Did you get the job you wanted only to find that your co-workers are a nightmare to be around? Spare a thought for David Parker.
Listen to the story as it was told at The Watercooler storytelling night or read on.
I kind of stumbled into a job working in a shop. I was looking for something part-time and stress-free, but it very quickly became full-time and I started to see there was some big problems with how the business was being run and the staff were being treated. Plus, the pay was horribly low.
But none of those things even chart in my top ten list of reasons why I grew to hate being at the shop. The best days were when I got to work with my favourite selection of staff, like Tuesdays with just Dave and myself, or over school holidays when some of the weekend staff would pick up some extra hours. Maybe with the right selection of people I'd have never left. But you don't get to choose who you work with.
Just when I'd found my place and was feeling comfortable, Craig started work. We were very different people. I like Gilmore Girls, making gingerbread houses, watching romantic comedies, and at the time almost exclusively listened to what I would've referred to as ‘indie music’. Craig liked Avenged Sevenfold, and he liked them so much, he got their signatures tattooed on his arm.
For those who have been fortunate enough to have not yet heard of Avenged Sevenfold, they are a band and their members have names like Synyster Gates, Zacky Vengence and M. Shadows. Craig took a week off work to stalk them around Auckland and show them his tattoos. Apparently when he found them they were 'stoked', as I'm sure I would be if someone tattooed their body with my signature.
I dreaded Mondays, the one day a week when it was just Craig and I. We barely spoke but when we did he constantly talked down to me. When he was telling me how to do my job my one petty solace was that every month I consistently outsold him.
He was the kind of guy that if I were talking to an attractive woman he'd wink and lick his lips suggestively at me behind her back.
It was probably around this time that I started feeling a little bit out of place around a few of the other staff members, in particular the two managers of the shop. Most of the time they seemed pretty great, but I can barely remember a conversation that didn't involve sex or the casual objectification of women. Andrew was the manager that dealt with my side of the store. He was the kind of guy that if I were talking to an attractive woman he'd wink and lick his lips suggestively at me behind her back. Most of the time his jokes were in good humour and maybe I was a little sensitive, but often I'd feel quite uncomfortable.
There was an old wooden office desk in the dark room behind the counter that was full of Andrew’s stuff. You know just regular things you keep at work; a selection of clean shirts, old papers, a pack of cards, some condoms and a large pile of a foreign currency. Well foreign to me anyway. It was Mermaids’ dollars. Apparently strip clubs have funny money!
When he found out I hadn't been to a strip club before, and had no intention of going, his immediate reaction was, "When's your birthday?"
"Oh I don't want to go thanks."
"Dave, when’s your birthday?"
"Uhh next year?"
"Shit, that's no good. Ok this Friday, we're going to a strip club."
"Uhh no thanks."
"But Dave at a strip club you get to do this…"
He called over Craig who'd been very enthusiastic about the outing. He then had him act as a stripper, and having collected the Mermaids’ dollars from his desk, proceeded to rub them over Craig while he gyrated around an imaginary pole. It wasn't pretty. I awkwardly laughed it off and left to another part of the store.
The two managers left on somewhat bad terms a year after I'd been working at the shop. They'd been running a hire company on the side using products that they'd bought from the shop. They'd even been employing myself and a few other staff members. To me it all seemed above board, but when upper management found out they weren't happy.
Eventually they went to the head office for a meeting. By the end of the day I had a call from Andrew to say they had quit and would be starting a competing store. He asked if I could clear the contents of his desk and bring them to a location down the road. I thought he was overreacting, but minutes later I had a phone call from Dan, the retail manager for the country, telling me to not let them back into the shop and not to communicate with them.
I shadily met Andrew after work that day in a car park by a coffee shop. I'd stashed the contents of his desk into a bag from our store and along with the rest of his things was, of course, the comically large stack of Mermaids’ money. I didn't count it, but I must've been smuggling almost $1000 in aquatic currency.
By this point I'd lost my patience with Craig and we were at an all-out passive aggressive war. It was really quite petty. I was sick of him changing the computer backgrounds to fake inspirational posters that he thought were funny, so I decided to change it to a photo of him from his celebrity stalking MySpace page. He was actually quite successful and had a large collection of photos on the page and I wasn't sure whether to be impressed or concerned.
I was sick of him changing the computer backgrounds to fake inspirational posters that he thought were funny, so I decided to change it to a photo of him from his celebrity stalking MySpace page.
