GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #667: TRAINING

 I hate trainings at work. 95% of them are useless. I attended a handful of trainings that were useful two jobs ago. And there were a couple of hours of training in the 10 years I worked at the library that weren't useful but were interesting. So naturally I hate training at work.

I had to do a two hour session on Saturday, and it was pretty useless. Anyone with common sense already knew everything in that training. (Yes, I hear you. Not everyone has common sense. But let's focus on "common" in there. I will grant you that on average people are stupid, but the training was so useless that even the stupid averages among us wouldn't have needed it. Just a few ugly outliers, that's all.)

But no matter how bad the training has been at any of my jobs, the absolute worst, hands down, was the training I had to do at Sears. How much fucking training did I need to sell fucking shoes at fucking Sears?

Here is what an average day at Sears looked like to me. I show up. I'm assigned to a section of the department to keep clean and orderly. Or I'm assigned to stock in the back for my whole shift (which, honestly, is preferable). Or, best of all, I'm there early to set up all the sales signs and can punch out when the store is opening its doors to customers. If a customer needs help, I help them. If a customer *might* need help, I ask them if they need help. And then I help them. Very briefly we had a cash register in the department which we had to learn to use, but that was there for maybe a month and I never saw it again.

So what exactly do I need training for? I've blanked most of it out, so I don't actually remember. But here's what would happen. Every month we would have a bunch of training to do. Hours of it. Which is stupid for me because I only worked weekends, so a lot of my time on the clock was spent on the shitty computer doing shitty training in their shitty training room that was actually a shitty stock room.

(Now that I think about it, it might have once been some kind of meeting room, but it was definitely a stock room by the time I got there.)

Hours and hours of pointless bullshit. Every once in a while a training program wouldn't work. I followed directions, and it didn't work. I got my supervisor to watch me as I followed directions and it still didn't work. He would then say to skip it for now, we'll have someone look at it, and we'll circle back before my last shift of the month. The last shift of the month usually came and went without anyone mentioning it to me, which reinforces my belief that it was busy work that no one, not a single solitary person in all of Sears, from the lowliest custodian to the biggest boss, gave a shit about it. I feel certain that no one even checked my quiz scores. Why would they? It was hard enough to find someone to work in shoes. Would they really risk needing to get rid of someone who actually did show up on a regular basis and sold on a reliable basis?

Well. Why would they make me do the stupid training in the first place? I can't have scored 100% on every one of them, could I have?

I'm getting mad thinking about it right now. I meant this to be a silly look-at-this-stupid-shit kind of thing, but I'm actually getting heated up right now. I'm probably going to think about this for the next hour or so while trying to get to sleep, so I'd better stop this right now.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #665: FROM DIE HARDS TO ZAPPOS

 I loathe thinking about my time selling shoes at Sears. Wind me up, and I'll horrify you for hours on end about the terrible shit that has happened to me or that I have seen in that godforsaken place. But there are a few good stories and interesting things that have happened there. Not many! But a few.

I worked in shoes in general, but I was usually put to work in men's shoes. That ranged from dress shoes to work boots. Sneakers fell under a different category. (And, on a side note, I always thought it was fucking weird that we didn't sell Nikes.)

There was one day I was across the aisle in sports shoes. I'd already straightened out men's shoes and was waiting for just one person to come along and fuck up an entire row of shoes, which is what usually happened. This big guy came along, dressed like he'd just come off a jobsite, and said he was looking for work boots. Those were on the far end of men's shoes before you head into another department. I led him over there and helped him pick out what he needed. He went with Die Hards. And like I said, he was a big guy, so his shoe size was pretty big, too.

He looked familiar. I tried to place him, but I couldn't do it. Until he said the next thing.

"I'm also looking for some fashionable women's shoes," he said. "The biggest size you have."

Aha! He used to come into one of my previous jobs! Except he's trans, and I'd only ever thought of him as a her because that's the way she presented at the other place. I caught on quickly and brought him across the department because that's where the women's dress shoes were, at the very end before you went into another department. I didn't think we'd have shoes big enough, but it turns out we did.

