EliteNinja
08-16-2005, 03:30 AM
webpage (http://forum.simplyhired.com/showthread.php?t=662)
This is a long one, so please forgive me. But I think it's worth it.
Back in the late 1990s for about 6 months, I managed a small electronics store. Toward the end, I was miserable. The boss was a greedy old ******* who collected sales tax without remitting it, misled customers, and was a general all around greaseball.
When he jerked around a very good friend of mine, and I found out about it, I decided to "quit"...sort of. I wasn't going to quit per se. I was going to get him to fire me after putting him through complete agony.
First off, I got myself another job, so that I only had to manage the electronics store on weekends. Since I was the only employee available during the week besides him, and he had to use the week to pick up products from his suppliers, keeping the store open for business was a bit of a problem. I also made sure to tell him on Sunday at closing time that I was starting the new job the next day.
"You already knew that, you ******."
"No I didn't. They called me last night. I would have told you today, but I never saw you." (Conveniently ignoring people is fun!)
"Well what are you doing?"
"I'm not supposed to tell. I signed a confidentiality agreement." (I did, but it had nothing to do with outlining the new job.)
"You lying ****. You have to tell me."
"Ummm...no I don't. There's no law requiring me to tell you where I work."
"What if I need you tomorrow?"
"What if your wife grows a set of balls and decides she wants to **** you in the ass? Not my problem."
"**** it, then, you're fired."
"Sweet. Good luck finding someone who knows how to work the register, because I know you don't. I was going to stop by on the way in and show whoever you managed to hire, but I guess I don't have to do that."
Note: The boss himself didn't even know how to work his own cash register.
About an hour later, I got a phone call at home.
"Yeah, you're not fired, you can still work the weekends, can you come in and show me how to work the register?"
"Okay, but I'll only have about an hour, tops."
The next morning, I took my sweet time getting up and getting into the shower, and for some reason the hot water in the shower wasn't working. I'm sure it had nothing to do with me not actually turning on the hot water faucet, though. So that put me about 30 minutes late, giving me about 30 minutes to explain to my boss how to work the register.
Naturally, at the end of the 30 minutes he still didn't have a clue. He could barely figure out to hit the "No Sale" button to open the thing, never mind balance it. So I made a point of digging out the manuals and saying "if you just read through these, it's how I learned how to use and program it." I knew full well he wouldn't.
He called me about 10 times that week, trying to figure difficult tasks out like how to add the sales tax in (there were buttons specifically labelled in a row for that) and how to count change. So I returned those calls when I officially got off work, at around midnight when I knew he was asleep, left a vague set of instructions on his voice mail, and never spoke to him.
I also made a phone call to a former girlfriend of mine, now an auditor for the Government of Canada, and let her know of the situation. Apparently that little phone call cost my boss somewhere in the neighbourhood of $300,000 in terms of a fine, as I found out 24 hours later. I didn't even know our government moved that fast, but they'd already been looking into the guy and my testimony clinched it.
So...my boss got desperate. He arranged at the last minute to send his two weekend workers up to an outdoor auto show with as much as they could carry in their vans. He told them just to sell it off for cash, as much as they could get, and bring it back to him.
But my boss made one very critical mistake: he asked me as a favour to email the installers the list of things they should take from suppliers, knowing that I knew the part number for every product in the store by heart. But those weren't the part numbers the installers got!
I sent up a lovely list of alternatives:
BJ4U
I69
SMD88
EMO77
GFY15
And many others, mixing in some legit parts along the way.
The coworkers knew exactly what I was up to, but they just laughed because they were quitting soon and took the list anyway, claiming the supplier didn't have most of the parts.
And, for a little icing on the cake...
Weekends at this store, like most retail stores, were much busier than weekdays. To make matters worse, the two other weekend coworkers weren't going to be there that weekend since my boss had shipped them up with next to sweet bugger all up to the auto show. So the plan was just him and I.
I stopped by the store after closing time on Friday night and jammed the outside door. The way the store alarm worked, you could only enter it from outside and not inside in order to disable the alarm. If you went through the inside door, the alarm would go off.
