At about 9:30 p.m. my boss calls to let us know that there’s been a string of robberies in the past few days. The perpetrator was a Caucasian male in black clothes who told the clerks he had a bomb hidden under his clothes; alternately, he would show them a butcher knife.
Good plan.
Now, I don’t actually tell my co-worker about this, because I don’t want to worry her, and what are the chances this goon is going to pick our store? Right? We’re as prepared as we always are. We have a selection of panic buttons, two phones, state-of-the-art security cameras, and we’re double-staffed.
Half of an hour later, this clown shuffles in wearing an outfit his big brother must not have wanted and insists he has a bomb hidden…somewhere. He flails around on an explosive Easter egg hunt inside his own pants, and while to us this just looks like public masturbation, he clearly thinks this indicates he has a Looney Tunes-sized case of TNT in his jockstrap.
The way he walks and talks sounds like he really hopes he’s the bad guy in a low-budget blaxploitation flick. If you’re going to use the M.F. word as punctuation, and you want me to be threatened by it, you better sound like you mean it at least as much as Samuel L. Jackson does. Especially when you have sweaty withdrawal skin, googly Cookie Monster eyes, and you’re hiding half of your face like an Old West bandit.
I think the poor robber was just trying to hide his messed up meth teeth.
Him: “I have a bomb! Give me all the money!”
Me: “No. You don’t. We already got a call about you.”
(This is the point where I suddenly realize my coworker ‘Tasha actually thinks there might be a bomb strapped to this nervous wreck’s genitals. Oops. Prooobably should have told her.)
He isn’t stunned for long, but his next brilliant move is to pull out his butcher knife… Which is still in the sheath, with two snaps holding it there. If I was the kind of idiot who refuses to give money to an armed robber (I’m only the kind of idiot who tells them they’re a liar), I could have made it to Miami and been sitting in a wicker chair sipping a freaking maitai by the time his shaky hands got that thing loose, and even if he tried to chase me, he would have tripped over his floppy pants and stabbed himself in his penis. (I don’t know how his junk managed to get out of our store in one piece.)
Also good plan.
Me, as I reach toward the button that opens the register: “Okay, I’ll give it to you. But the police are already on their way here. We hit the buttons.”
Him: “You’re [Redacted]suckers. [Redacted] this!”
He throws a plastic bag on the counter and storms out just as awkwardly as you’d expect from someone who is trying to walk inside of a camping tent. He was a two-second wait from getting several hundred dollars. And he left.
Robber: 0. Me and 'Tasha: Plastic bag.
In conclusion,
1. My retired police officer father is going to kill me when he finds out I sassed a robber after the stories he’s told me and
2. This guy is just lucky he didn’t spill anything on ‘Tasha:
I’ve never been trained as management. I’m learning by watching my boss. Who has ALSO never been trained as management. You’d think this was a recipe for disaster, but for some reason our store has the lowest turnover rate in the company. (Knock on wood!) Most of our employees have been here for four years or more, at a retail position where we routinely field more sexual harassment than a really hot prison guard. When and if our employees leave, they do so reluctantly, because they have to move or they’ve finished their degree.
While I’ve never been taught how to hire for a job, I was taught how to apply for a job while I was in high school. I learned that:
Your resumé should be as concise as possible. Managers are physically incapable of turning pages because they have giant, curved claws instead of fingers like normal humans.
You write in blue or black ink. Graphite will smudge on the manager’s wings and prevent it from lifting into the air properly.
You fill out every field. A manager’s CPU is confused by blank spaces in a query string.
You should dress slightly nicer than you would at the job. Managers should see you as a potential mate, but not a potential rival. Once you’re hired, you can dissuade them with the same bottled fox urine that gardeners use to keep away rabbits.
You never run from the interview. Managers will always pounce on a moving object and disembowel it with their powerful hind legs, even if it’s a Volkswagen or a tornado.
My manager Nicole is not a highly educated woman. She says things like, “volumptuous” and “would of,” and I tease her about it with all the ceaseless enery of a younger brother who found a juicy diary hidden under her mattress. But while Nicole isn’t highly educated, and that might cause some people not to take her seriously, she is by far one of the most competent human beings I’ve ever met.
When she hired a guy who filled out the application in pencil and wore blue jeans to his first and second interviews, I was understandably apprehensive, but he turned out to be great with customers, and just as good with the employees. He’s the kind of man who will drop what he’s doing to cover a shift or who brings coffee or little presents to the people sharing his shift. He even engages in low-stakes prank wars with me. (If you don’t know me well: pranks are my favorite social activity.)
Nicole wast taught in school just like I was, but I guess because she isn’t an evil, winged, predatory robot who has a deathly fear of fox urine, she has a different way of doing things. She recognizes that not everyone had the same opportunities in school. If they grew up in an area with poorly paid, poorly trained teachers, they might not have been properly warned about managers the way our more privileged applicants were. That doesn’t mean they’re less intelligent or less able to be personable and knowledgeable.
While I was weeding through the applications for really bad ones, my co-worker came up and pointed at how the applicant had included their references. “You’re not supposed to do that,” she said. “You’re supposed to say they’re available upon request.” She’s a very literal person, and it’s not surprising that she paid attention to what she was taught in school. But if she was doing the hiring, I wouldn’t be there. I wasn’t taught in school that managers are threatened by the proof that people respect you.
If you’re ever responsible for hiring someone, don’t let your CPU be confused by someone else’s search parameters. You’ll have less claws and disembowelings. And I’m sure you’ll find you can still fly.