I found a photo of him outside a hotel with a particularly startled looking bearded man from some dreadful band and added the caption, "Celebrity stalkers, it's so great to have a super fan show up outside your hotel." I made it the desktop backgrounds for all of the computers before I left work that day.
The next morning I got in and every computer background had been changed before the doors even opened. Craig didn't say anything. I changed them all back. 20 minutes later they were all gone again. Craig still hadn't said anything. I thought he'd see the funny side, but he was being a bad sport and ashamedly so was I. I changed them again. When he found it the third time he looked up at me and I knew I had pushed enough.
After the two managers left we split most of their roles between us, and seeing as we'd managed to scrape by so far, a new manager was never appointed. Instead Dan, the retail manager for all of the stores in the country, moved his office in upstairs and continued to ignore us.
One of the few times I'd met him before was at an annual managers meeting where the managers from stores around the country came for a day of meetings and were afterwards taken out for dinner by Dan. They'd flown up from Christchurch, Dunedin and Wellington and had spent the whole day in meetings with barely a break. I'd hung around late to close up the shop and Dan invited me along. We were going to some expensive restaurant by the Sky Tower, I can't remember the name of the place but it was exactly the sort of place you'd take a group of businessmen for a business dinner. I jumped at the chance. This was karma. I was going to eat the pay rise I was due!
When we arrived, Dan took a look inside and said, “oh it’s too busy.” And despite the list of recommendations we gave, he made out that the only viable option was Denny’s. Greg, one of my two managers at the time, was furious. As was I. I wanted to get business drunk on expensive business wines and eat business venison or quail or whatever it is that you eat at a business meal. While I would be happy to drunkenly eat curly fries at Denny's in the small hours of the morning, this wasn't the appropriate occasion. Greg and I went for a beer, but drank up quickly, made our excuses and we left what would have undoubtedly been an awkward and miserable dinner.
I wanted to get business drunk on expensive business wines and eat business venison or quail or whatever it is that you eat at a business meal.
I don't have enough time to go into Joe, but I did like him. He used to work at one of the other Auckland shops and we were about the same age and got on quite well. He ended up quitting and working for a competitor. It was probably only about six months after he'd quit that word got around that his newest employer had taken him to court.
There is an article from 2009 that says he, “appeared in court last month facing 12 counts of theft from his employer between June 2008 and February this year. More than 1000 items of equipment, with an estimated value of more than $300,000, were recovered in Auckland, New Plymouth and Nelson, according to court documents.” I never saw Joe again.
At some point the recession hit and my job went from helping people find what they needed to just find someone and sell them something. Dan was understandably stressed out. He would often just aimlessly yell at us “sell some things boys!” through the empty store.
I'd avoided the Christmas party toward the end of that year because by that time there was hardly anyone I could bear to make small talk with. Well no one that was going to the Christmas party anyway - we'd all made up excuses to not go.
Dan showed up to work the next day reeking of alcohol. He waltzed in with a bag of pies, sausage rolls and chocolate bars and made us take one. I didn't really want one, but he forced a sausage roll into my hands and demanded that we eat in front of him. After a few bites he went upstairs to his office and returned with a phonebook. He slammed it down on the counter in front of me and told me to “start calling.” “Who?” I asked. “Everyone. Start at the As and finish at the Zs. Call people and sell things.” I told him I wasn't going to do that. He got angrier and said he was coming back in 10 minutes and he expected us to be calling. We didn't see him for another couple of hours. He was asleep in his office. None of us knew what to do. We waited it out and eventually he went home with a headache.
I could go on and on. Looking back now, it’s amazing that one chain of shops could attract so many characters. I haven't even been able to touch on Smelly Jeff, or Ivan who told me my Christmas hat was “gay” and asked if I wanted to fight, or the countless hours I'd be stuck on the phone with boring Neil, or the manager who gave me a lift home but not before stopping and calling a sex worker over to my car window just to watch me squirm... I think you get the point.
After about two years I was fed up. I was already busy with recording and producing music and thought I'd try and see if I could be self-employed for a while. Five years later I still had the occasional nightmare that I was back at the store again.
This story was originally told at The Watercooler, a monthly storytelling night held at The Basement Theatre. If you have a story to tell email thewatercoolernz@gmail.com or hit them up on Twitter or Facebook.
Illustration: Kerry Ann Lee
This content is brought to you with funding support from New Zealand On Air.