If you had the brains enough to call in advance to let the alarm company know you were going to set it off, it didn't count as a false alarm. Fortunately, as you've probably guessed by now, my boss didn't have said brains.
So...he panicked. He tried calling me, I'd conveniently forgotten to tell my boss that I'd taken a second job on weekends and that they wanted me to start that weekend.
Being a dutiful employee, and wanting to make a good first impression on my new boss, I showed up bright and early that Saturday morning ready to work.
In the meantime, my old boss was having a nightmare. My only regret was that I didn't see any of this go down, but two friends of mine who worked in neighbouring stores did. Here's what they told me:
My old boss couldn't get in through the inside door with his key. Apparently, the locks were different on the two doors, which I didn't even know...but hey, why complain? So he had to call building management to open the inside door for him with their master key set, which set off the alarm.
It took my old boss over a minute to disable the alarm because he was so flustered and pissed off, and in the meantime the alarm company had alerted the police. There were two squad cars that happened to be a minute away that barreled in to save the day, only to find numbnuts trying to disable his own alarm. Needless to say, the cops were pissed and gave him a ticket for making a public nuisance and disturbing the peace.
So, the store that was supposed to open at 8 that Saturday morning now was opening at a little after 10. And of course, he's the only one there. I'm nowhere to be found. So he's all by himself, he still doesn't know how to work his own register, and he's got customers looking to buy stuff, which he can't handle.
I got off work around 3:00 and went to go see my buddy in the adjacent store to get an update. At that point, my boss completely abandoned the six customers in his store and stormed out.
"Give me your f***ing key, *******."
"What key? I have about 20 on my keychain."
"The store key, *******. YOU'RE FIRED!"
"You can't fire me. I didn't do anything wrong."
"YOU DIDN'T SHOW UP FOR WORK. THAT MEANS YOU'RE FIRED!"
"I thought I had the day off. It was on the calendar."
"WE DON'T HAVE A CALENDAR IN HERE, *******!"
"Oh yeah. I guess I got it mixed up with my other job. Sorry about that. Well, I guess you'll need the key to open up tomorrow. So here you go. I'm taking a sick day."
For some reason, he never took it at that point.
Meanwhile, all of the customers had stopped shopping and were watching this go down. Most of them were killing themselves laughing. But one of them, some little old lady, asked if she could get a discount on something or other. So I decided to give her one.
"The price tag says $59, but you're such a good-looking young woman and I might want to take you out later, so $50, no tax."
"YOU CAN'T DO THAT, *******, YOU'RE FIRED!"
"I can't be fired yet. You haven't given me a pink slip."
"Does that mean I still get the discount?"
"NO, YOU OLD *****! I DON'T KNOW HOW THE HELL TO PUT A DISCOUNT INTO THE REGISTER SO YOU CAN'T [censored] HAVE ONE."
At this point, all of the other customers let him have it. So I stood back and let it happen. I sat in the adjacent store with my buddy watching it all go down. When it was all over with about 60 minutes later, I looked in the store and said, "damn, looks like you had a bad day. Most of the stock is still here."
"ARE YOU GONNA GIVE ME YOUR [censored] STORE KEY OR WHAT?"
"I dunno, I might still want to keep it and get my employee discount."
"JUST GIVE ME THE GODDAMN KEY BEFORE I CALL THE COPS AND HAVEYOU CHARGED WITH THEFT, *******."
Not that the threat bothered me, but I figured I'd had my fair share of fun. So I gave him the key. "Now where's my pink slip and severance pay?"
"GET THE **** OUT! GET OUT!" As I walked out the store back to my buddy's store, the old boss got the bright idea to wing the handset from a cordless phone on display at my head. He missed completely, but he learned the hard way that gravity and hard surfaces do wonderful things to cordless phone handsets.
This wasn't one of the cheap phones either. This phone cost him wholesale about $100, which is apparently all he took in that weekend (he normally took in between $15,000-$20,000). I guess that cut into my severance pay, because I never did get any, or my pink slip either.
Just to add even more injury to insult and injury, the store got robbed three months later. The thieves backed a truck into the outside doors of the store, which were two glass doors and cleaned the place out. The alarm had gone off, but because the false alarm from earlier was the 3rd false alarm that year, the alarm company didn't respond as per their company policy.
