Tales Of A RGIS Auditor

Is There Any Loyalty At RGIS?

2012-01-13T08:55:00.000-08:00

Mahonri made a comment at my last post regarding an idea for a new post, and I thought it was a good idea. Mahonri mentioned loyalty at RGIS, and how RGIS used to reward loyalty from an employee. That is, how workers who had been with the company for years were treated differently than those who had been with the company for only a short time . But now, according to Mahonri, seniority at RGIS no longer means anything and everyone is treated the same.

I experienced a little of that myself, when I was still working at RGIS, but for a different reason. I started working there right after New Year's Day so at first there was a lot of work available. But as months passed and work slowed down I noticed that some people were still working more than me, even though I had made it clear I was available for work anytime, anywhere. I soon realized that a few auditors were being given more work than us newbies and that was because they were veterans at the company and were getting preferential treatment because of it. I don't remember having too much of a problem with that; it seemed reasonable that those who had been there longer would get the plum stores or just more of them. They had been there longer and had earned it. And as I continued to work at RGIS and improved my accuracy and speed I was given more stores too.

However that changed when my district promoted our AM to DM. That particular person was well-known in our district for chatting up all the new young female employees and once he was made DM he started giving lots more stores to any new girl he was infatuated with, even though she had only been with RGIS for a very short time and hadn't proven herself as a fast or accurate counter. And all because the DM had the hots for her. I remember there being a lot of frustration regarding this, not just from me but from the other veterans as well. It was as though all our time spent trying to improve our speed and accuracy, and spending months and years traveling all over three counties, and finishing one inventory at a store and going straight to another store inventory without going home, meant nothing. Of course, this was a different situation than from what Mahonri had mentioned but the feelings of resentment from the veteran auditors was much the same. What about all the years of hard work and little or no sleep and endless miles of travel that we experienced at RGIS? Did that mean nothing to them?

I'm curious as to how many other RGIS employees have experienced this. Are you a long time RGIS employee and now you find yourself having to compete for store assignments with auditors who have only been with the company for a short time? Do you think this is fair, or do you think that auditors who have been with the company for a longer period of time should be rewarded with the "better" stores or with more work than a newer employee? And if you're a newer employee, do you think it's fair that everyone is treated more or less the same? Or do you think that some employees might be right in expecting more because they've been with the company longer?

And finally, is it different for you and do you feel that loyalty from employees is still being rewarded by RGIS in your district? Also, just to play devil's advocate for a bit: does RGIS deserve any loyalty from their employees? I'll be interested to read your comments.

RGIS Sightings, Anyone?

2011-05-13T13:23:00.000-07:00

The comments on the last blog post had reached over 100 comments so I thought a new post was in order. I saw RGIS recently at a local store. They were just finishing up there; the suitcases were being pulled out to the van. That's the first thing that I noticed, those suitcases on wheels. When I was still working for RGIS we had these soft-sided brown vinyl suitcases to hold machines, lasers, paper tags, etc. They had two handles and nothing else, and we would have to lug those suckers, one in each hand, out to the company van while the AM or DM was busy schmoozing up the store manager one last time. The polyester burgundy short-sleeved shirts were still in evidence, and the black pants as well. Ah, nostalgia.

Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to see them in action; I would have been curious to see the latest versions of the audit machines; do they still even call them that? I also got a chance to see WIS in their natural habitat as well, on a different day. Their blue shirts look a lot better than those tacky vests they used to wear a long time ago. They were using those all-in-one audit machines, with the laser built in, it looked like. I guess RGIS probably has those too, huh? It's been a long time. But not too long. :-)

It made me wonder though. Have any other ex-auditors ever encountered RGIS doing an inventory while you were out shopping? What was it like to bump into your former co-workers? Pleasant? Awkward? Hostile? Nauseating? Post your experiences (and anything else RGIS-related) here.

So Why Do You Still Work For RGIS?

2010-09-23T20:31:00.001-07:00

Someone posted this comment on my previous blog entry:

Misfit
Thank you for this blog
Could you please start a new topic - suggestion, how you managed to leave, and recover your sanity. There are good people suffering out there. Try to tell them, it's ok to not suffer, how to leave. thanks!!!

I thought it would be a good start to a new blog entry, for people who have already left RGIS to share their stories on how and why they left, if it's been a good or bad decision for them and if they regret not leaving sooner. Or if they're still with RGIS then why? Is it because of financial difficulties perhaps, needing the job because there's little else available where you live? Or maybe you're that rare individual (winks) who still enjoys working for RGIS in whatever capacity. Whatever the case share your stories here. And of course anything else about RGIS you'd like to post. People have been using this blog as a way to pass on info about the various lawsuits that have been going on vs. RGIS, and also to ask questions about all sorts of things like time sheets, breaks, questions about the equipment, etc. I think it's a great way for people to share and exchange useful information. As I've said before I wish I had found a blog to share my tales of RGIS woe when I was still working for the company; I think it would have helped me a lot to know I wasn't in the only RGIS dist. with problems.

As for my story about leaving RGIS it isn't really that exciting. I just found another job. It took a while but I never stopped looking. And I started looking once I stopped enjoying my job as a RGIS auditor. Because as strange as it may sound to some, for quite a while there I did enjoy it. I found I loved counting things and trying to devise new ways to count sections of things in stores to increase my speed but without sacrificing my accuracy. And for a while the people I worked with were enjoyable as well. But things worsened within my district as the years passed and I stopped enjoying what I was doing and started looking for new work; luckily I was able to find something that paid decently and that I liked doing, or at least that I could stand it better than my RGIS job.

I guess the bottom line is: if you're not happy working for RGIS, if it makes you miserable and you hate every minute of it then start looking for another job NOW. Not exactly the most earth-shattering or revelatory advice, I know. But that company, no company, is worth risking your health, mental and/or physical, over. Most people know about Craigslist as a place to look for jobs. Another couple of websites that people I know have found jobs through are indeed.com and snagajob.com. If your local community college/junior college offers business classes then they're worth checking out as most of these schools have job placement for their students. And all of the old suggestions are worth doing too, things like telling friends and family you're looking for work, pounding the pavement and handing out your resume to businesses even if they have no Help Wanted signs in their window.

There is life after RGIS. And it can be very good indeed.

Looking For A New Job?

2010-04-07T14:10:00.000-07:00

The comments on the previous post were up to 150 in total so I thought it was time to start a new post. I was just taking a look at the official RGIS website and I thought this was funny: on the home page, under the title Looking For A New Job? it reads:

RGIS is always looking for qualified people to fill positions worldwide. From part-time seasonal to life changing careers.

It was the life changing careers part that made me laugh, for some odd reason. Of course, RGIS doesn't indicate whether working for them will change your life for better or for worse. Hmmm...

Google RGIS...

2009-12-06T18:33:00.000-08:00

...and this blog shows up in the fifth spot! At least it did today when I Googled it. Anyway, nothing really new to report, I just noticed that the comments on the last post had really piled up and I know some people prefer to read comments when they haven't gone too far over one hundred so here we are.

I'm guessing things are pretty quiet right now for RGIS auditors, what with it being the holidays and all. I hope things will pick up for everyone come January and that the new year is better and brighter for everyone. I know it's hard to think that it will given that you may still be employed by RGIS but hey...it's a job, right? Maybe not one that pays a living wage or that gives you good benefits or treats you as though you were a human being or...ahh, never mind. Screw RGIS!

I Posted These For The Lulz

2009-07-29T19:21:00.000-07:00

Over the period of time that this blog has existed there have been a small number of comments made here that for one reason or another didn't get published. But just because they didn't get published doesn't mean that they disappeared altogether. Oh no. I managed to save a few of them and I'm finally giving them their glorious due today. I edited some of them, removing people's full names, clearing out the spam links and inserting some paragraph breaks in the last two comments (both were in single paragraph form) but the rest is genuine. The salty angry language, run-on sentences, punctuation mistakes and glorious spelling errors are all real. Enjoy!

P.S. I changed the layout of the blog. Do you think it was better the way it was before? Is it better now? Let me know in your comments. Thanks!

1. I been working with the company for 3 years and I have seen problems like in any other company my question after i read your blog is if you dont really like the people and how RGIS DM or AM act why dont you look for work in another company ??? if is that bad i dont know why you still there...oh right i just imagine that maybe you are not qualified for a "better" place to work.

2. A great deal of RGIS employees are educated and do this for extra money. I think you are mad because you have no skills, please don't speak for 99.9% of RGIS employees.

3. Who ever posted this probably only work one Penny's and held about a 150 APH I'm a top gun in Wichita D61 and yeah the hours suck the management is a old joke that I'm tired of hearing but I'm fuckin addicted to blowing you fuckin newb ass loser misfits away cause I'm getting paid fat paid. I do this job because I enjoy it, not the people, the work. Besides the world has jobs for misfits that fuck up every thing they do:McDonalds, Burger King, etc. So enjoy your minimum wages cause I'm laughing at you from 3000 mi. away BrokeAss

4. Let's face it, they fired you because you could not count past 15 shithead.

5. your all morons so shut the hell up stop arguing about the name and remember that most people don't care.

6. I came to my computer and saw this crappy blog site on my screen,I ask my husband what was up with this. He goes o i just wanted to see whats been up with RGIS.WHY I said, we worked for RGIS when it was worth working there and it was still crap so why would any body want to be a looser and come blog about this job! its bad enough you all work there, but you take time when your not at that crappy job to talk WOW what a shame, to bad i wont ever be back to to see what you loosers type in response sorry i have a life, and if you see my husband in here kick him out even though he don't work there he still wants to be in the loop WOW he just as bad as you guys gross!!!!!!!!

7. Wow so i gues the 124 district isnt the only bad district. We have A.M's trying to set ppl up firing good ppl and running into the company into the ground. My story is real messed up i was a team leder for them and one of the auditors who is a friend of mine before i became a team leader was helping me out because i got hurt on the job( and they didnt want to help me with that either!) My friend has an A.M living in her house and somebody had already contacted corporate about it and told her if she wants her job that she has to move out and shes still living there!

But anyway my friend she was driving me to the inventories cause she was on my team anyway. the last time i had a store with her my D.M tells me my friend will no be in my tomorrows store knowing i needed her. so that night she was at my house hanging out after work and before she leaves i tell her my fiance to help get the equipment out of her trunk and into my trunk. he pulled everything out except the Labtop that happened to be sitting on the front passenger side floor. i didnt realize her nor him took it out cause he only grabbed what was in the trunk.

the next day when i got to my inventory i opened my trunk to get the equipment and when i noticed No labtop in my car it hit me that it was still in her car so i had to call my d.m to bring me a lab top. after my inventory i told my friend that i left my labtop in her car and she bust out tellin me no i didnt that it isnt in her car! I asked her did you help my fiance take the equipment out and she says no and i said did he grab anything from the front of her car she said he only grabbed from the trunk and i told her the labtop was sitting on the floor of her passenger side and she says that she just got in the car and left and didnt think to see if anything was on the floor of her car.

The D.M suspended me for 6 week before she finally decided to fire me then put me down as terminated for STEALING!Then gave my team to a girl who got fired for fighting and cursing a store manger out. the rehired her 2 months later. she cursed out another manager then 2 days later gets a gray shirt then gets my team but me a labtop gets stolen out of another employees locked car and im unrehirable and then try to say i stole the labtop and i didnt even do steal that carp! And also that a.m who lives my friend. No body likes her and she also has the copy of the key to my friends car! Alot of ppl think it was a set up to get rid of me cause they owe me alot of back pay from my 908's.

