Working Serious Undertime

(To help pay my expenses at uni, I get a job in a big shop. The hours are only four hours every Saturday. This is my first job. After 4 weeks, the manager calls me into the office.)

Manager: “I noticed that it’s taking you a really long time to get the hang of the tills.”

Me: *nervously* “Is it?”

Manager: “Well, there was that issue last week with the customer’s voucher, and before that there was the discount card.”

Me: “But it was the first time I’d ever done one of those. I couldn’t remember how to do it.”

Manager: “You’ve been here four weeks. You really should know how to do these things by now; I can’t believe it would take so long. Most of employees pick it up after their first week.”

Me: “First week? Like seven days?”

Manager: *patronising* “That would be a week, yes.”

Me: “But I’ve only been here for four days!”

Manager: “You’ve been here a month!”

Me: “Only on Saturday, for four hours! So that’s like four part-time days total or two full days, but spread out over a month. It’s a little harder to pick this up when I don’t spend much time here refreshing my memory.”

Manager: “…You can go.”

(She continued talking about how I was so slow for someone who’d been here ‘over a month,’ so eventually I left and got a job with more hours elsewhere. Picked up the tasks pretty quickly when I had frequent practice!)