This is a long one, so please forgive me. But I think it's worth it.
Back in the late 1990s for about 6 months, I managed a small electronics store. Toward the end, I was miserable. The boss was a greedy old ******* who collected sales tax without remitting it, misled customers, and was a general all around greaseball.
When he jerked around a very good friend of mine, and I found out about it, I decided to "quit"...sort of. I wasn't going to quit per se. I was going to get him to fire me after putting him through complete agony.
First off, I got myself another job, so that I only had to manage the electronics store on weekends. Since I was the only employee available during the week besides him, and he had to use the week to pick up products from his suppliers, keeping the store open for business was a bit of a problem. I also made sure to tell him on Sunday at closing time that I was starting the new job the next day.
"You already knew that, you ******."
"No I didn't. They called me last night. I would have told you today, but I never saw you." (Conveniently ignoring people is fun!)
"Well what are you doing?"
"I'm not supposed to tell. I signed a confidentiality agreement." (I did, but it had nothing to do with outlining the new job.)
"You lying ****. You have to tell me."
"Ummm...no I don't. There's no law requiring me to tell you where I work."
"What if I need you tomorrow?"
"What if your wife grows a set of balls and decides she wants to **** you in the ass? Not my problem."
"**** it, then, you're fired."
"Sweet. Good luck finding someone who knows how to work the register, because I know you don't. I was going to stop by on the way in and show whoever you managed to hire, but I guess I don't have to do that."
Note: The boss himself didn't even know how to work his own cash register.
About an hour later, I got a phone call at home.
"Yeah, you're not fired, you can still work the weekends, can you come in and show me how to work the register?"
"Okay, but I'll only have about an hour, tops."
The next morning, I took my sweet time getting up and getting into the shower, and for some reason the hot water in the shower wasn't working. I'm sure it had nothing to do with me not actually turning on the hot water faucet, though. So that put me about 30 minutes late, giving me about 30 minutes to explain to my boss how to work the register.
Naturally, at the end of the 30 minutes he still didn't have a clue. He could barely figure out to hit the "No Sale" button to open the thing, never mind balance it. So I made a point of digging out the manuals and saying "if you just read through these, it's how I learned how to use and program it." I knew full well he wouldn't.
He called me about 10 times that week, trying to figure difficult tasks out like how to add the sales tax in (there were buttons specifically labelled in a row for that) and how to count change. So I returned those calls when I officially got off work, at around midnight when I knew he was asleep, left a vague set of instructions on his voice mail, and never spoke to him.
I also made a phone call to a former girlfriend of mine, now an auditor for the Government of Canada, and let her know of the situation. Apparently that little phone call cost my boss somewhere in the neighbourhood of $300,000 in terms of a fine, as I found out 24 hours later. I didn't even know our government moved that fast, but they'd already been looking into the guy and my testimony clinched it.
So...my boss got desperate. He arranged at the last minute to send his two weekend workers up to an outdoor auto show with as much as they could carry in their vans. He told them just to sell it off for cash, as much as they could get, and bring it back to him.
But my boss made one very critical mistake: he asked me as a favour to email the installers the list of things they should take from suppliers, knowing that I knew the part number for every product in the store by heart. But those weren't the part numbers the installers got!
I sent up a lovely list of alternatives:
BJ4U
I69
SMD88
EMO77
GFY15
And many others, mixing in some legit parts along the way.
The coworkers knew exactly what I was up to, but they just laughed because they were quitting soon and took the list anyway, claiming the supplier didn't have most of the parts.
And, for a little icing on the cake...
Weekends at this store, like most retail stores, were much busier than weekdays. To make matters worse, the two other weekend coworkers weren't going to be there that weekend since my boss had shipped them up with next to sweet bugger all up to the auto show. So the plan was just him and I.
I stopped by the store after closing time on Friday night and jammed the outside door. The way the store alarm worked, you could only enter it from outside and not inside in order to disable the alarm. If you went through the inside door, the alarm would go off.
If you had the brains enough to call in advance to let the alarm company know you were going to set it off, it didn't count as a false alarm. Fortunately, as you've probably guessed by now, my boss didn't have said brains.
