Chapter 31: You're Not The Boss of Me

It’s one of those writing nights I can feel it. It’s not because my roommate has ditched out on me and chosen a guy over me. That doesn’t really bother me, I honestly could care less. I have just been feeling this way most of the day. The first hint to me is that I didn’t sing along with my music while driving today. That means I’m too contemplative to even open my mouth and sing along, which in turn just makes me feel like maybe I am depressed. I love singing along to my music.
At work today I was talking to my friend and while we were talking the thought came into my mind, “how many conversations could you really have about the same topic?” How many times can you repeat the same conversation, just not verbatim? You just beat the common interest into the ground until you are left sitting there wondering how many years you were friends based on weak conversations scattered here and there.
Which in turn just depressed me. Well, it just made me more contemplative which made it seem to those around me that I had quite possibly become depressed in a matter of seconds.
And while I’m thinking about repetitive conversations I am also trying to figure things out with this friend. I call him a friend but he is apparently the Non-friend. At least he stands by that. One summer when I was home from school we had a conversation about guys and girls being friends and he made the statement that guys and girls can’t be friends. This is a guy that I would spend a lot of time conversing with at work and I had assumed we were friends and I said, “Well we’re friends right?” and he said, “no”. His whole take on things is that guys and girls can’t be friends because one of them is always going to like the other one whether or not it is reciprocated. The whole sexual tension thing gets in the way of there ever being a good friendship. I of course stand on the other side of the argument because I have had friendships where I am not interested in the guy and the guy is certainly not interested in me. We are just friends. Years later I still stand by my side and he is standing by his side.
When I took the job as a trainer at the store I’m at he happened to be working there so we started to pick up conversations again. He came in once and ate lunch with me on my break. I bought him a birthday dessert (just one person…what does he need a whole cake for?). We have been talking constantly and yet he is still holding firm to the idea that we are not and can not be friends. I have called him socially inept (there is certainly more then one reason for that). Lately it’s been more than just conversation. We both really like this one show but I am always working when it comes on and every week he is asking if I saw it and he’s laughing about how funny it was and I never get to see it! So one night he says that he can e-mail the latest episode to me. So I give him my e-mail address and the next day I had gotten an e-mail message saying that he wasn’t able to do it but he would keep trying. Then he said that he had the episode on his computer he just needed to get his hands on a burner. A few weeks later he buys a burner and a day or two after that he has a DVD for me with a few episodes on it. Before I left work that day he had come back to work to drop off another DVD for me. Granted I haven’t been able to get either of them to work on my computer, but that’s not his problem, that’s mine. Needless to say I am left wondering, knowing his philosophy on how guys and girls can’t be friends, what does that make us? It leaves two options, he is either assuming that I am the one with feelings for him or he is the one with feelings for me. Because by his rules we can’t simply be friends.
Oh, and also, I randomly got an e-mail message from him the other day and he was saying how he liked my quotes page (a long while ago I was playing around with HTML and made a webpage and one of the links was a page with my favorite movie quotes). This means he must have googled my name on a random night and found that webpage. I haven’t even touched that page in over two years.
He told me the other day that he likes how I repeat the exact way he says something. Like when we are having one of our more dynamic conversations and I do the woman thing and use his own words against him. I figured it was a compliment and he told me later that it was, apparently he likes that. So today we were talking and he was telling me about a customer that I had been helping earlier. I was trying to train two individuals and a customer had asked me to help him a little bit with his shopping list. I figured it wouldn’t take long so I did it but it ended up taking half an hour, if not more. Non-friend came up and asked if he could help us find something and then asked if I had trainees. I told him I did and he said that he’d take over so I could get back to work. Then he just explained to the customer what was up. When we were talking he told me that the customer had said that he didn’t “want to hold that pretty girl up from doing her work.” I used this as an opportunity to pull out one of his phrases and I can’t remember how he used it, I just remember that he used it and said, “I’m surprised you didn’t say, ‘yeah she’s not ugly’”. I don’t even remember if he used the “not ugly” line on me or while telling me about some other girl that he saw somewhere but I felt like it was a good slot to throw in some of his words. It is just one of the many reasons I call him socially inept, with all the words he knows he can’t just says someone is pretty he’s got to say that they’re “not ugly”. Okay, so maybe I am beginning to like him a little bit. But that can’t end well, whenever I start to like someone I start to act differently around them and then before long I have pushed them away and out of my life just for good measure. I don’t want to end up with Non-friend actually being a non-friend. I doom myself to Buddy land, I realize this, but in some situations it is the only option. Because of this I refuse to bring up the contradiction in his theory about girls and boys not being able to be friends, because I’m afraid if I confront him about it then I will be given a truth that I am not actually prepared for and that in my immaturity will not handle well.
So I have all of that kind of on my mind. But that’s not it, there’s more in the mix leading to me being so pensive.
