Give Them An Inch And You’ll Get A Mile (Long Line)

When I was in college, I worked evening shifts at a gas station. I typically worked at least four nights a week and would be the only employee on shift at that time because most of the night was too slow to warrant more than one staff member. That being said, there were some rushes, typically at the start of the shift when day-shifters got off work and came in for gas and about three-quarters of the way through my shift when overnight workers were stopping for coffee before heading into work.

As this shift was primarily worked by me, and I was a reliable employee, when we had new employees start who would work my nights off, it was my job to train them.

On one such occasion, after a couple of weeks of training [New Hire], my boss let me know that she wanted to make the transition to the new hire working alone. With this in mind, I was asked to essentially not work for the last evening of training her and to only observe and be available for questions. This allowed [New Hire] to get a feel for what the shift would be like alone while still having me as a safety net, and it let me see if she was really ready to work alone and report back to my boss.

The problem with this was that I really struggled with not jumping in to help. I could appreciate the benefit of just letting her figure it out unless there was a big issue, but in practice, I just wanted to take over because A: I wanted things done right, and B: it was really boring just observing.

Knowing this, my coworker who was on the shift before me and [New Hire] hung around to chat for a while after her shift and encourage me to let [New Hire] handle the initial rush. This is where we met the second problem with this plan: I still had to keep an eye on things, and there are only so many places to do that from, so I was still behind the counter near a second register with a closed sign up.

Customers understandably saw me there and expected me to assist and/or thought I was being a lazy “kid” just talking to my coworker. I tried to politely redirect people, letting them know my register was closed and the other employee would assist. I even said a couple of times that I was just training and there to answer questions as some snide remarks were made.

Finally, one customer decided he was going to make me do my job, I guess. He walked up to the register next to me, pushed the closed sign out of the way, and deposited his items on the counter. He didn’t say a single word but made it clear he was not moving.

Trying to not make a big deal of it, I just quickly checked him out in hopes I could put the sign back and keep directing people to [New Hire], but the damage was done. Most of the line moved over to my side, including people I had already directed to [New Hire].

I understand why people thought I should be running a register, but really, if a register is closed, you don’t get to decide to open it or decide what the employee’s job is at that given time.