So...he panicked. He tried calling me, I'd conveniently forgotten to tell my boss that I'd taken a second job on weekends and that they wanted me to start that weekend.
Being a dutiful employee, and wanting to make a good first impression on my new boss, I showed up bright and early that Saturday morning ready to work.
In the meantime, my old boss was having a nightmare. My only regret was that I didn't see any of this go down, but two friends of mine who worked in neighbouring stores did. Here's what they told me:
My old boss couldn't get in through the inside door with his key. Apparently, the locks were different on the two doors, which I didn't even know...but hey, why complain? So he had to call building management to open the inside door for him with their master key set, which set off the alarm.
It took my old boss over a minute to disable the alarm because he was so flustered and pissed off, and in the meantime the alarm company had alerted the police. There were two squad cars that happened to be a minute away that barreled in to save the day, only to find numbnuts trying to disable his own alarm. Needless to say, the cops were pissed and gave him a ticket for making a public nuisance and disturbing the peace.
So, the store that was supposed to open at 8 that Saturday morning now was opening at a little after 10. And of course, he's the only one there. I'm nowhere to be found. So he's all by himself, he still doesn't know how to work his own register, and he's got customers looking to buy stuff, which he can't handle.
I got off work around 3:00 and went to go see my buddy in the adjacent store to get an update. At that point, my boss completely abandoned the six customers in his store and stormed out.
"Give me your f***ing key, *******."
"What key? I have about 20 on my keychain."
"The store key, *******. YOU'RE FIRED!"
"You can't fire me. I didn't do anything wrong."
"YOU DIDN'T SHOW UP FOR WORK. THAT MEANS YOU'RE FIRED!"
"I thought I had the day off. It was on the calendar."
"WE DON'T HAVE A CALENDAR IN HERE, *******!"
"Oh yeah. I guess I got it mixed up with my other job. Sorry about that. Well, I guess you'll need the key to open up tomorrow. So here you go. I'm taking a sick day."
For some reason, he never took it at that point.
Meanwhile, all of the customers had stopped shopping and were watching this go down. Most of them were killing themselves laughing. But one of them, some little old lady, asked if she could get a discount on something or other. So I decided to give her one.
"The price tag says $59, but you're such a good-looking young woman and I might want to take you out later, so $50, no tax."
"YOU CAN'T DO THAT, *******, YOU'RE FIRED!"
"I can't be fired yet. You haven't given me a pink slip."
"Does that mean I still get the discount?"
"NO, YOU OLD *****! I DON'T KNOW HOW THE HELL TO PUT A DISCOUNT INTO THE REGISTER SO YOU CAN'T [censored] HAVE ONE."
At this point, all of the other customers let him have it. So I stood back and let it happen. I sat in the adjacent store with my buddy watching it all go down. When it was all over with about 60 minutes later, I looked in the store and said, "damn, looks like you had a bad day. Most of the stock is still here."
"ARE YOU GONNA GIVE ME YOUR [censored] STORE KEY OR WHAT?"
"I dunno, I might still want to keep it and get my employee discount."
"JUST GIVE ME THE GODDAMN KEY BEFORE I CALL THE COPS AND HAVEYOU CHARGED WITH THEFT, *******."
Not that the threat bothered me, but I figured I'd had my fair share of fun. So I gave him the key. "Now where's my pink slip and severance pay?"
"GET THE **** OUT! GET OUT!" As I walked out the store back to my buddy's store, the old boss got the bright idea to wing the handset from a cordless phone on display at my head. He missed completely, but he learned the hard way that gravity and hard surfaces do wonderful things to cordless phone handsets.
This wasn't one of the cheap phones either. This phone cost him wholesale about $100, which is apparently all he took in that weekend (he normally took in between $15,000-$20,000). I guess that cut into my severance pay, because I never did get any, or my pink slip either.
Just to add even more injury to insult and injury, the store got robbed three months later. The thieves backed a truck into the outside doors of the store, which were two glass doors and cleaned the place out. The alarm had gone off, but because the false alarm from earlier was the 3rd false alarm that year, the alarm company didn't respond as per their company policy.