#bookstoreproblems

and here is why.

Our Event Coordinator- Tony- is an Italian Man.

Yes. That kind of Italian Man. He's blatantly sexist, and obsessed with how much money he makes for the store via corporate or school orders. If Tony makes less than a couple thousand dollars when he's working, he's pissy. Now that you know this, let us move on to the next part of the story.

Tony gets a call from some woman representing someone. This someone wants one thousand albums. Tony assures this woman working for this someone that he can get one thousand albums, in a timely manner, and will put his 'best people' on it.

By 'best people' he means the music department.

If you've never been to a Barnes and Noble Music Department, let me describe it to you. It is, in essence, a tiny Barnes and Noble in and of itself. All the returns, the cleaning, the shifting around that happens on the bookfloor, happens in the music department. With one ginormous difference.

There is one person who works the morning shift, and one person who works the night shift. That one employee is responsible for the entire department. Sometimes, if you're lucky, there will be a midshift person to help, but mostly, it's a one man ship.

Your job, as the only person in the music department, is to check out customers, find product for customers, sort daily shipment- always four or more boxes of product that go everywhere- shelve daily shipment, zone each section to be sure that everything is neat and clean, help customers over the phone, remember what's playing in the overhead CD player, and in general keep the place from looking like shit.

I am the closing shifter in the music department. It's because I have open availability, though really I'd like to think it's because I'm better at dealing with the late nighters and I'm useful during the clean up- which is eight of us employees straightening a three level store. Anyway.

I'm working and this woman comes in with her thousand album list. She talks to me as though I understand what it is she's doing and spends the next four hours hunting down CDs. Meanwhile, I'm dealing with everything else in the music department and trying to pull for changeover, which is the monthly day of hell in which all of our displays change. It's happening next week.

At the end of her four hours, she comes to me and asks if she can make a note for the person who will 'continue' tomorrow. I say sure.

and this is when I learn that our first shifter- my pseudo-manager- is expected to pull the rest of the CDs on this massive list that we have in stock, and order the rest. The woman pulled two hundred or so CDs. There are over seven hundred left to go, and we definitely don't carry some of them.

She leaves. I get on the horn with my manager, then the store's manager. We decide we're going to murder Tony.

Not only did he make an impossible promise to this woman, but he didn't clear it with us at all before he did it, nor did he offer to keep us in the loop. Nobody knew- not the manager, not my pseudomanager, no one else who works in the music department was aware of this.

This task would be possible only if the music department was empty the entire day and we had a first and a midshifter. There won't be a midshifter. The store doesn't want to pay us overtime. I am keeping my phone off tomorrow just in case Tony tries to goad the manager on duty into calling for backup because fuck if I'm going to let that bastard drag me in on a day off so that he can ring up another thousand to three thousand dollars of product.