I’m a cashier at a car dealership. I’ve seen a few cashiers come and go, but this is by far the worst cashier we’ve ever had. 

We recently hired the daughter of one of the technicians to work weekends. She was eighteen, which is the minimum age requirement, but it was not her first job. She started a month or two before she graduated high school, and she thought this would be a great job to have while she was in college. She spent a month training with the head cashier, and everything went well. That is until she got shifts by herself. 

[New Cashier] started to make mistakes, which is expected, but she didn’t seem to learn from them. The biggest issue was that she was not logging her transactions correctly or closing tickets correctly. If the head cashier tried to correct her, she still made the exact same mistakes. I even tried to show her the correct way to do things because we thought maybe hearing it in a different way would click in her brain. Nope.

Sundays are by far the worst day to work, simply because there is absolutely nothing to do. Parts and service are closed Sundays, but the sales department is open, so a cashier is needed. There might be one hour of work scattered throughout the eight-hour shift. The cashiers usually rotate who works on Sunday, but [New Cashier] absolutely refused to work on Sundays simply because she didn’t want to. This girl worked three days a week. The head cashier was furious because she works the most Sundays out of everybody, but the manager refused to make the new cashier work on Sundays.

The store closes at 9:00, but service and parts close at 7:00. Never once during training did [New Cashier] leave before 9:00. On one of her first shifts alone, she left around 7:30 because “No one was here.” When we looked at her stuff from the night before, nothing was closed out correctly. After that, we told her to start closing everything out at 8:00 so that at 9:00, she could leave. However, she refused to start her closing routine until right at 9:00. While it only takes me or the head cashier about twenty minutes to do the entire closing routine, it took her two hours. The sales managers were all mad because they couldn’t leave until she left and none of them live nearby, but no matter how many times we told her to start her closing routine earlier, she wouldn’t listen.

A lot of people will order parts and pay for them over the phone. When that happens, the cashier will put the customer’s receipt and their copy of the invoice in the small window that connects the two departments, and a parts worker will grab the invoice when the customer picks it up. One night, around 6:00, someone paid for a part over the phone. However, the customer did not come before the department closed at 7:00. [New Cashier] saw the invoice still in the window, grabbed it, and shredded it. When asked why, she said she assumed parts didn’t need it. The parts manager had to go up to accounting and make copies of the ticket and receipt they had so he had something to give to the customer.

The title clerk gives the cashiers tags a few times a week. If the customer is local, they will come to pick the tags up. However, if the customer lives far away, we will mail them to the customer. All tags come in a plastic sleeve, and the registration is in the sleeve with them. The title clerk gave [New Cashier] some tags for out-of-state customers one day as she was leaving. [New Cashier] had given out plenty of tags by this point, but this was the first time she was mailing tags to customers. She texted the head cashier, who told her to call the customers and verify the mailing addresses before making the shipping labels. I came in the next morning and found that all of the out-of-state tags had been mailed, but the registrations and plastic sleeves were in the trash can. Thankfully, the cleaning ladies hadn’t emptied the trash out yet, but I had to call the customers and explain that their registrations would be mailed out separately. We asked [New Cashier] why she hadn’t mailed the registrations, to which she said, “I didn’t think they were important.” Not once when giving out tags to people who picked them up did she not give them the registrations.

The cashiers are in charge of getting all of the scanning done. I can usually get it done or mostly done before the afternoon cashier comes in, but the rare time I can’t get it all done, the afternoon cashier is expected to finish it. [New Cashier] struggles with the scanning, and she doesn’t understand why she has to know it when I can just finish it the next day if I can’t get it all done. I even made step-by-step instructions for her, and step one is “open the program.” One day, I was busier than normal, and I barely had time to get everything unstapled and ready to scan. I had a doctor’s appointment that afternoon, and my boss said I could leave thirty minutes early. I told [New Cashier] that she’d have to get everything scanned in that evening. Absolutely nothing was scanned. She didn’t even try, so I had to finish that before I could start on the scanning for that day.

The last straw happened after [New Cashier] had been with us for three or four months, and my manager was debating putting her back into training for the rest of the summer. A customer had a service ticket that was about $4,500. The customer paid with a debit card, but the bank would only let the customer pay about $2,700 with that card and she would have to pay the remaining $1,800 another way. The credit card machine prompted [New Cashier] to accept the partial payment, and on the receipt it printed out, “Collected $2,700.00 Still owe $1,800.00”. [New Cashier] let the customer go. The customer agreed to pay the remaining balance, but it took her almost three weeks to do so.

[New Cashier] quit so she wouldn’t be fired.

In the 1980s, I worked for a naval architecture firm. We had a standard PBX phone system, where phone calls would be answered by our receptionist, and then she would manually forward the call to the employee.