8. District 124 is a skam. They don't pay you like they claim if you get it any at all.they pick and choose. K. is very rude and unprofessional and so is B. You call in to tell them something very important has came up and you get yelled at not talked to. They give the travel time and Bounus Pay to their friends they party with who work only when they want to cause they our hung over and did to much cocain the night before so they didnt sleep.Or who they are Kin to.

for exsample E. is a wanted person. But she has a job best friends with a team ledder with a cocain dealer as a husbund(the team ledder)E. has ran around with the team ledders husband drinking and cocaining dealling all night so there for can't work her sch. but yet a singel mother paying and raiseing childern get recommend for missing work.Because of car trouble dental pain and other excussable reasons. guess i should be hiding from the law and a drug /drunker and suck somebody's husbands dick to have a job?

The other team ledder is such a rude as Bitch hell who wants to call and say anything..She hires her own child and tells the working mother well your kid not 18 and can't work so they pertend he didn't pass the test .(dam keep the money in the family I recon) the mother with rent and ch.support and a child to raise hell that Bitch don't need the money. And lets get to how rude the rest of work is they raise their voices talk to you like you don't matter and if their friend or family needs off well then don't matter if you have a excussable reason they write you up if you are not in the KLAN you know the drill.

Cherry pickers that count all the easy stuff and let mention how if they don't like you they will take away from area counted ao add to it. And to the stores well ever wondered why your pre count didnt match. well you should role your tapes back on the count. Check out place such a cosmatics they are short cause they going into the pockets of the counters. I have seen it I have tryed to say something but now I have a job but no schueld so I can't even file for unemployment.but yet I have all these children to care for like I said 2 to pay childsupport to and one at home.

They don't pay you gas or the travel..And don't mess up and help anyone in DRI.124 cause sure at first it is like you get something from they co workers but then it is well I didn't get paid I got you cover comes out their mouth when you hear that take my advise stop giving rides cause next thing you know you are paying 100.0 in gas for two weeks and you get a check for 136.00 for two weeks..so you are the one left standing.. And their friends that are team ledders well the excuss is you shouldn't have helped them knowing they needed it.Just a short storie about Disrt.124

Yes i can prove must everything I said. And got some wittness Like CVS role your camers Family Dollar role your camers you will see.. that Drist. 124 top counters putting the make up in their clothes pouch ect.....

sorry about the spelling I have that drun disablity

Our Customer's Customers

2009-04-18T10:26:00.000-07:00

Most of the inventories that I did for RGIS were either before or after store hours. That is, the store would be closed to customers while we peons, er, auditors counted the merchandise. However, for whatever reason some stores chose to have us inventory their stock while the store was open for business. That kind of inventory could be a headache or a hilarity, or both. A headache because if it was one of those inventories where a lot of verifying would be done then “mistakes” in counting were bound to occur. I mean, if an auditor is counting merchandise and a customer comes along and takes an item that was just counted then of course your totals are going to be off. Or if a customer pulls some items out of one department, wanders around the store for awhile, decides that she doesn’t want those items and then just dumps them in a different part of the store then the counts are going to be off in two different areas. To us RGIS people it would be clear that incidents like this were bound to occur and we wouldn’t expect to have perfect counts. However, to some thick-headed store personnel something so glaringly obvious just never crossed their minds as a possible happening and the areas in question would need to be recounted. Ooh, fun!

But sometimes having the store’s customers shopping right along with us counting could be funny too, in a weird sort of way. I remember this one time when I was doing an inventory at a Toyworks (local independent toy store). It was late morning, and I think I was counting all the Brio or Playmobil or some such crap. This little boy was in the store with his mom. They spent around 15 or 20 minutes in the store and the whole time they were there the little boy kept following his mom around the store saying, “Mama, my butt itches. Mama, my butt itches. Mama, my butt itches.” On and on and on, over and over and over again, for 20 minutes! Jesus. After hearing this for just a few minutes I wanted to yell at the kid, “Well then for Christ sakes, scratch your damn ass!” But of course you can’t say that to a little kid, can you? At least, not if you’re wearing a RGIS polo and counting wooden trains in a toy store. The whole time the kid was complaining about his itchy ass his mom never said a word. Sometimes I wonder if now, years later, the kid is still saying it.

Another kid incident happened when I was counting in an Albertson’s grocery store. This inventory was at night (start time 8:00 PM). I think the store closed at midnight, or maybe it was open 24 hours. Anyway, it was around 9:00 PM or so and I was counting dairy, or soda, or something in the cold cases. A little kid around 9 or 10 came running into my area to grab something. He, for some bizarre reason, wasn’t wearing shoes and was just in his socks. I guess the floor must have been highly waxed because when he reached the section I was counting he must have slid about 10 feet before he landed right on his butt (ass comes into play again). I asked the kid, “Hey, are you all right?” He just laughed kind of embarrassedly and said, “Yeah, I’m okay” before standing up and grabbing whatever it was he had come into the store for and leaving. Walking, not running this time.

At another Albertson’s I was counting some canned goods when these two young men came in late one night and asked me where the condoms were. I hadn’t even been in the OTC that night so I said I wasn’t sure. I explained to them that I wasn’t a store employee, I was only there doing inventory. One of the young men said very snottily to me, “Well, if you’re doing inventory then you should know where everything is, right?” Oh, really? Everything? Because little old me counted every damn thing in the whole supermarket, is that it? Me, one person, counted every single piece of merchandise in the whole goddamn place, is that what you’re thinking? You snotty little shit. But once again of course I couldn’t say what I really wanted to, since I was wearing that damn RGIS polo. So I just suggested very politely (gag) that they should check with the store personnel. They stomped off in a huff. And good evening to you too! Jerks.

Then at yet another Albertson’s (what’s with that store and their customers?) we were doing an inventory after store hours. You’d think that would keep us safe from the store’s customers but not that night. A group of teenagers came to the front door of the store and tried to get in. They were confused because:

1. All the lights in the store were on.
2. They could see people (RGIS drones) inside.
3. The doors wouldn’t open.

They started banging on the front doors and yelling something unintelligible. The store manager was in the back room so our RGIS AM went to the door and told the kids through the glass doors that the store was closed. The kids grumbled a bit and then went away. We thought that was the end of it until a few minutes later. I was counting the stuff at one of the checkout stands when I heard banging on the glass doors again. I looked up and was treated to the sight of some pressed ham under glass. That’s right, three teenagers were mooning us with their bare asses. They did so for a couple of seconds, laughed uproariously and ran off. Oh my God, I just realized. That’s another ass story!

Finally, I was counting some OTC at a Long’s Drugs once, and a store clerk was in the same aisle chatting to me about something. An old man appeared at the front of the aisle; he stood with his feet planted firmly and absolutely shouted out the word “TYLENOL!” Not, “Excuse, me, where’s the Tylenol?” or “Do you know where the Tylenol is?” but just “TYLENOL!” at the top of his lungs. The clerk turned to the guy and calmly said to him, “Are you giving a testimonial as to the wonders of Tylenol, and how much you love it? Or were you looking to buy a box of it?” The old man blinked and screamed just as loudly, “WHERE DO YOU KEEP THE TYLENOL?” The store clerk showed the old man where the pain relievers were, and then came back to me and told me that that sort of thing happens all the time, so when it does he usually liked to have some fun with the customer first. He said that the customers almost never had a sense of humor and never got the jokes. Oh well, at least he never got mooned at work.

Smile, You're Working For RGIS!

2008-11-08T09:27:00.000-08:00

I keed, I keed.

I just noticed that the comments on my last post reached the 100+ count so I thought it was time to start a new one. I haven't had the time lately to go over any more of my sweet RGIS memories and post them so I've just put this little bit of nothing here to fill in for the time being.

Has anyone ever tried searching for RGIS in Google Images? I just did and among the expected pics (audit machines, models in RGIS plastic burgundy polos) some weird stuff popped up. Fart Bomb Bags (farts in a bag, 12 count), a naked ass, weed and some really ugly sandals. What is Google trying to tell us about RGIS? Hmmm...

To TP Or Not To TP? That Is The Question

2008-06-14T16:15:00.000-07:00

Kevin was one of the most disliked district managers Santa Rosa had seen in quite some time. On the surface he could appear to be friendly and upbeat but in fact this happy-go-lucky demeanor of his masked a great incompetence in his ability to run a RGIS district. Most if not all of the auditors, team leaders and other managers in District 414 had quickly grown weary of DM Kevin’s false bravado and phony cheerfulness. Nearly everyone had a negative attitude regarding Kevin ranging from mild dislike to outright hatred. Virtually no one save an unaware newbie felt Kevin capable of making intelligent decisions in how to handle a single inventory, much less an entire district.

This contempt that almost everyone in District 414 felt for DM Kevin was not unjustified. There was a long list of troubling incidents and decisions involving Kevin that had caused his district to turn against him. There were numerous raises promised to auditors but never given, mistakes made in scheduling auditors for inventories, mistakes made as to which Team Leader or Manager should be running which store, and mistakes made as to when these inventories should be held. All of this ineffectiveness of Kevin’s left everyone in the district in a constant state of frustration and anger.

Complaining about DM Kevin and his many faults and blunders did absolutely no good. Visits paid to our district by various Operations Managers fared no better. Dist. 414’s once prestigious reputation as an efficient, well run and go-to district continued to fade with each passing day.

Auditors and TL’s would talk amongst themselves about the situation, sharing their own personal DM Kevin horror stories and expressing frustration at how nothing ever seemed to change. Venting about one’s crappy RGIS DM could be somewhat therapeutic but the benefits of merely saying, “Kevin sucks!” and doing nothing about his sucking were short-lived and ultimately unsatisfying. Real, actual, physical action needed to be taken in order to bring about some relief from our troublesome situation, and TL Heather and I believed that we had the solution.

One late Friday night during a Waldenbooks inventory (endless ISBNs) in Santa Rosa Heather and I were as usual rehashing some complaints and grudges we had against DM Kevin. We had in previous inventories discussed various ways to exact revenge on Kevin; toilet-papering his house was by far the most popular idea. At Waldenbooks that night Heather reminded me once again of our nefarious desire to TP Kevin’s house. She said that since Kevin was away on vacation at the time and was due back the next night that tonight would be the perfect time to do the TPing. I agreed and the two of us quietly canvassed the group of auditors at Waldenbooks to see if anyone wanted to join in. Only Tina and TL Mondo (who was bungling, er, running the inventory) agreed to be our accomplices. Having Mondo participate in the TPing was crucial because he alone in the group that night knew where Kevin lived. Mondo also reassured us that nothing untoward would come of our misdeeds; that Kevin would in fact regard the whole thing as a great joke and even as something ultimately positive for the district as in, “Hey, my auditors came together, bonded and did something as a real team!” Myself, Heather and Tina were actually naive enough to believe this crap.

The Waldenbooks inventory finally ended around 1:00 am. Me, Heather, Tina and Mondo each got into our respective cars and drove to the local Food 4 Less supermarket (open 24 hours) where Tina and I each bought a huge 12 roll pack of toilet paper. I’ve often wondered since then what the sleepy clerk who rang up our purchases thought about four giggling adults in matching burgundy shirts buying 24 rolls of toilet paper at 1:30 in the morning but the guy never said a word.

The four of us had decided earlier that it would be a good idea if we didn’t all drive to Kevin’s but instead we would drive to a mini-mart near Kevin’s, park there and take Tina’s car to the house. This was done and we were on our way.

I was curious as to what sort of residence a RGIS district manager could afford to rent in Santa Rosa and upon our arrival at the place I was not surprised to see a real rathole of a house. Kevin’s tiny, one story beige-colored dump looked much like all the other small, shabby homes on his street. A postage stamp-sized yard filled with sparse amounts of crushed volcanic rock and skimpy dried-up bushes fronted the sad little house. Toilet paper would only improve its looks.

Tina parked right in front of Kevin’s house and the four of us climbed out quietly. We found the dark, unlit entryway to Kevin’s front door off to the right side of the house and decided to begin there. We ripped open the packages of toilet paper and got to work.

