Tales from the Underpaid: Drop Dead Ed
Elon Musk was not my boss, but he did fire me on the last day of June.
My job as a federal contractor for the Center for Medicare Services was eliminated as a cost-cutting measure (we added $4b/year to Medicare, just fyi) through an order from DOGE. So ends my latest day job.
So although he was not my boss, it is in his honor that this month’s newsletter is going to be about bad bosses.
I have previously written about my first boss, the one who cut himself with the deli slicer. He was the blueprint for all the bad bosses to follow: emotional, incompetent, reckless, and vengeful. Most of the worst examples I can think of were managers I had when I worked at Lowes and Home Depot.
At Lowes, I worked for an older white assistant manager named Jim. Jim had come to Lowe’s from Sears, and he had stepped down from a district position to work on the floor with the rest of us goons, wearing an apron and waving flags for forklift safety. Except Jim didn’t do spotting, or drive a forklift. He wouldn’t help customers find a screw or pick the correct potting soil. He refused to help load or sweep up a spill, and most of all he would not learn to use a register.
At both Lowes and Home Depot, everyone has a sign in to operate a till. Everyone is trained for it, because every customer, even the big commercial orders, go through a POS. Online orders, too. It was beneath none of us, but it was beneath Jim.
One night, after a run of customer complaints about Jim dodging them, refusing them, and handing them off, our district manager walked in at 9:55, five minutes before close. He patted Jim on the back and the two of them walked, laughing and talking, over to the garden dept. Jim kept two cashiers on the clock and let everyone else get into their closing routines.
When the district manager said he’d decided to buy a riding mower, Jim told him that was a great choice. He pulled someone off of the night crew to drop it with a forklift and walked his boss over to the cash wrap.
“Now remember to give him the employee discount,” Jim told me, as he gave me the tag to ring the mower up.
“Now Jim,” the district manager said, “I’d like you to ring me out.”
“But Meg here is all logged in and ready to go.”
“Meg,” the district manager said, “log out.”
I gleefully tapped the three-key macro to sign out and left the booth, gesturing grandly for Jim to take over. I knew what was about to happen. I watched with my great grandboss as Jim hunted and squinted and pecked and failed to even log into the cash drawer. The charade went on a long time, long enough for Jim to know he was in trouble. I did not offer to help.
After fifteen minutes in a back office, Jim was walked out, stripped of his apron, speaking to no one. I went home and slept like a baby.
My second bad boss was Ed at Home Depot (these are their real names; I don’t give a shit.) Ed liked to sneak up on cashiers and scare them, knowing that we were often worried about being robbed at gunpoint. He thought it was hilarious.
Once, after I rang up a three-cart load of paint and drop cloths and tape, he stood over me, panting like a bull and demanding I run a duplicate receipt for that transaction. I knew he thought he had caught me passing off merchandise without charging, and I could tell he wanted to fire me so bad. I said nothing. I ran the dupe and handed it over. His bloodhot eyes crawled down it, looking for my mistake.
He walked away without saying a word, dropping the dupe on the floor. I picked it up and threw it away. Months later, Ed decided that we should put up a bell people could ring when they got great customer service. I could tell he had just had a life-changing experience at Cold Stone, where unlike us they were allowed to accept tips. He said we should have a saying or a song to shout out when someone rang. He put up a suggestion box and told us the best one would win.
At a morning cashier huddle, he stuck his hands into the box and began to read them out loud. There were only three.
My Home Depot was a high-volume and high-theft store. Cashiering was a complicated task with a lot of throughput, tens of thousands of SKUs, and they wanted us watching for concealed products and theft while we did it. We also had to pitch the store credit card, process applications, and tell people they were denied. We still took checks. I personally had memorized about a hundred SKUs for popular products that often lacked a tag: railroad ties, common nails, sheets of plywood. Adding a song and dance to this was asinine and he knew it. He just liked to make his monkeys dance.
Suggestion one: “Hey hey! Ho ho! You got your shit, now it’s time to go!”
Suggestion two: “Nice caulk!”
Suggestion three: “Thanks a lot, Ed’s a twat!”
All of them were from me.
Ed took the fucking bell down.