Two Weeks Notice

My first job out of college was working at a retail electronics store in Houston, Texas.  It wasn’t exactly a dream job for someone that had just graduated with a degree in Computer Science, but since the market was flooded with people with similar majors the year before, I didn’t have a lot of options.  I was hired as a floor salesman, which basically meant I was supposed to wander around the floor and ask people if they needed help with anything.  This is a lofty goal when you don’t know anything yourself.  I was trained in software development, not the correct tool to use to crimp an RJ45 connector on Cat-5e cable.  But I learned, and learned quickly.  I was thrown in the ocean, and it was swim or drown.

This job was tough.  It was the only job I have ever quit after only two weeks of employment.  It wasn’t the hours, or having to learn to be extroverted, or even the hyper knowledge gain.  It was the manager of the store.  He was…to put it nicely…the south end of a northbound mule.  He was slick, oily, egotistical, entitled, and pompous.  In short, he was a salesman.  He was very good at getting people to buy things they didn’t need, but he had no business being in charge of other human beings.  But he craved power, and he spent every day lording what little he had over us.  Combined with my volatile temper and aversion to undeserved authority, this was a power keg waiting to explode.

And it did, two weeks in.  I had had enough of him bossing me around for no reason.  I’d no sooner get done moving entire sections of tools from one part of the store to another, then he’d tell me to put them back.  Why?  Just because he didn’t like to see me idle.  The final straw came when he told me to come in early one morning to do inventory.  It was just the two of us, but he decided that inventory was beneath him and refused to assist.  That was fine, I was used to that.  While he went to the kitchen to make himself some coffee, I was set to count stock on the register endcaps.  I was just finishing up the first one, when he burst out of the kitchen and asked me if I’d counted the hard drives yet.  I told him that I was still counting the end caps and would get to it when I was done.  He lost it.  He started yelling at me that I was taking too long.  I was losing it too, and through gritted teeth, I told him that I was only one person, and that I was doing the best I could.  This set him off again on some tirade about me being insubordinate, so I dropped my clipboard right there on the floor in the middle of the store.  I stomped over to the hard drives and started counting.  He started screaming for me to go pick up the clipboard and finish the end caps.  I stopped and stood in the aisle glaring at him.  I didn’t say a word, just stood there.  When he finally asked me what I was doing, I simply responded that I was waiting for him to make up his mind.  He yelled for me to finish the counts and then stormed off to his office. 

I did finish the counts, and I finished out my day.  Then, I went to his office and quit.  That night when I told my father, he got onto me for quitting a job before I had another one lined up.  He demanded that I go back to the store the next day, apologize, and ask for a second chance.  He didn’t really care about the inappropriate behavior of the manager or the emotional stress I had endured.  I was at fault, and I had to fix it.  And I did.

I went back to the store the next day, and I apologized to my manager for my behavior.  I ate crow for something that he had provoked while he sat there grinning in victory from the other side of the desk.  I spent every day of the next year looking for another job.  I shut my mouth, and I took everything he dished out; every nonsensical request, every moment of him taking credit for my hard work, every verbal beratement in front of customers…even being chewed out over the public intercom system across the store.  It was the first of many jobs that God would put me in to grow and mature me; to teach me both job skills and relationship skills.  I hated that man with every fiber of my being, but I learned a lot from him.  I learned the kind of person not to be, and I learned to appreciate a halfway decent manager when I see one.

Here I sit sixteen years and five jobs later, and he is still there…still stuck in that same dead-end job as a store manager for a retail electronics store.  His aspirations of moving up the corporate ladder and into upper management dashed, because he opened his big mouth to the wrong person (and sexually harassed the wrong person, if the rumors are to be believed).  I hope he’s mellowed out a lot and that he’s not still yelling at people in front of customers across the store.  Amazing that even after all of these years, the very memory of that still gets my blood boiling.