We covered anything and everything we could reach at Kevin’s place with toilet paper. Even things that we couldn’t reach like the roof and gutters we TP’d. Each of us would take hold of the loose end of a roll of toilet paper in one hand and use the other hand to toss the roll up and over the roof. The roll would come cascading down another side of the house leaving a trail of toilet paper behind it. This process was repeated over and over again; the air was fairly thick with flying rolls of toilet paper.

Not only was it cathartic for us RGIS auditors to TP our DM’s house (take that you rat bastard Kevin!) but it was incredible fun too. The four of us were trying to be as quiet as possible while coating Kevin’s house in toilet paper but we found it difficult to stifle our laughter. I was afraid our constant giggling would awaken Kevin’s neighbors but my fears were groundless as no one turned on a single porch light or peeked out a window. In fact Mondo told us a few days later that he spoke with Kevin’s next door neighbor who told Mondo that “You guys were really good (at TPing), I never heard a thing.”

We spent nearly an hour festooning the front of the house and yard with toilet paper. I even wrapped the little dried-up shrubs with toilet paper. Then Heather made a great discovery: the gate to the backyard. The latch was on the inside of the tall gate but little Heather had somehow managed to leap up and unlatch it. We all scampered into the backyard and proceeded to trash it as well.

Not surprisingly the backyard was as dilapidated as the front. The grass/weeds were knee-high; a few skimpy rose bushes were planted along one side of the fence. So sad. Since we didn’t have too much toilet paper left we decided to forego TPing the back part of the house and instead concentrated on the yard itself. We laced and crisscrossed the tall grass with toilet paper, making a sort of gigantic checkerboard pattern on top of it. It was fantastic. I snapped several photos of our artistic achievements with my little camera. After all it was most important that our fabulous work be recorded for posterity.

While Tina decorated the rosebushes with more toilet paper I went up to the sliding glass door at the back part of the house and looked inside. Even by the faint light of the moon I could see that the kitchen was a mess, with papers strewn all over the table and countertops. What a slob Kevin was.

Finally we were down to our last few bits of toilet paper and the four of us stepped back for a moment to admire our handiwork. The backyard was a vision in toilet paper loveliness. Not even a Tonka toy dump truck, abandoned by Kevin’s ex-wife’s son, escaped our toilet paper wrath. Then Mondo added one final touch: he took the last few pieces of toilet paper and dipped them into the rainwater that had collected in the toy truck, wadded them up into soggy paper blobs and flung a bunch of them at the sliding glass door where they stuck like glue. We were done.

As we trooped out of the backyard, still giggling, Mondo pointed out Kevin’s garage window on our left. We looked inside and could see several empty 12 packs of Coors Light beer. Mondo told us that Kevin would regularly polish off a couple 12 packs of beer every weekend. I though to myself, “Hmm, I guess that explains a lot about why our district is the way that it is.”

We got into Tina’s car and drove away, pleased with our efforts and success at getting away with it all. Tina dropped us off at the mini mart and we all drove to our homes. It was quite late, around 2 or 3 in the morning but I wasn’t sleepy at all. I was jazzed and my adrenalin was pumping. Yes! We had finally achieved revenge against our lousy RGIS district manager. Score one for the lowly auditors! I finally reached my home and fell into bed.

When I woke up later that morning I realized that there was still one last thing I needed to do to complete The Great RGIS TP Caper. I got dressed and drove over to Kevin’s house. In the bright morning light Kevin’s neighborhood was even seedier-looking than it had appeared last night. I parked my car in front of Kevin’s house and took some really great photos of the place from various angles. All that toilet paper was even funnier in the daylight. I then drove over to Walmart and dropped off the film for developing.

I had a JC Penney’s inventory scheduled for later that day in Petaluma and on my way there I stopped off at Walmart to pick up the photos. They were beautiful, perfect and hilarious, especially the daylight shots of the TP’d house. It was a real toilet paper masterpiece.

At the Penney’s inventory I waited until our lunch break (a shocker I know, RGIS auditors getting a lunch break) before I went out to my car and grabbed the packet of photos. Most of the RGIS crew had gathered in the store employee’s lunch room and that’s where I went. I passed around the photos and everyone had a great laugh, snickering at the shots of Kevin’s house drenched in toilet paper. I was so proud.

A few hours later it was close to midnight and we were finishing up the inventory. I was busy scanning a rack of men’s jackets when I saw Tina hurrying over to me with a worried look on her face. She told me that Kevin had just come back home from his week-long vacation and was more than a little surprised at the sight of his house. In fact he was furious. Tina said, “Kevin just called Joe (area manager running the Penney’s inventory). He’s pissed!” She said that DM Kevin told AM Joe that he didn’t care exactly who had done it (funny that Kevin immediately knew it was his auditors that had TP’d his house and not some neighborhood kids) but that he wanted “this shit” cleaned up by the end of the day tomorrow or else.

Upon hearing this I was a little angry myself. Mondo had told us the night before that Kevin wouldn’t mind his house getting TP’d and would see the humor in it all. Aaarrggh! That’s what we got for trusting Mondo. I headed over to where Mondo was scanning some t-shirts and accosted him. “You said that Kevin wouldn’t get mad!” I fumed. “Tina just told me that he called Joe and he’s pissed off!” Mondo was nonplussed and he struggled for a reply. Finally he came up with this: “Well, if you get fired we’ll all get fired too.” Oh gee, thanks you jerk.

I flat out refused to return to the scene of the crime to clean up all that toilet paper. I feared that if I went to his house Kevin would be lying in wait and immediately upon sight of any or all of us we would be fired on the spot. I can laugh about it now, being so worried about getting fired from one of the worst jobs ever (also, since when did RGIS ever fire anyone?) but at the time I needed that shitty job and the little money it brought to me so I wasn’t taking any chances.

Heather pretty much felt the same way as I and refused to go back to Kevin’s too. In the end it was Tina and Mondo that went back to do some toilet paper picking up, and for some bizarre reason Mondo’s obnoxious brother Luis tagged along. Suck up. I heard later that when the three of them arrived at Kevin’s house and began cleaning up the mess Kevin suddenly popped out of his house with an “Aha!” and snapped a photo of them. Apparently time had healed his toilet paper wounds and as it turned out he did indeed see the humor in it all. What an asshole.

I Love RGIS!

2008-03-08T09:06:00.000-08:00

Ha! I knew that title would catch your eye. You probably thought, "What the hell? Has The Misfit finally gone over to the Dark Side?" No, of course not, never in a million years. I will never drink the RGIS Kool-Aid. No, I just noticed that the comments were adding up in the last post and thought it was time to start a new post, to make it easier for people to scroll through everyone's comments. I'm still working on my toilet paper post (see the "Emails" post for more details) so I had to come up with a little shortie like this one to fill in for the time being.

I also wanted to reiterate that I absolutely love reading everyone's comments, both about this blog and about their own past and current experiences working for RGIS. Every last tale, no matter how short or how long is endlessly fascinating to me and I once again want to thank everyone for sharing their own RGIS stories here. Please continue to do so!

Emails, We Get Your Emails...

2007-12-20T11:45:00.000-08:00

I've received a few emails recently that all had a similar (and good!) suggestion for this blog. Several people have noted that my last post "Help! Help Wanted!" had collected quite a few comments (by the way, thanks! again to everyone who continues to leave comments); they mentioned that it was taking a long time to scroll down the list of comments left by others and suggested that I start a fresh post so a new series of comments could begin. Or words to that effect. Anyway, it sounded good to me so here it is. From reading the comments that are being left at this blog I can tell that a lot of important information for all RGIS employees is getting out to people everywhere here and that's why I think it's important to keep this blog going.

Also, every once in a while, even though I fight it, frightening RGIS memories of mine surface now and again and I recently recalled another rather amusing incident that happened in my district. Something having to do with toilet paper and a DM's house. I plan on recounting it here so stay tuned...

Help! Help Wanted!

2007-06-09T11:35:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine was searching through the classified ads in the local paper recently and spotted something very near but not dear to my heart. "Hey, look at this," he said, as he handed me the newspaper. "Didn't you used to work for these guys?" I looked at the ad and nearly vomited. It was titled "Inventory Counter-Apply and Train now." The ad went something like this:

$8.50 hr to start
No experience necessary
Paid training
Medical benefits after 90 days
Flexible scheduling
Must be 18 years +
Reliable transportation
Part-time inventory counter positions available
Call now for an appt.

Just the sight of that ad brought a shudder of horror and disgust to my heart. Also mixed in was a certain amount of amusement as I went over the ad. "8.50 an hour to start"? Hmm, interesting, that's down from a high of $9.00 not too long ago. "Paid training"? Of course what they don't mention until said training has already begun is that the training pay is at least $1.00 less per hour than the starting wage.

"Medical benefits after 90 days": Well, when did RGIS finally do something halfway decent and give the auditors back their benes that they took away so abruptly when I was working for them? How are the benes? Any good?

"Flexible scheduling": Ah, a creative way of saying, "Well, one week you'll work 30 hours, the next week 5 hours, the next week 0, and the week after that 1 1/2." That's very flexible!

"Must be 18 years +": "However, if you're 50 years + we will immediately classify you in our minds as a 'feeb' or 'goober' and you'll rarely be scheduled for any stores. Probably the only time you'll see work is when we have a big store like Kmart or Target to inventory and we need every available warm body, even the ancient ones."

"Reliable Transportation": "We wish. Actually, since we're so hard up for people to work for us we'll send someone to your house to pick you up on the way to the inventory, especially if you're a hot chick that one of our managers hopes to someday score with."

Very amusing. But it left me curious. Have you guys seen any RGIS help wanted ads in your local papers recently? Do they sound a lot like or identical to the one that I saw? I'd be interested in hearing what RGIS ads are like around the country. Or world rather, as RGIS is global now. So if you see any help wanted ads from RGIS lately please post them here. Thanks!

P.S. Well well well. Looky what I just found on craigslist.org!

$8.50/HR COUNTING stuff at LOCAL RETAILERS (santa rosa) [sic]

"This is a fantastic job to fill in any gaps that you might have in your normal routine. Make us a secondary source of income or your primary source of income...RGIS is the world leader in Inventory Retail Services...We have...40,000 employees...

Desired qualities:

Team Player
Competitive Spirit
Dependable Employee
Prompt Arrivals

Learn more about us at (the RGIS website url) and see why 40,000 employees love what they do!"

Okay, two things about this craigslist ad makes me laugh. One is the 'Desired Qualities' section. RGIS 'desires' employees who are team players, have competitive spirit, are dependable, and who can manage prompt arrivals? Then why don't they treat their employees decently and pay them a living wage? Why don't they treat their employees decently and not subject them to ridiculous pay decreases based on their EAPHs when said employees are unable to meet unreachable or unknown EAPHs? Why don't they treat their employees decently and not give one small group of a district's pets more favorable treatment (raises, more stores) than the rest of the district? If RGIS could do the unthinkable and treat their employees decently then maybe they might hire and retain more employees who have those qualities that they so desire.

The second thing in that ad that's a laugher is that last line. "Learn more about us...and see why 40,000 employees love what they do!" Oh, that's priceless. "Love what they do." Hey, RGIS employees, does that sound like you?

P.P.S. : I just checked the San Francisco Chronicle (June 20, 2007) and RGIS has a "help wanted" ad there. Their starting pay is $9.25 an hour. Okay, I know S.F. is larger than Santa Rosa but .75 larger? Doesn't sound fair, but then little about RGIS is fair, IMO.

Nicknames Are Nice. No, Seriously!

