Mr. Regional-Manager-Guy-With-the-Pencil-Moustache-and-Douchy-Ed-Hardy-Shirt's Motivational Speech
Thursday, November 26, 2009 I was in a shopping mall recently, picking over Hickory Farms cheeseballs, which are a terrible weakness of mine. I call it terrible, because one mound of that soft, cheesy goodness on a cracker invariably turns into many more mounds on many more crackers until the goo in my stomach threatens mutiny.
Most cheeseballs aside, though, there was what seemed to be a regional manager talking to his new store manager out in middle of the mall only a couple of feet from me, and the regional manager was giving the store manager what I am sure he might have thought was a motivational talk, but it kind of made me want to kick his knees out from under him. The store manager, a young woman who could not have been more than twenty-one, listened quietly and, I can only assume, wanted to do the same thing to him that I did.
I was so inspired by my witness of such exquisite retail hell that I wrote down what I heard on a piece of scrap paper on top of a Hickory Farms gift box while I eavesdropped. My training in the ancient art of shorthand comes in handy now and again:
Mr. Regional-Manager-Guy-With-the-Pencil-Moustache-and-Douchy-Ed-Hardy-Shirt's Motivational Speech
There will be times when I'll hold your hand, but there will also be times when I'll hold your head under water, stand on your neck [mimics standing on a person's neck with his right foot], and you'll be sputtering for air, but I'll still hold you under until you know how to ask for help, even if you're grabbing at my leg for me to save you, because that's why Julie failed, because she tried to fix things herself.
You will have days when you think that you don't have what it takes to do this job, and you might not, most people don't, and you'll have days when you think I'm a bastard, and I can be a bastard, but it's for your own good, because you have to learn that I am right.
If you want help, though, you'll have to ask for that help before January, because come January, I won't be risking my life driving on black ice on the highway in Saskatchewan. I might fly, but I won't risk wrecking my BMW to solve problems you've created.
You got that? It's up to you.
I betcha Mr. Regional-Manager-Guy-With-the-Pencil-Moustache-and-Douchy-Ed-Hardy-Shirt is popular with all the ladies.
I had a manager once way back when I worked in fast food who sidled up to me while I made salads one afternoon and told me that his body was completely hairless from the neck down and did not sweat. He also informed me that this meant he was "hairless and soft like a newborn baby all over", and all he ever had to do deodorant-wise was pat himself down with baby powder. Although that body-wrackingly shudder-worthy moment was on a completely different level altogether than Mr. Regional-Manager-Guy-With-the-Pencil-Moustache-and-Douchy-Ed-Hardy-Shirt's totalitarian dictatorship management style, I can assure you that it was likely no more enjoyable.
Hit me with your favourite manager stories in the comments and entertain me while I power through my last 15,000 words for NaNoWriMo. Please and thank you.
Reader Comments (9)
I'm 18, a college dropout, with a job selling pool cues, pots and pans, and velour jogging suits to people in parking lots. Joined some of the gang at a club for a drink. Mr. Manager is telling me about the boat he lives on. We decide to go to my place for a drink of sweet vermouth (ugh). I excuse myself to go to the bathroom and when I come out he's in my BED, NAKED, his red-haired freckly 30-ish fat body clearly visible. I told him to get his clothes on and leave, and I never went back to the job. Too embarrassed.
I don't have any stories for you, but this cracked me up.
Regional managers. Sigh. My father had some doozies.
My last manager, a director from a US company, a female in the boys club-I have stories. But she used to yell at me over the phone and call me stupid, and I'd cry at work.
And then she'd wonder why my work suffered and was never done.
Oh my god. Fuckwit! GET OFF MY NECK!
Well, my first job was with a family business. The dad / boss told me he only hired women because they sold better. He also told me I had beautiful eyes. And then he referred to us all as his angels. But then he fired me a few years later for stealing. He cried while he fired me, because I was like family. It wasn't me who stole the hundreds of dollars - it was another Angel, the one with the new truck and the purebred puppy.
Oh yes, and it was a cheese shop, so we were "cheese angels." (We didn't sell hickory farms cheese, though.)
Go go nanowrimo!
Big box bookstore...I was ’written up’ because I came back from a publisher’s author event (I was a regional marketing manager) acting just a little to ’animated’ and so must have been drunk! These events did serve wine--in all honesty I did have ONE small glass--and this same regional manager hadn’t had a problem in the past with the social drinking aspect of the job...I had seen her having more than one glass of wine at similar events...could it have been because this was a large North American publishing house with some really cool authors and SHE HADN’T BEEN INVITED? I was too classy to mention this fact but I did tell her she ’obviously didn’t know me because ’animated’ is just how I usually roll....this was just the tip of the problems I had with this job. She was one reason that women bosses get such a bad rep.
Ok, I am going to be anon but this is your pal Sb...
I could talk about my ex-boss Lena all day. She was so lazy, so stupid, so horrible...For instance...her husband had a rare form of life-threatening cancer. For some reason he loved her. But she had a crush on my co-worker Matt, who was 15 years her junior. During our weekly meetings, she would gaze at Matt with lovey eyes to the point it was just gross. I mean, way obvious.
One day she said "If anything should happen to Al (her husband with cancer) I think I would be JUST FINE" (looking into Matt's eyes. BTW Matt despised her).
Another time, we were all having a big conference call with important people. The call started at 1 pm. We could see her out the window of our offices, sitting in her truck reading. The call was about to start and she was still out there. We all got on the call and the Vice President said "Why isn't Lena here? She needs to be here!" We made vague excuses.
Finally Lena arrived 15 minutes late, long after the VP had ended the call. Lena said "OMG traffic was so bad." My co-worker quipped "Yeah, a real parking lot, huh?"
I don't have any of my own, but a friend of mine who's a retail store manager says his district manager is so erratic that he'll do things like call the store, yell at him about something, realize he's called the wrong store and just hang up. Once he chewed out my friend for not being on a morning conference call even though they'd had a fairly lengthy back-and-forth conversation DURING that very call.
I had a boss once that everyone called "The Maneater." Now, that particular nickname is not unique, but I will go so far as to say this lady was one of a kind.
The place I worked is dived up into sections and in my section there only ever seemed to be girls working. The reason behind this was probably my boss' compulsive stalking of any male assigned to our section. She would shadow him and take every opportunity to tear him down. They would only last a couple of days and we'd never see them again...
Ugh, people can take their management positions way too seriously sometimes. How the hell does one end up like that and maintain any sense of, I don't know, a right to exist.