, that there isn't ever more than one person with the same name at this company, so if there's two, one's got to go.  They put the good Chris who was on track for the architect position in the office, and he got a better offer from Tetradyne and quit two weeks in, so we were stuck with the bad Chris who boat-anchored the support team for three months until Piotr caught him abusing sick time and canned him. One or two of these might have been an accident: all of them, one after the other, it's got to be a curse."  Brian took a deep drink from his beer.  Dan's head was swimming, and he hadn't hardly drunk anything yet.

"But – cursed – it can't always have been cursed – the place is just, like, a normal office building.  Was it that way from the start, like when you moved in?" As weird as this was already, asking about previous tenants doing voodoo rituals in the office was just borrowing trouble, and he couldn't be sure that Brian wasn't just lying to him.

Brian looked unexpectedly reflective, elbows on the bar.  "I don't know.  It was before my time, but probably not much.  Go look up the Employee of the Quarter plaque, if you can find it – last I saw it was covering a hole in the kitchen wall over the fridge, because the brass doesn't want to make a big deal of it.  That plaque's got two names on it, two quarters only, and it stops in 2007 Q2 for a reason.

"The second name, Merzahd, he's the one who was in support before me.  He got on the plaque for doing three weeks of 24-hour call in a row, and he quit the month after he got the award.  Burnout.  Burnout gets you.  The first name is the guy he replaced, a guy called Warren.  He did the same stuff, met the same fate – as far as I've gotten anyone to tell me.  Merzahd, people have him on LinkedIn, they sort of know what he's doing; Warren, he finished up his back to back to back and had some stupid hand-holder prod ticket at five on a Friday and he just lost it.  He finished the case and got it Pending Close, but he grabbed up one of the permanent markers – not even the whiteboard ones – and chalked up FUCK THIS SHIT on the back wall of that office in foot-high black letters, left his security badge on his laptop, and just walked the hell out.  Nobody ever heard from him again, and when the janitors found what he'd written on Monday, they had to chisel it off the wall and repaint – there was no getting that off."

Dan stopped and blinked, beer hanging in midair.  "So – then –"

"Yeah, that's about the shape of it," Brian said, plugging back the rest of his Guinness and signaling for another.  "Hell hath no fury like a support engineer at the end of his rope, and you're new yet, and in Services – you don't know that over by us we make suicide jokes to whistle past the graveyard.  Whisper it, but like as not Warren got sick to fucking death of the fucking customers and killed himself, and he's haunting that office with frustration and despair down to this day."  He picked up his new beer and took a long pull off it without letting the head settle, ignoring Dan's horror-wide eyes and hanging jaw.

"But – but – but –"

"But it's a crazy story, and there's no ghosts and no curses?"  Brian cocked an eyebrow back over his beer, leaning away.  "Sure, fine; believe whatever you like.  As long as you don't get posted up in that office, and as long as you keep the door closed, you'll be fine.  Probably.  I mean, I've been here ten years and change, and I haven't heard about it getting out and jumping on anyone outside. Well.  Yet."  He leaned back, glugging away at his beer, and Dan looked down at his hands.  Maybe Brian was putting him on, the grizzled old veteran hazing the wet-behind-the-ears newbie.  Maybe – or maybe every single person in the office wasn't in on the hazing plot and there was really something weird through the glass behind his cube.  Maybe Jokol was really cursed.  Maybe.  Whatever.  He couldn't deal with this, not like this right now – but maybe the Guinness would help.  Dan leaned back, eyes closed, and tried to get all of the beer down in a single swallow.