I remember thinking at the time how odd it must be, to live your life as a construction worker by day and then go to drag shows at night (because I also saw her at Rocky Horror when I covered that with my Primitive Underbelly partner years before for the Leader). It must have taken courage to ask me for help.

It is my hope that more people become accepting of those who are trans or non-binary. Everyone deserves the same rights that I have, and it angers me when that isn't the case. I saw a meme a while back, and I wish I could find it, but it said something along the lines of, "The trans agenda is not to get killed." It's funny until you think about it a little bit, and then it's pretty horrifying.

No one is asking you to understand it. I don't think anyone could unless one is in that kind of situation. I don't understand it. But it's not mine to understand. It's mine to accept and to be welcoming and inclusive.

All right, all right. My misanthropy will surely recommence next week. Because have you seen the number of this column?

We're close.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #573: FUCK BLACK FRIDAY

 I know I'm in the minority on this, but fuck Black Friday. If you've been around me for a while, this does not shock you. But I absolutely despise the naked greed of people who fight over stupid shit for a deal that really, in the big picture, isn't all that much of a deal. So here is my annual reminder to not give in to our corporate overlords. DO NOT GO OUT TOMORROW.

Do not camp out overnight at some store's doors. Do not give back all that money you make to the corporate scumbags you made it from. Do not resort to violence for stuff that you don't need. Don't do any of it.

And here's my entreaty to the corporate overlords: don't make your employees work on this day. Give them a fucking break. Let them stay home with their families. Let them take a day to do what they want to do, not what you want them to do.

I only ever worked retail one year during which Black Friday happened. Spoiler alert: I didn't work that day. Sears had a mandate, from the tippy top, that every employee must work Black Friday. I did not show up. I made it very clear to them that when they hired me, I could only work weekends. This was a supplemental job for my real job, where I made real money.

When I showed up for work the following Saturday the acting boss of the shoes department asked me why I wasn't there the day before. I told him exactly why. This isn't my real job, and if I lose it because fuck Black Friday, then so be it. I didn't tell him that I actually had the day off on Friday because, in case I haven't said it enough, fuck Black Friday.

I didn't get fired. I think it's because my boss felt doomed at that job, himself. Maybe he saw that I still had hope to escape the clutches of Sears. Now that Sears is gone I wonder what happened to him. It must have been a terrible day for him. I genuinely feel bad for him.

So yeah. Don't go out tomorrow. If enough of us stop doing this, Black Friday will stop being a thing. Let's make that happen.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #310: BLACK FRIDAY

 I remember a long time back. I was working at a telecom company specializing in conferencing, be it audio, web or video. I'd been there a long time, but I needed more money. So I went to a Sears. I'm OK mentioning it by name since, well, yeah. Sears bit the big one. Even the flagship Oakbrook Mall location where I worked at (666 ft. above sea level, no shit, I got bored one day and checked it on my GPS) is nothing but dust and the scent of old sweat and tears.

But it was thriving back then. I got the worst fucking job of my life: I started selling shoes at Sears. Just for the holiday. But I worked out so well that they wanted to keep me. I hated the job more than anything I've ever done, but I was good at it. I sold more than anyone else, and I did the best at ordering shoes online, which they really counted because they wanted us to be good at that. Also, I won a ridiculous amount of prizes from that. But it sucked. I felt lower than whale shit, if that's still a phrase.

Here's the thing. When I got hired, I told them I could only work weekends. I had a job that paid a fuck-ton more on weekdays. Everyone agreed with me, and they let me practically work whenever I wanted to. I mean, not really, but close.

Yes, I hear you thinking, "Dude, you were Al Bundy?" Yeah, I've heard that maybe a thousand times.

I fucking hated that job, but it gave me enough money to survive a little while longer than I thought. My favorite part was getting up super early so I could put the correct labels on each shoe display. Why? Well, because during that time we were closed. THERE WERE NO FUCKING CUSTOMERS. When I was done, the doors opened for the customers, and I could just go home and drink myself into oblivion. I also loved checking stock for the same reason. I had no customer contact. If that sounds weird, think of this. The customer always believes they are right. And they are NOT. Unless they are Michael Douglas shooting the ceiling out of a fast food joint. If you ever want to see someone's true face, look at them when they are trying to buy something. If you are the retail worker you suddenly become the focus of their ire. Although I have my problems with the job, at least my immediate boss had my side during these unrelenting situations. Every other job threw me under the bus.

