Unfiltered Story #325664

The worst person I’ve ever worked with has got to be be Susanna. Susanna was notorious, so notorious I was warned about her my very first shift and she wasn’t even rostered on. The woman was practically part of the furniture at this store because she was one of the Old Ones.

The Old Ones was the nickname given to the employees retained when the store changed ownership and branding a few years prior to my arrival in the area. It was a huge change with the businesses involved being direct rivals, so retaining staff from the first company was a strange concept to me. It was a different kind of set up, but it was a complicated one too as the Old Ones were the only people in the entire store employed on contracts as a result. Everyone else who wasn’t management? Casuals. This made for a…tense few exchanges over the years that Susanna seemed to revel in. Most of the the other Old Ones despised her and the drama the differential employment status’ caused, Susanna lit up like a kid on Christmas when the drama started instead.

Adding to the complexity of her already strange employment status within the company, Susanna is special needs to a mild degree, but it doesn’t affect her ability to work. A fact she was quite proud of, and I’d be proud for her too on that front, if she actually achieved anything remotely closely related to “work” while on the clock…

Susanna’s version of work turned out to be things like half-filling the sink with cold water, adding extra detergents to make it look fuller, then dumping everything in and sort of…start running her hands back and forth through the water. Blantantly too, she was never even sneaky about it: half the time the cloth would still be hanging on it’s rack, in front of her face, while she played “Bathtime” with the cold water and suds mountains.

Some of her more, grating, work habits include, but don’t nearly encompass all, are:

– She never served customers apparently, and never when I was on shift with her. Instead pretending to have not noticed them even while staring blankly at them before they engaged in conversational attempts.
– She “couldn’t be trusted with the slicer machine” according to more than a few people.
– She was a serial chain smoker and would leave, without notice or permission, to go have a smoke whenever she wanted during her shift.
– If a friend or neighbour came into the store as a customer Susanna would dissapear to “assist them with their shopping”.

This last one isn’t a service we provided at the time, outside of the elderly and disabled, and it was less a policy than general human decency really, but before you applaud her for being a good friend/neighbour; she never did the same for other shoppers, was always gone for never less than an hour per event/per person who arrived, and once tried denying it to a counter staff member when confronted about it. While in the middle of actively doing it! And get this: the timing that this was done at was the POS, wherein Susanna was trying to give this non-blood acquaintance her, various, employee discounts (NOT ALLOWED) after having spent a whopping 2.5hrs “shopper assisting” with about half a dozen smoke breaks in between, as her acquaintance was also a chain smoker…

This event was almost completely covered by CCTV cameras inside the store itself, the shopping centre and carpark. Complaints were coming in from left and right as Susanna was the only person stationed at the deli for most of that time due to a sick call-out and a legally necessary break for the other deli member, who had stayed to cover the time it would take to replace the sick worker. Susanna hadn’t been anywhere near the deli in all that time, except to replenish her cigarette stocks periodically, and during one such trip she had outright ignored potential customers waiting expectantly when they saw her enter the deli area. Their bafflement is also captured on camera.

You might think this fiasco of a customer service nightmare finally got this woman fired. You would be wrong.

Remember that contract? And the additional addendums added to her’s specifically? Yeah the store manager couldn’t legally fire her, lay her off or make her take unpaid leave. Heck, no disciplinary actions could be taken without incurring a potential call from a legal team with a “please explain”. She probably still works there to this day because of it. Higher pay, less hours, no chance of negative repercussions in the workplace? Yeah she’ll still be there a while yet.

This woman was the absolute worst person I ever worked with. She was the human equivalent of a Drift Bucket. Not really going anywhere, getting in everything’s way, going wherever the whimsical tides took her instead of the shift schedule and utterly useless for anything inside a grocery store setting.

I sincerely hope you don’t encounter a Susanna in your work lives, but let’s be real here we all know one when we work in retail 😅 So instead I wish you luck.