Looney Cashiers

So I realize that I have entirely way too many entries talking about my love life (or lack thereof, depending on how you look at it). I've justified this up until now by claiming that my life is boring. All I do is go to work and then come home and watch movies and television. But I realized today that my work life is actually rather wacky, so I thought I'd fill you all in on my crazy workplace.

So I'm a Head Cashier...when I'm lucky, I'm one of four. We basically are in charge of the cashiers, their registers, direct ship orders, the displays around the cash wrap, and general money stuff. It's not necessarily a difficult job...it's just that the managers and the company like to pile as much responsibility on us as possible, and not give us adequate time to complete it.

Plus, half my cashiers are looney.

Oh, the stories I could tell! I'll be good and not use real names, of course. So let me tell you about today. Today's main looney cashier is getting downright neurotic. Before I even get to today's incident, let me give you some background. First off, every time she's given a register drawer to count, she opens up EVERY SINGLE COIN ROLL, regardless of how much change is in each till cup to begin with. After she ended her register shift, I balanced out her drawer and then took it up front and used it as my drawer. I didn't open any more change and I actually rang more than usual. But at the end of the night, I still had almost $1.50 in LOOSE PENNIES, not to mention far too many nickels and dimes. (I managed to get rid of a bunch of quarters.)

It doesn't end there though. I think she tends to be overly cautious. I want my cashiers to ask questions if they don't know how to do something or don't remember, but some of them, should know better. This girl was originally getting trained to do all this stuff last year. Her codes still work in the register, so technically, I don't have to authorize anything. This implies that she should be able to do the regular stuff. But she has no initiative. She doesn't seem to retain any knowledge of the registers. She's soooo frustrating.

And then today (or really, yesterday...Thursday, that is), she was up at a register. Part of the front fell off on two registers, one of them being hers. She decided that she couldn't stay on that register. Let me just explain that it was like a vent cover or something minor. I was on the other register...I barely even noticed the missing piece. Someone else had to point it out to me.

Anyway, so this neurotic employee told the newest Head Cashier that she needed to be put on a different register, because she wasn't comfortable staying at this one. Well, this H.C. wasn't sure about how to do this. She came across me and I explained how to do it. But when this H.C. went up front, popped open the cashier's drawer, and asked her which register she'd prefer to use, the cashier suddenly refused to move, and actually refused to ring. She was determined to find one of the managers about it, specifically, the one who was ringing in the Cafe at the time. She refused to ring at all! And she still had 2 1/2 hours left on registers!

She was told that for the remainder of her shift, if she wasn't gonna ring, then she needed to clock out because that's the one place we needed her for the time being. She ended up clocking out...leaving me with just the blind and deaf dwarf (not really a dwarf, but really short)...who of course bitched and moaned that she wasn't out of the store until about 5:07pm. (She was scheduled 'til 5:00pm.) But I'll save her for another day's entry...

So there you have it, an example of the craziness I work with. It only gets better... :-)