#look my coworker who also trained me and whom i adore and trust with...well everything

[needlekind]

the california asshole sounds interesting

THE CALIFORNIA ASSHOLE, that’s my new band name

all names here except mine have been changed but: let’s talk about cathy

cathy and i were promoted to claire’s’s sister store, the icing, at the same time, a few months before the holiday season started—that was the instance where literally everyone in that store quit, another, briefer story; she was the manager, i was the assistant manager. i was nineteen at the time and she was only a few years older than i was

because literally everyone in the store had quit there was a rough month or so immediately after our hiring where we were each regularly pulling doubles so the other could have a day off. eventually we hired lisa, whom i absolutely adored, but only for a couple of days a week because this was a second job to her

at first cathy and i seemed like we were going to be an absolute dream team, high energy and excited about the store and being in charge with it, but ultimately there was not a lot of love lost between us. she was kind of a control freak and would get huffy if i made decisions without her (which happened pretty often, because i was regularly working 50+ hour weeks and was very often alone in the store, sometimes for the entire day!), and she especially hated if i did planogram—when corporate gives you some pictures and diagrams of how your store fixtures and walls are supposed to look and you go “our walls are way taller than this. we don’t even have that product. we don’t even have that many fixtures and most of them have four sides instead of six” and make it look appealing with what you DO have—on my own. she was the kind of person who talked about how her bluntness made her honest and a person other people could trust and rely on while making it incredibly clear that she thought i was totally incompetent when it came to store design and planogram and similar (credit where it’s due; she spoke highly of my sales skills). for a long time, we kept talking about having a manager from a different store come in and do some training with the both of us so she would shut the fuck up, because she wouldn’t train me herself, she just complained about how everything i did was wrong without specifying, so much so that i was impossible for her to train, she didn’t know where to begin, i was just that bad at it

somewhere along the line we also hired shannon, whom i ALSO absolutely ADORED, and she worked shifts between claire’s and our sister store. she was an old friend of cathy’s and therefore got a huge chunk of our allocated hours each week since cathy wrote the schedules, even as lisa’s availability opened up. like i said, i LOVED shannon, she was great, but lisa had an amazing eye for planogram (when she quit it was because her other job offered her a management position designing planograms SO, LIKE, UNPARALLELED COMPARED TO ALL HER COWORKERS INCLUDING HER MANAGERS). planogram season came again and cathy and i got into a fight at one point because i tried expressing that, if cathy thought i was so garbage at planogram then lisa should be getting more hours so she could do it because she was so good at it, and cathy got mad at me for “attacking” her while fervently denying she was showing any favoritism. regardless.

a sidebar: before the holiday season (and i mean the retail holdiay season, not november/december when people actually start celebrating holidays), our stores were dead because we lived in a tourist trap island kind of place, so winter and fall were unbearable no matter where you went. so, when cathy and i’s shifts overlapped, we would just waste time talking about all kinds of things while marking product or organizing signage up front in between customers. one time we ended up in a political discussion where she, a staunch conservative, eventually made a point about how she thought people who couldn’t talk politics without getting emotional were immature, and that it should be completely acceptable idle talk and dinnertime conversation, and that friends could and should have completely opposite political views (this was all before the november 2016 election). she tried to backtrack when i made a point about how i, a lesbian (this being the first i told her this) would never under any circumstances choose to associate with anyone against same-sex marriage (which the supreme court hadn’t ruled in favor yet), and i knew. i could see in her eyes that she was a raging homophobe but wasn’t ready to admit it because christ, we lived in massachusetts, that was a hell of a way to get fired from your job for discrimination.

but i knew she was so uncomfortable because when i said “i would never, ever associate with anyone who was opposed to same-sex marriage, and i probably don’t want to have a discussion with them about it either” i was talking about her. i pushed the point as hard as possible for as long as possible, on purpose, until she dropped the whole conversation.

she never talked politics with me again.

anyway. a few months later my mother died—i hated her and she deserved it, and we weren’t in touch, but i was the next of kin, so i had to do all sorts of legal garbage. claire’s offered three paid days off for bereavement in the event that an immediate relative died; i took mine in the middle of the week adjacent to some pre-scheduled days off so i would have time to travel back and forth and decompress. these days off overlapped with a pre-scheduled visit from a manager elsewhere in the state, whose icing store was converting to a claire’s, so we kept getting their icing product. she was going to bring us some product and help train us in planogram, since she’d been managing that store for, like, a decade—but i was going to miss her visit because of my bereavement leave.

cathy was pissed. she didn’t say so to me, even though i did get a couple “are you suuuure”s (wherever possible, she made the manager at claire’s talk to me if she had a problem with me that wasn’t just vague complaining about how much i sucked; 99% of the time these were baseless and the claire’s manager would mention it offhand like three days later like “cathy was freaking out about x before” “oh yeah” “yeah. i told her to shut the fuck up it’s not a big deal” “nice”). she did call our district manager (who told me about this conversation well after the fact, complaining about cathy’s complaints about me) to complain that i was going to be taking some time off. because my mother died.

like. i did not communicate to my coworkers what my relationship with my mother was like. here’s what cathy knew and was complaining about: i was taking some days off because my mother died. and it was inconvenient for her.

jesus christ.

another month or so goes by, iirc; cathy has another meltdown about planogram after i stay five hours past my shift trying to set up an entire store wall alone and eventually call her and ask if i can just go home and give up and a visiting manager opens with cathy the next morning. the visiting manager said i did a completely fine job and pointed out one specific thing she would rather i didn’t do anymore. cathy told me, in as many words, that everything was trash. nothing comes of this, because she is wrong.

cathy takes a scheduled week-long vacation to see family in california in the middle of the month. she leaves on sunday. she’s been talking about this for a while, she’s scheduled to come back not the next day but the monday after.

on tuesday, my day off, i receive a call in the evening from the manager at claire’s. “what’s going on?” i ask

“cathy quit” she tells me. “she’s staying in california”

“……………..oh”

“yeah. thought you’d want to know. we’ll talk about the schedule when you’re in again on thursday”

“oh. okay. great! ……what”

we never heard from her again