2007-04-07T09:23:00.000-07:00

First of all I just wanted to thank everyone so much for reading my little ol' RGIS blog. I've had a fantastic time writing this blog, and an equally wonderful time reading all of your comments. It's been very educational and entertaining, reading everyone's stories about their own experiences working for RGIS. Without this blog I would have never been able to hear from Auditors and Team Leaders and Managers all over the U.S. and Canada too. It's become apparent to me and probably to most of you as well that no matter what district we're in, and regardless of which state or even which country we're in as well a lot of our RGIS experiences are quite similar. It's helped me a great deal to write about my time with RGIS, and I hope it's helped (and entertained) you to read this blog, as well as the comments left here. I feel like for some it's become a sort of catharsis. This blog has been for some a place to vent their frustration with the way a lot of things have been going with RGIS lately, and I'm very glad to provide a place for people to do just that. I know all too well how unfair things can get sometimes when you're working as a RGIS auditor or TL or even a manager. Sometimes you just want to scream with frustration. Aw, group hug!

Secondly, I have a tiny favor to ask you guys. Don't worry, it's nothing major. When you leave your comments here at this blog, would you please use a nickname instead of commenting as "Anonymous"? It's just that it would make it so much easier for me (and others) when leaving a reply. It doesn't have to be a terribly clever nickname; you could use something like "123" or "Shoe" or "Fungus", whatever. You can even change your nickname every time you leave a comment. It's just that when myself or someone else leaves a reply to your comment it's much easier and quicker to reply to a "Handbag" or a "Dog" than to have to type out "anon. at 4/7/07, 11:35 pm". Choosing the nickname option is very simple. When you leave your comment, you'll see that just below that box there is an option that says "Choose Your Identity". Just select the "Other" option instead of anonymous, and then you can have some fun and pick a nickname. Like I mentioned before, it can be just about anything and you can use a different one every time you leave a comment, if you like. And don't worry, just because you've used a nickname doesn't mean that anyone will know who you are. Unless you use your real name and then you're screwed. Of course you can always still post under "Anonymous" but wouldn't you rather have some fun and pick out a nickname? Of course you would! :)

Where The Hell Are The Archives?

2007-03-09T12:25:00.000-08:00

Just a little info in case you were wondering. My dear little RGIS blog has been updated to include some advertising (see links at the top of each page). This has caused the "archives" section of my blog to change locations. The archives used to appear near the top, on the right hand side. You can still view each and every post here (lucky you!), but you have to do some scrolling. You can find them all the way down near the bottom of each page, on the right hand side. Depending on which page you're currently on, and depending on what Blogger feels like doing on any particular day, the archives will be listed by either titles or by which months the posts were published in, or sometimes both. To view the earliest posts, the ones from the very beginning, just click on the last post listed, the one at the very bottom of the list. Keep doing this until you reach the first post, which is titled "Coming Soon To A Blog Near You". Happy reading!

BTW, about the advertising. If you've enjoyed reading this blog, and want to show your support for it, please take a moment to click on one of the ad links at the top of the page. If you do so it will be most appreciated by me. If you haven't enjoyed reading this blog, well then, what are you doing here? Go away. Now. Scram! Beat it! Take a hike! ;)

Comments And More Comments

2007-02-02T11:37:00.000-08:00

Recently I've encountered some difficulties in publishing new comments at this blog. Blogger is going through some changes in their system (again!) and that's resulted in several of your comments not getting published. I'm hoping that situation has improved and it will be smooth sailing from now on (well, I can dream can't I?). Thank you for your patience and happy reading!

Running On Empty

2006-09-30T10:23:00.000-07:00

Well, when we last met up in the continuing storyline of District 414, Area manager Joe had been named the new District Manager. This bad decision was made very quietly and with little fanfare. Perhaps even the Division office realized how unpopular and unsuccessful this decision was going to be, and wished to draw as little attention to it as possible.

Now, normally I would continue here with how bad Joe was as our DM (he was terrible), and how miserable a time I and everyone else had while working for him. But in going over my notes that I took during the time I worked for RGIS, I realized that I have very little material for this blog left. After Joe was made DM, I wasn't with the district for much longer. All the problems that had been prevalent in my district before Joe's ill-fated promotion remained and in some cases intensified after Joe became DM. Any appeal that my job as auditor held deteriorated to such a low point that I simply could not stand working for RGIS any longer and I quit.

So there's really not much left to tell you. Joe didn't last very long as DM; he stepped down from the position after only a few months and returned to his old AM job. A new DM named Chris moved in. He came from a district in another state, which one I can't remember. In fact Chris was so bland and colorless that I can't really remember anything about him other than he was bland and colorless. Joe was fired a few months after Chris' arrival, and a new AM named Josh arrived. Josh was a horrible AM who had a nasty habit of donning a RGIS grey polo shirt and masquerading as a Team Leader, all so he could count unobserved and unbothered by a store manager. Josh was eventually caught by RGIS higher-ups doing this and was moved to another district. I left my job as auditor shortly thereafter, and that's where this blog ends, more or less.

It's been a lot of fun writing this blog, and I've enjoyed reading most of your comments. You can continue to leave your comments and questions here, and I'll publish them probably two or three times a week. But there most likely will not be any more new entries, as I've simply run out of material. If you don't want to leave any more comments here, but still want to communicate with other RGIS people, I might suggest starting a RGIS auditors discussion group over at Yahoo Groups. I checked and there are already two such discussion groups, but not much activity at either. So someone might want to start their own group.

Goodbye, and thanks for reading.

More Shorts

2006-09-23T10:04:00.000-07:00

The following items are just little incidents that I remember from my glory days as a RGIS auditor. They don't really fit into a specific storyline, but I didn't want to leave them out of this blog. So I've just included them here in no particular order.

1. One afternoon after we finished a Long's Drugs inventory District Manager Kevin, on the way back to the RGIS office, drove a vanload of auditors to the Sear's store in San Rafael. We were doing the Sear's inventory in a few weeks, and Kevin told us that the store's manager had asked him to stop by the store for a quick discussion of the store's layout in preparation for the upcoming inventory. As Kevin parked the van outside the store's entrance he told us that he should only be gone a few minutes.

We sat in that van for over two hours. Two hot, uncomfortable, smelly (Mondo was in the van) hours. I don't know about you, but sitting in a crowded van parked in a Sear's parking lot on a hot summer day for over 2 hours was not my idea of fun. Nor anyone else's. Bedroom slippers Erin had dozed off at one point. When she woke up a short time later she was furious to find out we were still at Sear's. "Gimme the time sheet!" she yelled. "I'm signing myself in again!" Finally DM Kevin came out of the store. He climbed into the van and sheepishly apologized for the delay. He claimed that the Sear's manager had insisted Kevin do a full tour of the store's two floors, plus the basement storage rooms. He then did a rare, halfway decent thing and added two hours for each of us to the Long's Drugs time sheet.

2. The districts in the Northwest Division did a lot of inventories together, and each district usually brought a bag or two of their own equipment to each inventory. In order not to get our district's lasers and audit machines mixed up with another district's, orange dot stickers were placed on all of our equipment, including the few stepstools that we had. The idea was that if a District 414 laser or audit machine were accidentally placed in another district's bag it would be easy to spot by the orange dot.

The dots usually helped keep the audit machines and lasers in our district, but not the stepstools. Lots of times I would go into the back room of a grocery store or department store and find a little two-step metal stool with an orange dot on it, left behind from an inventory that we had done months before, and in one case a year before. The first couple of times I found one of my district's stepstools I notified the person running the inventory. The Area Manager or Team Leader each time expressed a little surprise but no other reaction. No "Oh wow, so that's where it was." No "Hey, thanks. Can you grab that one for me?" Just a shrug and a "Hmmm." Well, they didn't seem to care too much about it, so why should I? I would use the stepstool in the store's back room and then leave it there. Accidentally, of course.

3. TL Heather had become disillusioned at working for RGIS and decided to quit. This was around Christmas time, and I had stopped by her house to say hello. I told her I was on my way to the district office party to pick up my January schedule. Heather got a gleam in her eye and told me, "Wait just a minute." She left her living room and came back a short time later with a couple of RGIS polos, a leather belt and a large piece of Christmas wrapping paper. She neatly folded the polo shirts and placed the leather belt on top of them. She wrapped the bundle in the Christmas paper and handed it to me laughing, "Give this to AM Dave and make sure to tell him it's from me."

I got to the district office around 6:00 pm. The Christmas party was in full swing, meaning the lights were on and one cookie platter was visible on the front counter. I picked up my January schedule and spotted AM Dave. I handed him the brightly wrapped package saying, "Heather told me to give you this." Unsuspecting Dave seemed surprised and said, "Oh, well, how nice. Please tell her thank you." I said I would and then I got the hell out before he could open it.

4. AM Joe told a bunch of us this story about when he was an auditor and going through a particularly grueling schedule. He said that it was during one of those interminable Long's Drugs inventory runs (approximately 2 week's worth of Long's stores, one (and sometimes two) per day. In addition to these early morning inventories he was also doing a number of late night stores as well. Joe was so tired that at one point during a Long's inventory he went to the bathroom, sat down on the toilet and promptly fell asleep. He told us that he was asleep on the toilet for about half an hour, and the only reason it wasn't any longer was because someone woke him up by banging on the door outside the bathroom and yelling, "I need to get in there!"

5. Once I was standing on a little plastic stepstool (provided by the store) in a Long's Drugs, counting some OTC on a top shelf. Just as Ops Manager Sai walked by behind me I dropped a box of aspirin. Before I could step down and retrieve it Sai stopped, picked up the box and handed it to me, saying in his sing-song Eastern Indian accent, "Oh, you white people are always expecting me to pick things up for you." He then walked away before I could say a word.

6. A small crew of us were doing a port-fn inventory at a grocery store called North Shore Sentry in the little town of Nice, about 2 hours north of our district office. We were short-handed to begin with, and the situation got worse as we arrived at the store because blob Mondo immediately developed a mysterious nosebleed upon exiting the van. He bailed out of counting with us because of this nosebleed and spent the 7+ hours that we were there asleep in the van. Jerk.

TL Eric was running this one, and Eric under pressure was not a pretty sight. He always had difficulty handling "frying" in a store. We were woefully behind schedule, when Eric suddenly said, "I'll get us out of this store." He took a copy of the store's previous inventory, checked the areas that hadn't been counted yet, changed some of the numbers in those area's totals, plugged those new totals into the portable and...ta-dah! We were finished. Eric printed out the whole thing and handed it to the store manager. He was satisfied with the results and we packed up and left, bloody Mondo included. Another quality inventory done by RGIS.

People Problems

2006-09-16T10:21:00.000-07:00

Ever read the RGIS newsletter, "The Auditor's Auditor"? This stellar piece of news excellence was (and maybe still is?) published twice a year by RGIS and was available for perusal in my district office. As far as I know I was the only one in Santa Rosa who ever picked up a copy. Well, you never know when it might come in handy. Say you car breaks down and you're stranded way out in the middle of nowhere, when suddenly you experience some intestinal cramping and you think, "Whoops! Gotta go." The Auditor's Auditor would substitute for toilet paper quite nicely.

I have a copy of the Winter 2001 edition (the newsletter was published twice a year). The first page has several photographs of employees who have 25 years or more of subjugation, er I mean employment with RGIS. These photos left me wondering: given the rather dismal treatment that RGIS has been dishing out to their auditors, Team Leaders and Managers lately (wage caps, travel pay cuts, minimum hour cuts, etc.) makes me curious about how many RGIS employees will be "celebrating" their silver anniversary 25 years from now. Wanna bet that it won't be many? If any?

There are several little pieces of first-rate journalism in this issue, and chief among them is a stern piece admonishing auditors who use multi-colored ink pens when filling out time sheets. The anonymous author of the piece also notes that "gel type ink" pens are creating the most havoc, as "many copying and scanning machines cannot 'see' these newer colors and densities. Instead of your name...nothing." The article goes on to state that ballpoint pens with black or blue ink are considered to be the best solution; auditors are also admonished about their poor penmanship and urged to write legibly.