Power corrupts, and what bugs me the most is when it corrupts an individual whom you expected would be an ally and the one who would best understand your situation. I suppose for some people it may be easy to forget the unity of understanding and to forget what it was like for them when they were in your spot. I understand that this is bound to happen, I mean, it happens to each of us, or most of us I should say. As we grow from child to adult we forget how it was to honestly not know or comprehend certain things. But this process of forgetting takes years to get through. When we are throwing in time frames here what is a good adjustment period? Three months? I personally think that is too soon. You should still know what it was like. Yes, I’m talking about one person in particular and it happens to be the person whose job I took when she stepped down from it. She works in the same store with me and lately she has just been a bitch, and not just to me but to the people working in the store with her. It’s not an “I’m such a bitter individual” thing going on here, it’s more of a, “now I have the power you do what I say” thing. She is constantly coming up to me talking to me about new people and complaining about it, and of course blaming me for anything that they do. Some things are not training related, some people just make mistakes. No one is perfect, but when they make a mistake it does not mean that there is a line of responsibility to follow, a mistake is a mistake, and it is not due to bad training. I will be the first one to admit that I am not the world’s greatest trainer, but I’m not an idiot either! Lately she has even been telling me that I need to call certain people because they didn’t show up for work. Excuse me? Just because I trained them does not make me their mother and I almost even told her that today because she was pissing me off. She had me call this girl the other day even though she had already worked in the store for a day. I made the phone call and it turns out that the front end manager already knew what was going on and she hadn’t talked with him. None of them communicate with each other and for some reason it falls on me, it’s not my fault they can’t tell each other what is going on, it’s got nothing to do with me. Then today she was telling me that I had to call this other girl because she didn’t show up today. I guess I gave her a look and she said, “well, she’s still JSD right now because she hasn’t had her first day.” I simply told her that other stores don’t have that kind of opportunity to have me call their associates. Then she got an attitude and said that if there was going to be a tiff because of it then never mind. I told her there wasn’t a tiff; I would call her if she wanted me to, but only as a favor not because it was my responsibility. I call the girl who wasn’t even scheduled to come today because it’s her prom and she’s going to it. I ask her if she had been given a first day and she said that all she had was the schedule she had from the store for next week. So I told her to go ahead and just come on her first scheduled day. I went and told D-bag what the girl had said and then she acts like it’s my fault this girl wasn’t scheduled for an official first day! I just train the people, I don’t make their schedule, and I don’t call them if they don’t show up for work because it’s not training! She goes ahead and corrects it on the schedule, like I really give a damn. I’m sick and tired of looking like a fool because these guys can’t talk to each other and properly run their front end. ‘Cause guess what? I’m not a front end associate, I have nothing to do with the front end of that store, I help them out when I can bag groceries and get on register, but I am not theirs. I don’t belong to them and they can’t tell me what to do.
I don’t like being bossed around; it’s not one of my favorite things. The way that things are going I’m bound to just pull her aside and let her have it. I feel like reminding her that she had this same situation happen to her at a store that she used to train at, and she told me that she didn’t like when the manager there would boss her around like he was her manager, and I feel like I have to tell her that she’s not my manager and she needs to back off! How quickly can she forget that she was in my spot, she knows that these mistakes people make have nothing to do with her training, and she damn well knows that calling people because they didn’t come to work is not the trainer’s responsibility. She sugar coats it by saying that I’m a friendly voice. Guess what? I don’t care, what these new people need is to have their front end management make the call and get to know them because all I can do is get the information for them, if they have a problem with the information what the hell am I supposed to do? I don’t run their front end, I can’t tell people when to come and when to go. I’m not anyone’s manager. I am in charge of these people for a day or two and then that’s it.
D-bag isn’t even a manager, she’s what they call a “fill-in” and that means that she’s just a cashier who fills in as a manager when they need the extra help. But she’s pissing off people left and right and I’m certainly one of them on the list.
And you want to know something? It does kind of piss me off that my roommate said that she would be here tonight and that we were going to hang out and she has chosen to do something else and never bothered to even tell me about it! I am just fed up with people right now.
If that weren’t enough I have recently discovered that my family is more dysfunctional than I originally thought. As if a cousin who can be both Jack and Diane in one lifetime, an aunt and uncle who both served time in prison and family members on one side trying to kill their spouses weren’t enough evidence. It pretty much just boils down to my sister-in-law right now. And the fact that I had to say “right now” just makes me feel like this family of mine is always suffering in some form or another. The good news and the silver lining here is that my brother and his wife have finally decided on a house, they made an offer and they got it! So in less than a month they will be moving out of my parent’s house and left alone to their crumbling marriage and family. Don’t get me wrong, I do feel sorry for my brother, but his bed is made and the rest of the family shouldn’t have to continue to suffer because of it. I wish things were different for him, I still hope the best for him, but part of me hopes that his wife gets whacked on the head, gets amnesia and either leaves him or straightens up and starts to act like a woman who actually loves her family.
You know, with all this pent up anger I’m still reeling at why God would want someone like me in the Relief Society presidency. He sure does have a sick sense of humor doesn’t he? I think we would get along really well.