So, now we’re hitting a critical time where he is reaching breaks 30 minutes after they were scheduled. This is very bad, and not something that I can let goes on. I average a count out at about 5 minutes each assuming there are not variances, and I know that I can get these breaks back on track if I handle them myself. We also have an enormous amount of till bags that need to be handed in so the tellers can get a jump on them. We are at one of the first stands outside of the backstage area, about 5 feet from the entrance. This is important. We exit the stand, Gabe with his cart, and I tell Gabe to take the bags up, and I will go to his breaks. I stress that I want him to eat quickly while he’s up there, and then radio me for a meet up. There is literally nowhere between the stand we were just in that he can get lost, so I feel confident that there won’t be any issues.
I get the breaks back under control, but I hear Gabe responding to radio calls with absolutely zero “radio etiquette”. He is talking about money openly over the radio, not using 10-codes, and being kind of an asshole. I get a call from Roger asking me to teach him the etiquette. I’m frustrated, because not 10 minutes earlier I had reviewed this with Gabe, and had given him a handwritten notecard with everything I could think of regarding how to use a radio properly. Ok, well, I won’t be able to say that I looked like a baller trainer, but maybe I can still salvage the day.
Gabe somehow gets it into his head that I am a supervisor, and pages me by the supervisor’s number. Well, not exactly. We have unit numbers that break down by the tens. 170 is a supervisor, for instance, and as a lead working in their area I would be either 174, 175, or 176. 160 is the area manager, and above that we are not cleared to call. I had told gabe to page me with his own unit number “176 to 176” but he started paging 179, a number that does not exist. I don’t know where he got it, and his notecard indicates what numbers to call for whoever he wants. This might seem like I’m getting pissy over something that isn’t necessarily clear-cut, but I gave Gabe a lot of leeway based on my own trouble learning to use the radio properly. This kid just didn’t care, even after three or four people told him the number didn’t exist. Eventually, I just started responding to it, while the area manager shook his head and laughed.
Gabe and I meet up in a stand with a cashier that is from Jamaica. I’m counting her out, talking to Gabe about the process, still trying to do my best and teach him. I still think there’s hope for him, and even though he won’t respond to me, I still think it’s just his nerves and try not to hold it against him. The cashier is also talking to me, asking if I like working as a trainer, and I’m honest about being pretty stoked. Then Gabe just… just fucking pulls a Gabe. I’m filling out the CTS, and I hear him say to her, “You talk weird. Are you from Africa?”
I just slowly look up from the paperwork, and stare. I know I need to say something, but I don’t know what. I’m frozen The cashier seems to feel similarly.
“Do you not know a Jamaican accent?” She asks.
“I’ve never met someone from somewhere else” Gabe responds. And you know, that’s so innocent it works. I know I’m going to pull that story out with Jed, but I don’t think he’s being completely racist anymore. The cashier also seems to accept it.
So the day ends after a few other events, but I don’t want to spend four more hours outlining them. We get up to the top, and Gabe is missing 23 till bags, including a “change bag” that we use to refresh tills that are low on 1’s, 5’s and coins. They hold $1000 dollars at all times.
Holy fuck, Gabe is missing well over $2000 dollars, if I’m assuming the other till bags are from stands that didn’t make much revenue. And this is when it becomes apparent that Gabe has not been writing down the numbers of bags, something that we have paperwork for, and assigning them to locations. Not one, other than the ones that I did. Gabe… It was literally the only thing you had to do when I was counting out your tills. The only thing was to write a 5 digit number down. The boss is looking, I’m looking, the area manager is looking, the tellers are looking, and we can not find the bags. We know the numbers of the bags that have been checked out, but not what locations they were used for. We go through every bag in the bank, hoping that one of the tellers just dropped the ball and didn’t check them in. Nope, they’re missing.
I ask Gabe, “did you turn in the cart?” The same one I had sent him up with earlier. “I did” he insists “if you don’t believe me you can check the cameras!” He keeps telling us to check the cameras when we question him, and gets irritated when I say “I understand that you handed some bags in, but do you physically remember taking the bags out of a cart and putting them through the window?”
“Yes. If you don’t believe me, check the cameras!” Ok, that’s weirdly defensive, but I can still understand. I tell him that no one is going to check the cameras yet, we’re just trying to figure out where the bags are. This is… really bad, and I don’t know how I’d react to it if it was me. Most leads loose a bag once or twice, but generally we are able to recover them as soon as we realize it. It’s an automatic write-up, unless you forgot to take them out of a secure lock-box, but not uncommon when you’re new. Literally everyone has dropped a bag. But this isn’t one bag, or even a few empty revenue bags, these are a LOT of used till bags.
It takes us three hours to find them. Because I worked the area, I’m stuck waiting with everyone else, because of security issues. Every other lead has long since gone home, it’s 1 in the morning, and I work again in 7 hours. Then our boss finally finds it. I don’t know how he did it, but Gabe left my sight heading to the bank, and then somehow ended up doubling back and putting the unlocked cart of unlocked bags totaling more than $2000 dollars in the front line of a stand FUTHER down the road than when I sent him up. A stand with workers in it, and a door that doesn’t lock even when the workers had left.
I guess we should have checked the camera, because he never brought the cart up. And it wasn’t even some plan to steal the money, he literally just left the cart somewhere and walked away, and then thought he had turned it in.
This went on a lot longer than you would have thought, specifically because it’s hard to get fired from an understaffed job. Gabe also harassed another cashier about not sitting with him at lunch and got a sexual harassment write-up. He answered a phone call in the break room with, “wazzup my nigger”(Gabe is white) and started talking about the mad pussy his friend had gotten. He had to talk with the boss about language and appropriate behavior, and was mad that he had been ratted out. One lead started to stalk him on facebook and reported that all of his statuses were sexist and essentially illegible. We realized after he argued with his supervisors for the fifth or sixth time about them being bitches that he just couldn’t stand answering to women, women making up the majority of our managerial staff. Perhaps why he wouldn’t respond to me when I was training him? I’ll never know. Gabe got write-ups almost every day, usually after losing bags, but managed to hold onto the job for well over two months. He was fired on a day that I was off, and I didn’t realize it until I found his pink slip in my locker. I wish I could tell you what he was fired for, but I decided to throw it in the trash rather than indulge my curiosity. I heard that he had been reported being inappropriate with guests, and cursing in front of them, which seems to have been the last straw.
The thing that’s most amazing to me is that this isn’t some 14 year old kid getting his first job, and not understanding that it isn’t school, or that he has to be professional. This job is 18+ and requires previous experience.
Maybe not what you were looking for, but this kid was just strangely immune to common sense, and everyone thought he was bizarre. He never learned anything, and resented anyone that tried to show him how to improve. It speaks to his weirdness that he is the one I chose to write about rather than the coworker I had on a farm who asked “At what age do cats reach sexual maturity?”and told us that at 29 he wasn’t allowed to stay out on weekends because his mom wanted him to start looking for a more full-time job.
Hope you enjoyed, long as it is.