It's nice that RGIS was so helpful in their advice regarding the proper ink pens for use on time sheets. Might I make one more suggestion? If you're a District or Area Manager and you want to alter an auditor's sign in or sign out time, make sure you use the same color pen as the auditor's. That way, you'll be less likely to be caught doing this illegal (in California) act. See, one time during a Target inventory I signed in at 6:00 pm (by my watch and the store's clock. The store had a large clock very helpfully situated on the wall right above where we RGIS folk set up). Later that night when I went to sign out I saw that someone had changed my (and several other's) sign in time to 6:06 pm. Had that person not used a red pen on top of my black one I might not even have noticed.

In regards to this unlawful act committed by a RGIS manager, I would normally pose this question to you: Can you believe this? Can you believe that an AM or DM would be so tightfisted that they would try to cheat a couple of auditors out of 6 minutes worth of pay? But given everything that I've learned about RGIS lately I'd believe anything negative said or written about them. RGIS has some serious problems brewing.

Which brings me to the piece on page three of the "Auditor's Auditor". It's a helpful length of crap called "Handling People Problems at Work." It presents six problems that could potentially crop up at work. RGIS then gives the reader some solutions to each problem. Of course, being RGIS the 'solutions' are both laughable and unusable. I mean, the resolutions they've presented are not that absurd, it's just that the thought of trying to implement these solutions while doing a RGIS inventory is so ridiculous.

1. MY COWORKERS SEEM DISTANT AND UNFRIENDLY. "...Take the first step. Greet everyone pleasantly every day...To avoid misunderstanding, communicate frequently and openly...It's hard to remain gruff when someone is smiling at you." "Greet everyone pleasantly every day." Well, I can just imagine the reaction if I tried to pull this one off at work. I probably would have gotten my head bitten off. I actually witnessed a few newbies trying to act human and say "Good morning" in a few stores. All they got was a vacant stare. As I've mentioned in previous blog entries, most of the auditors in my district were hostile and unfriendly to newbies. Lydia used to say that she never bothered learning any newbie's name until they had been working in the district for at least six months. Given the extremely high turnover rate in my district, this was probably a practical thing for her to do.

"To avoid misunderstandings, communicate frequently and openly..." Another thing that wouldn't have worked in my district. Witness what happened to me when I tried to "communicate" with Area Manager Joe one night during a J.C. Penney's inventory (see blog entry "Fear and Loathing in District 414 {part 2}, August 2006 archives). As I've mentioned before, the managers in my district absolutely hated confrontations of any kind. There was no possible way to communicate with the managers in District 414.

2. MY SUPERVISOR DOESN'T GIVE ME ENOUGH DIRECTION... "Tactfully and pleasantly ask your supervisor to explain the required tasks or supply a written description of them." I can just imagine the reaction I would have received if I had walked up to AM Joe and said (tactfully and pleasantly of course), "Could you please explain to me how I am supposed to count this area? What, you don't have time to explain? Oh, I see. Well, then could you supply me with a written description of what I'm supposed to count and how?" I either would have been laughed out of the store or killed on the spot. Any store that Joe ran was like a nightmare for newbies. Joe's method of introducing newbies to the inventory business was like a sadist's method of teaching someone to swim. Throw 'em in the water and let them sink or swim.

3. MY SKILLS AND ABILITIES ARE UNDERUSED. "Look for ways to make your job more challenging...Take on tasks other have neglected." Hmm...a way to make my job more challenging? Oh I know! Have the AM or TL refuse to bring any stepstools to an inventory and that way I can use my skills and abilities to balance myself on 2 or 3 stacked milk crates. That certainly would be challenging!

"Take on tasks others have neglected." And for how many of you was this already a regular part of your job as an auditor? I mean I was constantly having to come along behind the cherry-pickers, picking up all the areas that they refused to count. One auditor that was notorious for this was an enormously fat girl named Victoria. She would constantly whine and complain about how she was "too tired to count this" or "I'm too tired to climb up this ladder". She would then just wander off aimlessly. It made one furious but what could I do about it? If I told AM Joe he would just mumble something like, "I'll look into it but in the meantime could you do that section?" and then rush off to do God knows what. The whole incident would be instantly forgotten by AM Joe and thus fat Tori would get away with yet another incident of cherry-picking laziness. Again, the AM and DM hated having to go face to face with anybody on anything, so auditors got away with all sorts of shit all the time.

4. MY COWORKER IS VERY CRITICAL OF OTHERS, INCLUDING ME. "Tackle the situation head on by discussing the problem with your co-worker...If necessary, state clearly and frankly what will happen if the behavior doesn't stop..." Okay, I'll try it out on TL Mondo. "Um, Mondo? You know when some auditor screws up an area in an inventory you're running, and then you go over and get in that auditor's face and scream at them and tell them that they're stupid and that they don't know how to count? Well, I don't feel that you're exhibiting very productive behavior. It isn't nice to say to someone, "Stop fucking up and start counting right." There are better ways to put it. And Mondo, if you don't stop with this negative behavior, I'm afraid I will have to inform AM Joe or DM Kevin, who will then have no choice but to ignore me completely and do absolutely nothing about the situation." There! Ahh, I feel so much better now. Thank you RGIS!

5. I AM BEING...TREATED UNFAIRLY BY MY SUPERVISOR. "Discuss the problem in private with your supervisor as soon as possible." Ahem. Tried that, didn't work. (see blog entry "Fear and Loathing in District 414 {part 2}, August 2006 archives).

6. TWO OF MY COWORKERS DISLIKE EACH OTHER, AND I AM CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE. "Talk to someone you respect who is skilled at dealing with people." Well, okay, on the surface that sounds good. But what happens when you have an entire district that dislikes itself? This auditor doesn't like that auditor who doesn't like that auditor, and the managers don't like anyone. What do you do then? What do you do if there is no one at work who you respect, or who is 'skilled' at dealing with people'? What happens then? The district implodes, my friend. It caves in on itself for lack of support or structure.

Well, I hope you enjoyed RGIS' examples of how to handle "People Problems at Work." Tune in next week for more RGIS nonsense.

The Darkest Hour

2006-09-09T10:35:00.000-07:00

The weeks of counting crap continued in RGIS district 414, and still we were without a District Manager. Ops Manager Sai still remained in Santa Rosa, torturing Area Manager Joe by dangling the DM position in front of his eyes, like a carrot held out to an eager horse. As much as Sai wanted to name a DM and get the hell out of Santa Rosa, he and his fellow Ops Managers still had some reservations about giving Joe the job. And rightly so; as I've mentioned in previous blog entries AM Joe was much too immature to be in charge of an entire district.

Of course Joe didn't see it that way. He was always way more enthralled of his managerial skills than anyone else. This was why he finally decided to push himself to the front of the stage and declare himself a viable candidate for the DM position, which was a big mistake in my opinion. I always felt that Joe was better suited to working behind the scenes. The puppetmaster behind the curtain, if you will. That's why the situation that he was in previously, with himself as AM and Kevin as DM worked so well for him, although he didn't see it that way at the time. DM Kevin would be out there, front and center, taking credit when things went right (which was almost never) but more often taking a hit when things went so very wrong. As second banana Joe could do and say things virtually without risk of putting his head on the chopping block, as he was the number two guy and not technically in charge of the district.

However, for what reasons only Joe knew, he got a bug up his ass about being our new DM and campaigned heavily for the job. But the longer it took for the Ops Managers to name a new DM the more frustrated Joe got. At one point he told me, "If Sai doesn't make me the new DM I'm gonna quit. I swear I will. Did I ever tell you about the time I walked out?" I said no. Joe then disclosed that back when he was an AM in San Francisco, he had been approached by some CSK (auto parts store, a customer of RGIS) representatives and asked if he wanted to come work for them. The idea intrigued Joe at the time because he had begun to feel a bit burned out in his RGIS job. So he proposed the idea to his DM and Ops Managers that he (Joe) take a leave of absence from RGIS and try out the CSK job for a while, to see how he liked it. Naturally RGIS told him "No way". Childish Joe was so ticked off at being denied that he went into his office, left his company car keys and pager on his desk and walked out without telling anyone. He ended up working for CSK for a couple of years before quitting and coming back to RGIS, who of course wasted little time in making him a manager again (What is wrong with this company? They just keep rehiring the same assholes over and over again).

By now it was apparent to even AM Joe that his self-perceived dazzling managerial skills weren't wowing the powers that be in RGIS upper-level management. So he turned to schmoozing some of his auditors, all in the attempts to butter some of us up, hoping that we might go to bat for him and tell Ops Manager Sai what great guy (!) Joe was and how he would make a marvelous DM. Incredibly, he even tried this out on me, an auditor who just a short time ago had had a major confrontation with him (see blog entry "Fear and Loathing in District 414 {Part 2}", August 2006 archives).

Either he was absolutely, shamelessly desperate for the DM position, completely retarded or perhaps his alleged heavy drug use had fried his brains out, I'm not sure which. Maybe it was a little of each. In any event he even tried to sweet talk me into thinking what a nice guy he was, and how it would be just super! if he were named Santa Rosa's new DM. Amazingly Joe told me, "DM Kevin didn't care about you, DM Dan didn't really know you, AM Dave was useless. We (Joe and I) have known each other a long time (1+ years, strictly on the job) and you know you can trust me. I'll look out for you."

Huh? What? Are you kidding me? I wanted to say to him, "Joe, are you suffering from Alzheimer's or something? Have you completely forgotten about the numerous times you screwed me over in my schedules? Did it completely slip your mind that just a few days ago you almost scared me shitless when you threw your hissy fit and screamed at me in Penney's? And now you're telling me that you're my good buddy, and you'll look out for me when no one else will? Are you insane?" Joe's brazen campaigning for the DM position had reached the point of ridiculousness.

I wasn't too worried though that AM Joe would get the job because I picked up on the fact that Sai and the other Ops Managers were tepid to naming Joe as the new DM. In fact, during a Sear's inventory in San Rafael that Joe was running and Sai was of course watching him like a hawk in, I at one point found myself in a conversation with Sai regarding this very same subject. I told Sai that there was a rumor going around that Joe might be named our new DM, and was it true? I must have sounded as worried as I felt to Sai because he smiled and told me politely that in his opinion Joe was too immature for the position. Yes! Thank you Sai! Sai then went on to explain that "The decision hasn't definitely been made yet, but I really think it might be better if we brought in someone from another district." Oh happy day! Thank you thank you thank you!

So it was with a light and happy heart that I went about my merry auditor's way. I sailed into the hardware department and spent several pleasant hours counting tons of hammers, screwdrivers and other various assorted tools. I didn't even mind when the Sear's head hardware guy asked me to step into the dark storeroom and count a huge box full of wrenches. None of the wrenches had tags but that didn't matter as they were all Craftsman (Sear's brand) tools with SKU numbers stamped into each piece. I sat cross-legged on the cold linoleum floor and cheerfully punched in SKU number after SKU number into my little green audit machine. I was almost singing as I tossed each counted wrench into another cardboard box. "Joe's not gonna be our DM! Joe's not gonna be our DM!" What a great day it was turning out to be!

I was so ecstatic, so pleased as punch, so elated that childish, partisan Joe would not be named Santa Rosa's new DM. But the screwy way thing were done in my district should have curbed my enthusiasm. I should have known that it was all too good to be true. And sure enough, later that same day as I was up on the second floor of Sear's counting some vacuum cleaner bags my sky-high joyfulness came crashing down. Ops Manager Sai caught up with me and said quietly that word had come down to him from the division office that Joe was to be named the new DM of District 414.

