Not a seven hour shift!!!!

Dear “Did you make a mistake on the schedule?”,

No I didn’t. You are in fact reading that correctly. You are scheduled for a full seven hour day, or what I myself like to consider a half day. I appreciate you taking this opportune time to talk to me about it though. The 8am hour at a coffee shop is always the best time for a schedule discussion. This way, you don’t have to do that annoying thing I expect of you which is customer service.

I could sense the desperation in your voice when you were appalled that I would even THINK to torture someone with seven whole hours of dealing with the public. I must have just misunderstood you the other day when you were pleading with me for more hours. This stupid sensitive side of me actually tried to adhere to your wishes, but clearly I was mistaken. You must just want me to magically add those hours to your check without you having to be physically present.

You raise a good point however when you said to me “there is no way I can do that, seven hours is just too long here.” Tell me about it. Try working on average twelve hours here, which could possibly be shorter, but unfortunately for me I have to engage in asinine conversations like this one during my day causing me a delay in doing what I should be doing.

I totally understand how unfair all of this seems. What kind of slave driving boss makes someone work so much? It’s like I’m running a third world sweat - shop here. To be honest, if I were you I would make a call to HR stat about the unfair working conditions you are under. Already you are convinced someone has put a curse on you (lucky for me this is the second time in my retail management career I have encountered such a fear from an employee so I had prior experience on how to deal with this, which is be sympathetic to your feelings then change the subject). Now you have to work an extraordinary amount of hours… in a row.

If it makes you feel better, you will in fact be allowed a half hour break midway through, which really makes this shift just six and a half hours long. I know, it’s still horrible. I’m sure you will have to spend the following day you have off in bed all day recovering from the torture you had to endure the previous day of running a register and changing milk carafes. I don’t even know how you’re going to be able to function. In the meantime, you are more than welcome to ask anyone else here to work part of that shift, if they can even fathom the idea of being put in a position of such cruelty and torture.

I look forward to our next conversation on pay day when you plead with me how you are having such a hard time making ends meet. Might I recommend selling your plasma? It helped me through college, is really just about a two hour shift, and you just have to lay there.

Sincerely,

Maggie