If you have ever worked in retail, you know the golden rule. On Black Friday, it's all hands on deck. But, you know, it was Friday. Not the weekend. Hence, I was at my primary job instead of that fucking hell hole.

So I came in on the following Saturday. My boss approached me as I was putting new boxes on the shelves and making sure that the smaller sizes were on top while the bigger sizes were at rock bottom. He said to me, "So John. I saw that you didn't come in yesterday. You did know that Black Friday requires all workers to come in, right?"

No, I didn't know, and I told him that.

"Yeah, we needed a lot of people yesterday, and you weren't here. You were on the schedule."

I said, "I told management from day one that I could only work weekends. I will never, under any circumstances, work a weekday. Because from Monday to Friday, I'm at my real job. You know, the one that actually pays my bills."

That made him very nervous. But he said that he would let his boss know, and everything would be all right. Sure enough, she accepted my reasoning. And that made me the happiest motherfucker in the world. Because fuck Black Friday.

Here's another thing you might find interesting. You know that conferencing job I mentioned earlier? All of a sudden we were being offered 12-hour weekend shifts. Where we barely had to do anything. We'd just pick up if someone called, and usually it was the wrong number. I had never seen the bridges so fucking clean. One day a friend of mine and I watched I Come in Peace while working. It was fucking great. Well, there was also the pervert who kept calling that one day. If I picked up, he hung up right away. But if my female partner that day answered (and I listened in, ready to step in if need be) he would say all kinds of fucked up sex shit. As I recall, this douche asked my coworker if she wanted to, eh, fuck it. You can guess, and I'd rather not talk about it.

As this company, there were several levels. If you were hired, you were on a temporary Level One. You had to prove yourself to actually get real Level One status. Then there was Level Two, which made more money, but you had to deal with more complex things. Then there was Senior, where you got the toughest calls, like investor relations calls. But then they invented a new level. I was one of a select few who were on the Strike Team. We handled the worst and craziest conferences. Some had star-studded security lists. Others were major wrestling companies run by a dude whose first name rhymes with "prints." And at one point I handled calls for celebrities. One of our customers was a guy who used to be one of the most loveable people in the world and who now is a thoroughly reviled sexual predator.

The point is, I started making a shit ton of money at my real job to the point where I was ready to jettison that awful Sears job. Joy!

I went in on my day off with an envelope containing my letter of resignation. Normally I'd give the customary two weeks, but I needed out of the job immediately. Also, having my first novel, Strip, published helped back me up. I found my immediate boss (his boss was always hard to find), and I handed him the envelope. He was very sad to see me go, since I outsold everyone except for him, but he accepted it. (He was not eligible for the online sales prize because he was management.) I decided to use my employee discount before that was gone, so I bought a bunch of stuff. As I did so, I ran into one of my shoes coworkers. I told her the good news, and her reaction was so ridiculously out of left field.

"You can't quit. They're not allowing anyone to quit."

Briefly I felt like I was in Bentley Little's The Store. I said to her, "Good luck getting me in for tomorrow's shift." Not allowing to quit. Seriously? And yet if I fucked up at the job, I'd be terminated on the spot. So, you know. Fuck Sears and fuck the shoes department. I really liked the people I worked with, even my immediate boss. But I was wasting time at that job. So fuck it. I took as many 12-hour shifts at my real job that I could.

That company no longer exists exactly. It was absorbed by a global corporation named after a character in an Orson Welles book. There was a movie, but as I understand it, it was never released. I found it very weird because the character in question was a horrible fucking person. Why name your company after that dude?

But then this company was absorbed by yet another global corporation, and so it still exists today. You know who doesn't exist anymore? That fucking shoe department. In fact, that entire store. It's gone, baby, gone. So fuck 'em.

I got off into the weeds on this one, but this has been weighing heavily on me, especially given the time of year. Long story short, fuck Black Friday.