Thursday, April 3 This is what happens when I swap work hours with the day shift - I get all their weirdoes!
About 2 pm today, in storms this woman who starts going totally apeshit at me and screaming incoherently while waving around a half-full bottle of malt vinegar.
I had no idea what she was on about and, before I could find out, the police arrived - but I hadn't called them!
Now, I know nearly every cop within fifty miles of my site (I call them all often enough), so when they come in, I greet them by name and they do the same back and tell me they've been called here because of allegations I've poisoned a small child.
Wuh?
The crazy lady identifies herself as the kid's parent and tells them I poisoned her lad. To avoid describing twenty minutes of ranting and gibbering on the woman's part, I'll cut right to the chase.
I had sold a 1L bottle of malt vinegar to a kid (about fifteen years old) that morning and he had taken the bottle home and drunk half of it - yes that's right, he had drunk vinegar. Of course, he got sick as a dog and "redecorated" the walls and floor of several rooms.
[No, I do not know why a teenager, who should be old enough to know better (and be at school too, for that matter) would drink half a litre of malt vinegar.] At this point the cops and I exchange looks and one said, "Damn Aaron, and we all thought you had finally snapped." Ha ha. There's always a comedian.
The woman demanded that I be arrested, but the police weren't buying it now that they knew the situation. She eventually relented on her demands that I be be thrown in jail, but demanded an apology from me for "failing to tell her son not to drink vinegar."
I said, "I don't tell people not to stick the fuel nozzle up their nose and fill their brainpan with diesel either. And do you know why? Because most people aren't that stupid!"
End result: I refuse to apologize, and stand firm by my statements that her child is a moron. She demands apology, threatens to sue for slander, and promises to return tomorrow when the manager is here.
And I thought the loons only came out after dark
I'm curious to see what sort of reaction she'll get from my half-wit manager if she comes back. But knowing him, he'll probably apologize to her, and make a new rule that all staff will have to tell people not to chug-a-lug vinegar
Monday, April 7
She came back in! This time she apparently brought both the vinegar-drinker and her husband.
I got the call from my manager around noon today after they had been in to see him. The story they gave him was, unsurprisingly, very different from how it happened.
In their revised version, the kid asked me whether or not you could drink vinegar and I said yes. However, since we now have cameras that record sound (I don't know how I ever got along without them!), the manager played back the transaction to them. Apparently she now claims we edited out the sound Despite all that, my worthless sack of shit manager caved in to them and apologized, and told me on the phone that he wanted me to write them a letter of apology.
THAT was never going to happen and, after an extended argument, with my manager using the "saying sorry does not mean you accept blame, it just means you're sorry" speech, he's decided to write one for me which he tells me I have to sign.
Well, that's never going to happen either. He can sign the damn thing himself if he wants, but there's no way I'll be apologizing to this stupid woman because of her stupid child.
So much for unwinding on my days off .
Tuesday, April 8
A lot of nasty stuff happened today.
My manager called me again today and told me to come in to work for a meeting. He wouldn't say why, but I guessed it was either about Vinegar Boy or the recent hassles we've been having with 'Sudsy', the drug dealer I had arrested, and his junky horde.
When I get in to work, I find my store manager (SM), the territory manager (TM), the stupid mother, and Vinegar Boy all there.
Can you spell 'ambush'? My manager can.
We go out to the back office, and my SM and the TM tell me off in front of the idiot family for failing to exercise due care in selling a fifteen year old boy a bottle of vinegar. The TM tells me to apologize immediately. I ask, for what should I apologize?
The stupid mother chose this moment to pipe up and screech, "I want you to say sorry for telling my son it was okay to drink vinegar - he could have DIED!" I reply that I never did any such thing, and told her that her son was either grossly in error or a liar.
Both my SM and the TM again say to apologize - and now they want me to say sorry for calling the kid a liar. I say I have nothing to apologize for, and that I never told the kid it was okay to drink vinegar.
At this point I should point out that I managed to keep my temper under check for the entire time, even though I was extremely angry at being ambushed. I figured there was a time and a place to unleash it, and that it could wait for a little while.
Then the TM says that they know I did tell Vinegar Boy it was okay, they have it on film (technically, we have it on computer disk, but who's quibbling?). I ask to see the replay and if, from that viewing I am seen to tell the kid it is okay to drink vinegar, not only will I apologize, I will donate my last month's salary to the kid as restitution.
The mother goes off about how we edited the footage to remove my words and the manager started to get a bit shifty. The TM looked curious about all this, and I thought that if the TM really hadn't seen the footage, I might get out of this with my manager getting his lazy arse kicked right out of the company. Silly me - like that was going to happen.
So, at the TM's insistence, we watch the footage and sure enough, all I say to the kid is to greet him, tell him the price, count him his change, and a goodbye as he leaves.
The TM looked pretty angry and glared at my SM, but said nothing. Nothing! He then repeats his demands to apologize.
I was floored by this. The TM saw I did nothing wrong, and still demanded I grovel to this sack of waste after he and my SM publicly abused me in front of her.
I refused to apologize (again!) and this time, demanded an apology from both the SM and TM for ambushing me, attempting to humiliate me in front of a proven liar and for trying to get me to apologize to Vinegar Boy and his mother.
The TM told me to apologize, or I would be suspended for a week and written up. I say, "Fine" and walk out with the stupid woman trailing me and gloating at how I got what I deserved. As I get to the door, the SM comes out and says, "If you walk out the door, don't bother to come back!"
I didn't even pause.
When I got home, I had nearly a dozen messages from work on my machine, but I deleted them without listening to them. I've now changed the message on my machine telling my ex-SM that anything he has to say to me can now be done through the union and to stop calling my number - of course he hasn't listened and has called me at least another fifty times since I got home.
When I had calmed down a bit, I called the site owner to see if he could take a look at what happened. The owner of my site is a totally cool guy, he's been in the fuel business since Henry Ford was a boy and is very clued-in. But as he's semi-retired now, it's pretty hard to get into contact with him. I did manage to catch his wife, so I explained things to her.
Tomorrow, I'm going to my union rep to see about suing those sons of bitches till they fucking bleed.
But right now, despite how angry I am at what happened, there's a big upswelling of sheer, unadulterated joy bubbling to the surface because I'm free of that damn craphole, and I'll be making my SM's and TM's life hell for as long and as hard as is humanly possible.