I was crushed. I couldn't say a word; I wasn't even able to ask Sai, "What happened? What happened to your (and everyone else's) belief that Joe was too immature for the job? That he couldn't possibly handle the responsibilities of running a district?" I wanted to shout, "Has everyone at the division office gone mad? Are the Ops Managers insane? Demented? Have they lost their senses? What kind of lunatic company is this that they would..." Oh...right. This was RGIS. Shit. Piss. Fuck.

Have A Good One! (Any One Will Do)

2006-08-31T13:05:00.000-07:00

Sorry but there will be no new post this Saturday. I'm taking this holiday weekend off, and I don't plan on going anywhere near a computer for the next couple of days. Well, okay maybe tomorrow, but that's it I swear! So if anyone leaves comments for this blog during the weekend, they probably won't get published until Tuesday at the earliest. Sorry if this inconveniences anyone. Everyone, have a great Labor Day weekend, please drive safely and all that jazz. See you here next week!

Curse Of The Fat Man

2006-08-26T09:47:00.000-07:00

I have a few more little bits of Mondo-related nonsense to share with you. These are just some small incidents involving blimp Mondo; they occurred over several years in several different places. They have been divided into three different categories: Fat, Feeble and Foul. Of course, all three are perfect descriptions of Mondo.

Fat: One night during some nameless and faceless inventory (read: I did so many of these fucking inventories that I can't remember in which one I overhead this conversation) bloated Team Leader Mondo was telling several of us auditors all about one drunken night at a local bar. He said that at one point he had tossed back so many drinks that he lost his balance and fell right off a bar stool. This must have been quite embarassing for Mondo (not to mention quite destructive to the floor. Imagine the damage a two-ton oily behemoth hitting the floor would cause) but as in many other incidents involving Mondo and something humiliating he tried to make a joke of it. "I don't know how I got up off the floor," Mondo quipped. "By a forklift?" wisecracked Gerry. Everyone laughed except Mondo. He might occasionally make fun of his morbidly obese condition but couldn't stand someone else doing it.

Feeble: Mondo ran quite a few stores as a TL, and had problems in every one of his inventories. His most spectacular failure occurred at a Cala Foods/Bell Markets inventory in Novato. Fleshy Mondo had all veteran auditors in this inventory but that didn't matter as most of us were dead tired from doing so many back to back stores. Every single one of us (including paunchy Mondo) made several mistakes while counting in that grocery store that night. Most of the errors were ones made by putting items in wrong categories: Liquor in Grocery, Grocery in General Merchandise, etc. Elephant Mondo missed a lot of these mistakes when printing out the areas, and simply handed over the error-laden printouts to the store manager, most without checking them first.

The store manager all night had received printout after printout filled with mistakes. With each muddled printout he got a little angrier and a little angrier. Finally he had had enough and confronted two-ton Mondo. He got right in Mondo's face (eeuuww) and verbally let him have it. The store manager went on at length about what a lousy job we RGIS auditors had done that night, and how he was not getting the quality inventory he had paid for. The guy was really pissed off and who could blame him? He had a bunch of burgundy-shirted zombies counting his store that night. We had done a lousy job in that Cala Foods store, and all of us realized it. Of course, that doesn't mean that we cared. All of us were worn out from so many back-to-backers and just wanted to go home and sleep. However, as lowly auditors we didn't have to experience the wrath of the store manager. No, TL Mondo, who ran the inventory, got the full blast of shit from the store manager. We peons merely stood around and enjoyed the spectacle. What fun it was to witness Mondo getting scolded and yelled at. Hurrah!

Finally, the store manager calmed down and stopped shouting at gargantuan Mondo. During the customer's tirade Mondo had not said a word. He was totally intimidated and cowed. At one point, while the customer was giving him a tongue lashing Mondo actually leaned his head against a post and stared at the floor. It was a totally unprofessional thing to do, and looked really bad, but that was Mondo.

The store manager was quite upset with Mondo and said to him, "So, as a representative from RGIS, what do you have to say for yourself, in regards to the job that you and your people have done?" Corpulent Mondo's response? He never said a word and merely shrugged his shoulders and continued to stare at the floor. Wow, a true leader. Disgusted, the store manager told Mondo, "This inventory is over," and we RGIS people quietly slunk out of the store and drove away. In front of the customer we had to appear chastened and a little sorry over the poor job we had done but secretly I was elated and relished the verbal clobbering that rotund Mondo had received.

Foul: When rumor had it in our district that malodorous Mondo was to be made the new Associate Area Manager, most of us didn't believe it. We couldn't imagine Mondo ever being able to scrub enough gunk off his huge moldy body in order to appear halfway decent as a dress-shirt-and-necktie-clad AAM. After all, it was Mondo who claimed that the reason he smelled so bad was because he was too fat to fit into his bathtub at home. That's why he never ever bathed, and that's why he smelled like a two-week old corpse on a hot summer day. How on earth would he be able to wash the funk off his carcass, if he couldn't take a bath? Helpful auditor Anna thought she had the solution. She offered to buy Mondo a shower attachment that he could hook up to the bathtub spigot. I guess she figured mammoth Mondo could sit on the edge of his tub and sprinkle himself with water, and thus wash some of the goo off himself that way.

Anna should have known better. Nauseating Mondo wasn't the least bit interested in improving himself in any way; not even if it meant moving his bulk up the corporate RGIS ladder. He was totally illogical and more than a little retarded in thinking that he could be both filthy and an AAM. Mondo said, "No thanks" to the shower attachment, and continued on his greasy way. He was eventually made an AAM, but that only lasted a few weeks, natch.

Fat: Jumbo Mondo used to have a terrible time during our summer inventories. We might be closeted in a stuffy Mervyn's back room for hours, scanning boxes of socks and racks of shirts. The atmosphere would be quite uncomfortable, as we usually did most of these inventories after hours, when the store's air-conditioning system had already been automatically shut off for the night. Most of us human-sized auditors were a bit uncomfortable, but for someone as massive as Mondo it was torture. He would be standing there, pawing through cartons of tube socks while the sweat just poured down his body in oily rivulets. TL Eric noticed the sweat gushing from Mondo's king size carcass and told him that he (Mondo) was going to melt into a puddle. "No, a puddle's too small," Eric corrected himself. "You're going to melt into a pond. We should call you Pondo." Mondo Pondo was not amused. Again, he could make fun of himself but he hated it when anyone else did it.

Feeble: Once a bunch of us were meeting at the office to commute to an early morning, out of town Long's Drugs inventory. This was during the time that half-witted District Manager Kevin was still having us park our cars in the tiny parking lot that surrounded our RGIS district office and a few other retail businesses. Kevin stood in the parking lot and directed auditors to park their cars at the other end of the lot, near Burger King. When Mondo pulled into the lot Kevin pointed towards Burger King. Mondo never stopped his Jeep. He drove to the other end of the parking lot and out the exit near Burger King, and disappeared into the early morning darkness.

It was so funny to see simpleton Kevin standing there in the middle of the parking lot with his mouth hanging open. He had no idea where Mondo had gone. In a panic he called Mondo's house but no one was there. He asked Mondo's hateful brother TL Luis where he thought Mondo might have gone, but Luis hadn't a clue. Finally DM Kevin had no choice but to leave for the inventory, minus his bloated TL Mondo.

When we reached the San Anselmo Long's Drugs about 45 minutes later, there was Mondo parked in front of the store. When questioned about his disappearance Mondo told us that when he saw Kevin pointing to the other end of the parking lot he thought Kevin wanted him to drive to the store himself. What a moron! But typical Mondo.

Foul: After we had finished an inventory in neighboring district Vallejo one night Mondo drove a company van full of us Santa Rosa auditors back to the Park-N-Ride. Riding with Mondo as a driver was always an adventure in terror, as he was both a horrible driver and a smelly one. You most definitely did not want to be sitting downwind of him, as one whiff of his gaseous fumes and you were a goner. Plus, as though his foul stench wasn't bad enough, he had a tendency to take every turn on two wheels. So one way or another you thought you were gonna die with Mondo driving.

One newbie riding in the van was already wise to the ways of repugnant Mondo. This became apparent when she told Mondo, "Hey Mondo, guess what? I had my shoe in your pants pocket." (This was not as difficult as it sounds. Two-ton Mondo flattened the driver's seat when he sat in it; his gargantuan ass was mere inches from the floor of the van) The newbie, sitting in the middle of the first bench seat, could by stretching her legs place a shoe tip in Mondo's pants pocket. One guy told her, "I'm surprised your shoe didn't melt." The newbie replied, "I'm surprised I got a shoe back." Once again, everyone laughed except for odious Mondo. Score one for the newbie.

Fat: As you may have already guessed, beefy Mondo had an enormous appetite. I once had the displeasure of riding with him to another out of town inventory. I had to ride sitting next to him in his stinky Jeep. Mondo couldn't even make it out of the office parking lot without getting something to eat. He stopped at the Burger King a few doors down from the RGIS office and ordered a double Whopper and a vat of Coca-Cola from the drive-up window. I watched in horror as he unwrapped the burger (I'm surprised he didn't just eat right through the paper) and took one, two, three, four bites without stopping or breathing and bam! the burger was gone. I mean that fat slob downed that enormous double cheeseburger in less than a minute. It was a most terrifying and disgusting sight. After seeing that nightmare I lost my own appetite for a couple of days. And after that ride with him I took care to keep my arms and legs safely away from Mondo's vicinity. Who knew when he might be hungry and need to feed again? What if we were doing a late night inventory and all the Burger Kings were closed? I didn't want to lose a limb.

Some stores that we inventoried would provide us with snacks if we took a break, and pizza or sandwiches if we took a lunch. Most of the Long's Drugs stores would give us coffee and doughnuts for our one and only break. We started counting at Long's around 5:30 am, and three hours later when we took our break the thought of a cup of hot coffee and a jelly doughnut was most appealing. Most of the auditors would take just one doughnut but then, we were human beings and not farm animals. Mondo, on the other hand, was like a pig at a trough during these Long's breaks. He saw nothing wrong in barrelling right into the store's break room and grabbing four or five doughnuts, all before any of us had even had one. He had his snout right into those pink bakery boxes, rooting around for the choicest pastries. Again, you had to be careful and not get your hands close to his mouth, lest you lose a finger.

Even foggy DM Kevin was aware of Mondo's greedy ways. Whenever we did a Kmart inventory in Santa Rosa the store was nice enough to provide us with pizzas and sodas for our half-hour lunch (This Kmart had a Little Caesar's pizza restaurant inside the store. I wouldn't touch the pizza after I'd heard that one customer recently vomited blood in the restaurant after eating the pizza. A special cleaning crew had to be called in, and thereafter I referred to the Little Caesar's pizza as "Haz-Mat pizza"). When Kevin called a lunch break he made sure to tell The Foul One, "Remember, only two pieces, Mondo." Kevin wanted to make sure that Mondo didn't inhale all of the pizza. Which he was perfectly capable of doing.

Gluttonous Mondo and pizza had quite a love affair going. While Mondo was known to consume anything (burgers, doughnuts, candy bars, possibly a small child or two) he held a special place in his oily heart for pizza. I don't think that he or his brother Luis (who lived with Mondo) knew how to cook. I believe they mostly ordered in food. I think Mondo would order a couple of pizzas at a time, and eat one immediately and save the second one for later. He wouldn't refrigerate the second pizza but instead would park it in his cold oven. He claimed it tasted better a day or two or a week later. Mondo called this "fermented" pizza. Puke!

Fat: If you had 450 lb. sweaty, greasy, smelly man asking you for a ride in your car, would give him one? Of course not. You would take pity on your poor vehicle and never think to transport something as foul as Mondo in it. Which is why Mondo could never catch a ride with anyone except his brother Luis, or maybe the company van; it was large and sturdy enough to withstand his enormous bulk. Luis' car, like everyone else's , was of average size and not really meant to cart around a hippopotamus, but Luis was Mondo's brother and couldn't refuse him a ride.