We initially had a woman working full-time as the receptionist but eventually had a woman from a temp agency take the job. When the receptionist needed to take a lunch break, one of the department secretaries would go up front and answer the phones. If they weren’t available, our office manager (a woman) would take over the post.

And if she was also unavailable, some other professional-level (engineer or tech writer) woman would be asked to cover.

As I took care of the technical side of the phone system, I knew how to operate the front reception phone. One day, the office manager asked the female tech writer that sat near me to cover the lunch shift in reception. She was a bit overwhelmed, as she had an assignment that needed to be finished by close of business.

Me: “I could cover the front desk.”

Office Manager: “No, you can’t. Your salary is too high to cover that position.”

Me: “I make two dollars less per hour than [Female Tech Writer].”

Office Manager: *Sheepishly* “Oh.”

She walked off, and she ended up covering it herself.

What she couldn’t admit was that company policy was to have females answer the front phone. Men answering phones? We couldn’t have that!

In the 1980s and ‘90s, I worked as a computer programmer and systems analyst for a naval engineering firm. This was the era when PCs were first becoming major tools in office settings.

I saw a numeric contest in a magazine. I won’t get into the specifics, but I realized that I could write a computer program that would find the optimum answer that should allow me to win the contest. Unfortunately, I didn’t own a PC yet. I wrote the program on the PC I used in the office and planned to have it run overnight. Just in case, I had it run a small subset of the possibilities and extrapolated how long it’d take. I calculated 150 hours. Since this was a DOS computer, that would be the only program it could run. I was sure my boss wouldn’t let me tie up the computer for most of a week.

Then, I came up with a plan. In the same way that I ran the subset to find out the total run time, I split the task into thirds and then copied two of those to two other computers in my department. I then waited until late Friday to start them running, figuring they’d finish up around late Sunday. Then, I’d look at the results on Monday and send in my winning result.

Monday came, and I got my results. Later that day, I was called into my department chief’s office.

Department Chief: “I came in on Saturday to do some work and noticed that three of the computers in your department were still on. I was going to shut them off, but I wasn’t sure how, or if there was a reason they were on. What’s that about?”

Me: “I had a project that needed more computer time than my one computer could do without disruption.”

I didn’t mention that it was a personal project. He nodded and accepted my justification.

And no, I didn’t win the contest. There were many ties, so the magazine did a random draw from the winning entries.

When my daughter was an infant and toddler, I would often end up driving her around with me on errands, to her daycare, friends’ homes, etc. We lived in Northern Virginia (around Washington, DC), which has horrendous traffic. I often got frustrated when I got stuck in stupid back-ups. I wouldn’t swear but would mutter, “Geez”, “Go!”, or my favorite, “Any particular shade of green you’re waiting for?” when I got behind someone who didn’t respond quickly enough to a green light.

One day, I was behind several cars at a stop sign; the road we were on led onto a busy local highway. It was taking ten to thirty seconds per car to proceed since the highway was busy. I wasn’t particularly frustrated, knowing the situation. After about five stop-and-gos without getting to the stop sign, from the back seat, my daughter gave out a whiny, “Go!” just like I did when I was frustrated with traffic.

From that point on, I made an effort to keep my mutterings to myself.

Related:
Careful The Things You Say; Children Will Listen

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was stationed aboard a nuclear submarine. I was a reactor operator, meaning I got to babysit the nuclear reactor.

We had a new Engineer Officer come on board. The Engineer Officer is the one in charge of the whole engineering department. This particular engineer was a hard-charging, go-getting, take-no-prisoners kind of officer. He was bound and determined to make Admiral someday.

Shortly after taking over, he was wandering around the engine room, familiarizing himself with everything. One of our gauges had a tendency to stick and give an out-of-specification reading, but a rap with the knuckles would free it up and return it to spec. The engineer saw one of the operators rapping the indicator and Blew. His. Stack.

Engineer: “THIS IS NOT AN OLD TRACTOR ON GRANDPA’S F****** FARM! THIS IS A UNITED STATES NAVY NUCLEAR-POWERED SUBMARINE! We do NOT bang on equipment to make it work!”

He calmed down slightly.

Engineer: “I want to see a written troubleshooting and repair procedure on my desk tomorrow morning, with references to all appropriate equipment manuals and operating procedures.”

The next morning, the chief in charge of the division gave the Engineer Officer a single-page troubleshooting/repair procedure:

Procedure: “Step #1: In accordance with the manual, gently mechanically agitate the equipment. If the out-of-spec condition resolves, no further corrective action is necessary.”

The Engineer Officer thanked the chief and was a little less strident for the next few weeks.