What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

Current song stuck in my head: Fake Wings from .hack//Sign

Today was busy. And frustrating. But mostly frustrating. Here's why.

For the first two hours, I ran from register to register, taking over for other cashiers when they took their breaks. No big deal, at least not until this afternoon. At one o'clock, I was sent to register 5.

*Insert groan here*

Register 5 is the busiest register in the store. It's the first full-service check-out past the self-checks. Since so many people hate the self-checks, they walk straight to five. So I had a line all day long. Making matter worse? I didn't have functional equipment. My PIN pad wasn't working; it wouldn't read any credit or debit cards. So the customers would run their cards multiple times, get frustrated and I'd have to slide the card through the magnetic reader on my side of the register. A transaction that should have been completed in under a minute took at least three and a half minutes. It doesn't sound like a long time but to a waiting customer it's an eternity. It felt even longer to me.

Yeah, I was frustrated, to put it mildly. But it gets even better.

The CSMs know that our PIN pad is faulty on register 5. Our store manager does not. Why? The CSMs haven't told him.

There is a total lack of communication in my store and it is now affecting my job. Register 5 needs to be fixed immediately but our manager doesn't have a clue about it. No one's told him. I'm also willing to bet that he doesn't know about the other malfunctioning registers in the store, like number 16 which doesn't have a working stylus. I'm frustrated, the customers get angry and nothing is being done about it.

And unfortunately, unlike so many others who work in my store, I actually give a damn. I want things to get better, or at least be somewhat bearable in the building. I'm sick of it, sick of the utter lack of communication, sick of the faulty PIN pads, sick of management being so clueless about how bad things really are there. I come home from work so irritated that I have to spend an hour upstairs with the cat on my lap to calm myself down. It shouldn't be this way, but until a few other employees actually start caring, things won't change.

And that honestly depresses the hell out of me. But it doesn't surprise me in the least.

--Weasel, "I'm tired, frustrated and trying not to slam my head into a wall. Wish me luck."