Which is why one morning several of us were treated to a most amusing sight. Me and a couple of auditors were in a car right behind Luis' car on the freeway. Even if you hadn't seen Mondo a few minutes earlier climbing into Luis' car, you would know immediately upon seeing the car that Mondo was riding in it as the car appeared to be driving along on two wheels. It was really funny to see this car tipping precariously to one side as it traveled slowly down the freeway. I mean, you almost expected to see it stop suddenly and about 30 clowns come piling out of it. But no, there was only one clown inside the car, the sad, pitiful, bloated, oily clown known as Mondo.

The Road Warriors?

2006-08-19T09:39:00.000-07:00

Here's another little memo that was sent out to all the auditors in my district. It was written by our then District Manager, Kevin. If you can read between the lines (and with my help you will be able to do just that), it gives you a perfect example of just how phony and lame and retarded Kevin was. The memo is reprinted here verbatim (that includes its incredibly stupid title). All comments in bold and italics are mine.

THE SANTA ROSA ROAD WARRIORS

DISTRICT 414

To the best RGIS Inventory Specialists I have ever worked with (this week. What a phony, smarmy little suckup). During the past few weeks, you have all shown me why I became an RGIS Manager (because Santa Rosa was hard up and desperate for managers). You all display the attitude and desire necessary for a team to be the best it can be (Okay, now this is just outright lying here. How did Kevin write this without his pants catching on fire?) As the teamwork improves (it didn't), you must all continue to strive to be the best (dream on). The new auditors that have recently joined us seem to possess the same attributes that many of you offer (you mean they suffer from apathy, cynicism and distrust too?), make sure you embrace these individuals (okay, sure, I'll just run right over and give a newbie a great big hug and sloppy kiss).

You must all lead by example by strictly adhering to the dress code and all other policies (oh, I guess that means Erin can't wear her bedroom slippers to inventories anymore). More team members does not mean less work (unless of course the district hires some young chicks that Area Manager Joe wants to bang and so therefore said girls get screwed and get more work and the rest of us get screwed over and get less work). A larger team will ensure we can continue to minimize the slow time (not with the retards that this district hires). We are improving in Albertson's (translation: We didn't fuck up the inventory in this store too badly this time) and get ready because now we are taking on Home Depot (poor Home Depot). We have been selected to be the core team for all Northern California Home Depot's (and again, poor Home Depot). I will be looking for the most professional, accurate and efficient (I guess that means you won't be looking in our district). These are the same characteristics I look at when writing the schedule (What are you talking about? You don't even write the schedule, idiot. AM Joe does). I look forward to working toward the future with all of you (that is, until you wig out and have to enter rehab, right Kevin?).

Now in order for us to enter the future (oh, good, we're entering the future, because I thought we were going to step into Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine and travel to ancient Greece and inventory the Parthenon), we must establish some rules that will not affect most of you (then why send us this retarded memo?). You have all received an Attendance Policy Acknowledgement form. This is going to eliminate the problem we have all experienced (oh, somehow I doubt that, since most people ignored the Attendance Policy form and didn't even bother to sign and return it), when a four-hour job turns into eight (and Kevin loses his bonus for fucking up yet another Long's Drugs run). That may be OK for some people when we are slow, you get the extra hours (and this will make up for the times when AM Joe screws us over and gives our stores to another one of the girls he's chasing after). But what about when we have Sears or Long's the next morning (and only five people show up for a 25 person inventory). These are the times when the entire team feels the pain (er, not the entire team. Just the ones who actually work. The F.O.J.'s {Friends of Joe} will I'm sure feel no pain as they probably won't even show up at Sears or Long's the next morning. And if they do show up, I'm sure their 2 dozen self-called smoke breaks will help to ease their "pain").

This also impacts our ability to supply the quality service RGIS Inventory Specialists is known for (quality service? Are you kidding me? This has got to be a joke). This attendance policy will be enforced (don't make me laugh. Nothing was ever "enforced" in this district). Do not test the water (gross Mondo may have sat in it first). This will improve our ability to function as a team (oh man, what was Kevin on when he wrote this? When did Santa Rosa ever function as a team? Never with Kevin and Joe as managers). Let's improve the quality of life for everyone involved (okay, how about we start with getting rid of you, Kevin?).

We must have the Attendance Policy, the back page of the Handbook and your schedules confirmed by Wednesday July 12 (or else we will nag you and nag you until you turn them in or we forget all about it, whichever happens first). Be sure to call the office if any of this will be a problem (Ring! Ring!). Lack of response will result in termination (a flat out lie. More than half the crew refused to sign the Attendance Policy and still remained with the district).

Thank You,

Kevin *****

District Manager

Santa Rosa

July 7, 2000

Fear And Loathing In District 414 (Part 2)

2006-08-12T09:36:00.000-07:00

Once we arrived at the Penney's store in Fairfield our district was assigned an entire floor to ourselves. AM Joe seemed flustered and more than a little upset as he attempted to unload and set up audit machines, lasers and rays, and to place auditors in various departments. Joe would be supervising a few of the Santa Rosa people in the housewares department, while two-ton Mondo would be supervising the rest of the crew in children's clothing. Normally I would be immediately placed in the housewares area, where a lot of the merchandise (towels, sheets, etc.) was quantity counted. But I was so ticked off at Joe that I wanted to be as far away from him as possible, so instead of waiting to be placed in a specific area, I just went over to infant's sleepwear and started scanning away.

In addition to the whole pervert AM Dave/asshole AM Joe debacle, there was an unintentionally hilarious subplot going on involving blob Mondo. In light of Dave being fired that very day and thus causing our district to be dangerously short of managers, Ops Manager Sai had done the unthinkable and promoted putrid Mondo to the Associate Area Manager position. Of course this was an absolutely horrendous idea, as anyone who has been reading this blog (and is by now familiar with Hindenburg Mondo) knows. Given that Mondo's revolting hygiene problem was such that it has caused more than one RGIS customer to ban him from their stores, and of course had caused many an RGIS auditor to want to vomit, it would seem absolutely ridiculous that Sai would give Mondo the AAM spot. But much to everyone's shock and disbelief, there was Mondo in J.C. Penney's, beaming from ear to greasy ear as he proudly informed everyone that he was our new AAM. Would this nightmare never end?

Of course, Mondo could never fit into the dress shirt and necktie that is required of all male RGIS managers. I couldn't for the life of me picture his massive oily bulk squeezing into any human-size dress shirt. And I was right, as Mondo showed up in Penney's wearing a surprisingly clean (and humongous) grey and black pullover sweater. This was his rather pitiful attempt at adhering to the manager's dress code. It also was apparently his only article of halfway decent clothing as he wore that same sweater in every inventory he attended for the next three weeks. And without any laundering of the sweater too (natch), so that with each subsequent inventory the sweater got a little more grimier and a little more funkier smelling. Barf.

And too, his lone pair of khaki pants, which he had laundered right before the Penney's inventory (I'm surprised they didn't disintegrate in the wash) began to once again sport those old familiar stains in all the old familiar places. And yes, in case you were wondering, of course foul Mondo never bathed his massive oily carcass during that time either, so after 3 weeks the green biohazard fumes were once again rising in thick waves from his reeking body. Despite Mondo's fervent wishes and desires for that coveted AAM job, that fat loser couldn't even manage to keep himself clean for a scant 3 weeks. Even Ops Manager Sai, desperate for a new AAM to take his place so he could split from Santa Rosa, realized that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and the whole "Mondo as an AAM" fiasco quietly faded away.

But before gross Mondo's AAM dreams were shattered, he still had an opportunity to make a good impression in his first inventory as an Associate Area Manager. That night at J.C. Penney's in Fairfield saw Mondo start off somewhat clean and resplendent in his new pullover sweater that tented his half-ton body. He was so proud of himself: after 10+ years as an oily auditor and even oilier Team Leader, he was finally being given a chance to prove that he could be a manager. He was full of goodwill and cheer, and all smiles. At the beginning of the inventory that is. Thirty minutes later Mondo was sweating like a hog and had already screamed at three people for miscounting. So much for good intentions.

In the meantime I was still smarting about the whole Joe-and-the-parking-favoritism thing. With every rack of toddler's pajamas that I scanned I got angrier and angrier (Mondo used to say that it was a TL or Manager's goal to get an auditor angry, but not too angry, and then he would be at just the right amount of outrage to start counting at a furious pace. That auditor would finish an area twice as fast as he normally would have, having been pushed just to the brink of furiousness, but not over the edge). For the past several years I had watched AM Joe allow his pet auditors to do as they pleased at work. The F.O.J.'s (Friends Of Joe) exercised lax attendance at inventories and stepped outside for numerous smoke breaks, all with tacit permission form Joe. And now Joe was blatantly allowing Gerry and Romy to park at the office when he had just told the entire district that no one was to park there. After a while I felt like a volcano about to erupt. I had to talk to someone about this or the top of my head was going to pop off.

I turned and spoke to the person scanning next to me. That person happened to be Anna, and I realized later that that might not have been the best decision to make on my part. Anna was hardly objective when it came to crises at work, especially ones involving managers. But all the hot, resentful lava bubbling inside me sort of muddled my thinking and I sought Anna's opinion on the matter. I asked her, "If you were upset at someone for something they did, would you tell them, or would you just forget about it?" Anna, ever a fan of confrontations and showdowns, said promptly, "Tell them about it. It won't do you any good to keep it inside. It'll just get worse and worse until you speak to the person who ticked you off. Who was it?" When I told her it was Joe she was ecstatic. Anna had a crush/hate relationship with Joe, with heavy leaning to the hate side, when the crush part of it yielded no results from Joe. She could scarcely contain her glee as she told me, "You have to tell him! Right now! You have to tell Joe that you're mad at him, and why! Right now! Go!" And she practically pushed me halfway across the store.

I went looking for AM Joe and found him standing next to a section filled with curtain rods. I asked Joe if I could speak with him for a minute and he said yes. We walked over to the luggage section, which had already been counted earlier in the evening and was now quiet and devoid of auditors. I told Joe what had been bothering me all night. "Why is it that you let Gerry and Romy park at the office? I thought no one was supposed to part there anymore." Joe immediately replied, "Well, Gerry drives that really old Blazer and he was afraid it wouldn't make it to the Park-N-Ride, so I told him it would be okay to park at the office." And Romy? "Well, Romy was hanging out with me earlier, so it just made sense for him to park at the office too." And of course all of this was said by Joe while wearing his customary bullshitting mask: an innocent expression and bland smile.

Now normally right here is where I would have just backed down and mumbled something very meekly like, "Oh okay I see, I understand thanks", and then scurried away quietly with my tail between my legs. But fired up with extra anger, resentment and generous egging on by Anna I said, "Joe, I don't feel like those are very good reasons for allowing those guys to park there. For one thing, in case you didn't notice, I drive an old car too. In fact, most of the other auditors here tonight do as well. I'm sure most of us would find it would be easier on our cars to park at the office. What makes Gerry so special that he can park there and we can't? And also, it's just not fair to let a few people park there when no one is supposed to, for any reason, you know? It's just not right."

For a few seconds AM Joe had this expression on his face of complete bewilderment. It was as though he'd been smacked in the head with a 2x4 (Well, I can dream, can't I?). He seemed stunned that someone, especially a pushover like myself, would be confronting and challenging him on something, anything, even something as minor as parking regulations. But the amazed expression on his face didn't last as anger began to take over. Remember, with all of the turmoil regarding AM Dave's firing from RGIS earlier that day, combined DM Dan getting fired shortly before that and then Ops Manager Sai having Joe jumping through hoops, this probably was not the best time to be trying Joe's patience. Joe turned red as a tomato, scowled, and began to shout at me.

And I mean he really let 'er rip. He yelled that he really didn't need this right now, that he had his hands full, what with Dan and Dave both getting fired, and he was at the office all by himself (what about Sai?). Joe continued ranting, going on an on about how no one had told him about AM Dave's Roman hands and Russian fingers (in addition to being a child molester Dave was also accused by auditors Anna and Tina of some inappropriate touching), someone should have said something to him, blah blah blah. Yeah, like that would have done any good. Had Joe been informed of this or anything else it would have caused him to pull his ostrich act and just bury his head in the ground. His specialty was ignoring problems and pretending they didn't exist.

AM Joe was really warmed up now and he showed no signs of slowing down. He continued to shout at me, saying that Gerry had come to him with genuine car troubles (sob), and so to be a nice guy (!) he had said sure, go ahead and park at the office...and then Joe told me, "You know, if you had wanted to park there (at the office) you could have said something to me (no I couldn't. The difference between me and the F.O.J.'s was that I wouldn't try to obtain special privileges that others didn't have. If no one could park at the office, then all of us should have abided by that). If you knew what was going on with Dave you should have said something to me (what?), someone should have said something." Um, someone did, remember? Anna had documentation from the sheriff's department regarding Dave's criminal record and you still did nothing, asshole. But I couldn't say this to Joe at this point because he was out of control and I wasn't about to risk losing an eye or something saying anything more. I just let him continue to bellow. Which he did. "Because you know I have an open door policy (total horseshit. Yeah sure, technically the door to AM Joe's office was open, but that didn't matter as Joe's mind was firmly closed) and you or anyone can talk to me anytime, but nobody said a word and now I have all this shit going on and I'm about this close (thumb and forefinger pressed tightly together) to quitting! I've done it before and I can do it again! I quit once before, did you know that? I don't need this right now!"

Wow. That was the first time I had ever seen AM Joe display that much emotion. Usually his countenance was about as expressive as a rock. He was really out of control and I was genuinely afraid to press my arguments further, so with all my righteous-driven courage completely dissipated I backed down and slunk away, having accomplished nothing. Joe really scared the crap out of me that night. I felt as though if I had pushed just one more of his buttons he might have really gone berserk and then popped me one. Now that would have been interesting. Two managers from the same district fired in the same day.

My guess as to why Joe reacted in that totally irrational way was not just due to all of the district shenanigans going on recently. I think it mainly had to do with the fact that he hated being criticized, just hated it. Joe believed wholeheartedly in his image as Mr. Wonderful and wanted "his" auditors to think so too. And most of us did when we first started in the district. "Joe Cool" would seem to be efficient and busy in inventories, and he would take a few of us into his confidence sometimes, telling us about how weak and lame former District Manager Kevin and AM Dave were at their jobs. He would make you feel "in the loop" about district goings-on, in that he could share his private opinions of his fellow managers with you, as though he valued your thoughts and opinions on the same subject. Of course, later on we would find out that he would then turn around and make disparaging remarks about us too, to others. And then too, his blatant favoritism regarding the F.O.J.'s really began to spin out of control once DM Dan left.

So the Mr. Perfect image of Joe's didn't last for very long. Bit by bit his facade of being this great guy began to fade, and as it did so too did his power and hold over the Santa Rosa district. My confrontation with him, as ineffective as it seemed to be at the time, turned out to be one of the first cracks in Joe's long smooth run as the King of District 414. No longer did one of his formerly faithful (read fooled) subjects believe in him and blindly accept whatever bullshit he tried to feed us. I was now as determined as Anna to set things right and this meant shedding the district of that louse AM Joe. Game on.

Fear And Loathing In District 414 (Part 1)

2006-08-05T09:51:00.000-07:00

With Dan having been let go by RGIS that left Santa Rosa without a District Manager. Oh sure, we had two Area Managers, Joe and Dave, but both were incapable of running a district, albeit for different reasons. Joe was simply too immature to handle the responsibility of heading up an entire RGIS district, and Dave was too slow-witted. He could barely handle his scant duties as an AM. It was ludicrous to think that he could ever be a DM.

So while the search for a new DM for us began, one of our Northwest Division's Operations Managers, a man named Sai, stepped in to temporarily fill in the DM's shoes. I say "stepped in", but it was more like he was pushed in to the job by his bosses, as Sai was lukewarm to the idea of having to be a DM, temporarily or otherwise. The long drive he had to make every day from his home in Pleasanton to Santa Rosa and back again probably had something to do with it, but I like to think that the prospect of having to deal with a district filled with fuckups who couldn't count worth shit and malcontents who could care less about anything inventory-related must have filled Sai with dread. He probably wished that he could have avoided his new position as our temporary DM like the plague, but no such luck for him. He was stuck with us.

And as it turned out, he was stranded in District 414 for a good while. Apparently the search for a new DM for our happy little district was experiencing some difficulties. For some strange reason no one was leaping at the chance to head up the Santa Rosa district. Hmmm, how odd. Could our reputation have preceded us?

There was only one person apparently who had shown any inclination or desire to be our new DM, and horrors, it was our Area Manager Joe. Despite his declarations of the past, that he had wanted no part of becoming a DM, something apparently had happened in the interim to cause Joe to (foolishly) believe that he was finally ready to handle the duties of being a DM. Maybe it was the unpleasant (for Joe, delightful for the rest of us) experience of having had former DM Dan step into our district and take over the reins, leaving Joe impotent and powerless. He probably wanted no more interference in "his" district and decided once and for all to run the whole district his way. But Sai and the other Ops Managers wisely had some doubts as to whether or not Joe would be suitable for the DM spot, and held back on promoting him for AM to DM.

So during the period of time that Sai was in my district as the temporary DM, it was a sort of long term audition for Joe. Being in the Santa Rosa RGIS office every day gave Sai a great opportunity to observe first hand how Joe handled things like the almighty master schedule, and crises like inventories running long, auditor no shows, etc. Joe was unused to being so closely watched and it was driving him crazy. I think he would have pulled his hair out, had said hair been allowed to grow longer than his customary buzz cut. He was clearly frustrated at not being given the DM job immediately, and having Sai watching him like a hawk was driving him to the point of distraction. During the time that Sai was in Santa Rosa we had several of our Long's Drugs inventories to do. Usually each Long's inventory would be run by one manager like Joe. But of course, since Sai was having Joe go through his DM tryouts he was right there in the Long's stores as well, much to Joe's consternation. For Sai wasn't only observing Joe, he was also interfering in the inventories as well. Joe would tell an auditor to count in this aisle, then Sai would come along and tell the auditor to go count somewhere else. Joe would tell his crew to start at this end of the store and count, and Sai would tell everyone to start at the other end. Joe would say this, and Sai would say that. It was driving everyone nuts, not just Joe. Pretty soon all the auditors started wishing Sai would leave the district and go back to the Ops office.

But Sai wasn't going anywhere soon because a major crisis was about to erupt in my district. For some time auditor Anna had been at odds with AM Dave. I wasn't sure how it began, but at some point Anna began to develop and nourish a personal hatred and vendetta against Dave. She diverted her time and interests from getting rid of Joe and turned it on full blast towards Dave.

From what I gathered (thanks to Anna's inability to keep a confidence), Dave's daughter Kim had intimated to Anna that Dave had a checkered past. According to Anna, Kim told her that Dave was a registered sex offender. Several years earlier, Dave had been charged with one count of unlawful sexual misconduct with a minor under the age of 14. He had pled no contest to this charge, and as a part of the whole deal, he had to register as a sex offender and agree to not work in any job that would allow him to come in contact with anyone under the age of 21. Our district had several people in their late teens working for RGIS, usually during their summer vacation months, so of course this was quite a problem.

The part about AM Dave being a registered sex offender was bad enough, but what happened after AM Joe and Ops Manager Sai found out was even worse. Anna, wanting to verify this information that Kim gave her, went to the local sheriff's office where the Megan's Law database for the State of California was on file (this database file wasn't online at that time, as it is now). If you're not familiar with it, Megan's Law gives people the opportunity to research whether there are any registered sex offenders living in their neighborhood. A person can search through this database by entering in someone's name. They can also search by using a city, county or zip code. Anna had Dave's name of course, and his home address as well. She printed out all the unsavory facts on AM Dave and took a copy to our RGIS office. She handed over the printout to AM Joe and Ops Manager Sai. I think she expected them to fire Dave on the spot. Well, that didn't exactly happen.

According to Anna, she went home upon leaving the district office, but she had an uneasy feeling about the whole thing. She said that the rather casual manner in which Joe and Sai had received the disturbing information regarding Dave bothered her, so later that same day she placed a call to RGIS' head office to find out if Joe and/or Sai contacted them. Anna was told that no, they hadn't heard a thing from our district office, and indeed the representative she spoke with sounded upset about the matter. She asked Anna to fax her a copy of Dave's info from the Megan's Law database. Anna did so immediately, and then and only then was Dave fired (Anna said that Dave had also lied on his original RGIS application, concerning the question "Have you ever been convicted?").

It was quite obvious to everyone in the district what had happened. We were right in the middle of the most busiest of times for any inventory service, January through February. Our district, stretched thin as it was, with auditors being hired and then quitting left and right, with scant Team Leaders being able to run stores and us still without a proper DM, all had caused AM Joe and Ops Manager Sai to panic at the thought of losing an AM, even one who was a registered sex offender. It was everyone's belief that Joe and Sai fully intended to hang onto AM Dave until after the busy season, and then let him go. But by Anna going behind their backs and contacting RGIS' head office, she foiled their nefarious plans and they had to fire Dave that day.

So now District 414 was down to one AM, an Ops Manager who most definitely did not want to be there and a couple of Team Leaders. The Santa Rosa district was imploding before our eyes. I myself took a rather sadistic delight in watching it crash and burn. I was enjoying it wholeheartedly, so much so that I decided to get in on the fun.

The very day that pervy AM Dave was let go was also a day when most of us Santa Rosa auditors had to go and bail out the Vallejo district in their J.C. Penney's store. Due to former DM Kevin's screwups and failures in choosing a proper new district office, we could no longer park at our RGIS office but instead had to park at a commuter lot 8 miles away in another city. This was inconvenient to most of us, but AM Joe was adamant about no one parking at the office. So imagine my surprise when a bunch of us were standing in the commuter parking lot waiting for the company vans, and AM Joe pulled into the lot in his car. Inside his car were his girlfriend Muong and best pals Gerry and Romy.

Now Muong being in the car I could understand, as she was Joe's live-in girlfriend and of course rode to the office with him. But Gerry and Romy? What made them so damned special that they could park at the office when the rest of us couldn't? Oh...right. They were F.O.J.'s (Friends Of Joe). They could do as they pleased.

I did a slow burn all the way to Fairfield. It pissed me off to no end that this favoritism of Joe's went on and on and never seemed to end. I had stood by and watched and said nothing as time and time again that asshole Joe let Gerry and Romy and TL Eric practically get away with murder. I watched Joe let his pals take breaks whenever they wanted to, show up late and leave early, not show up at all, and all without so much as a peep from Joe. But this was the last straw. After Joe and Sai had made it absolutely clear to us that no one was to park at the office, two of his favored pets blatantly parked there. Shit! I didn't give a rat's ass if Joe was stressed out from the whole pervy Dave mess. I was going to confront him on his favoritism tonight.

(Coming up: Part 2.)

Killing Yourself (Almost) For RGIS

2006-07-29T10:33:00.000-07:00

Can you remember ever putting your life in danger while working for RGIS? I mean, did you ever risk life or limb or lungs climbing up on unsteady ladders, standing on broken milk crates, or perhaps inhaling toxic fumes, all in order to scan a bar code or count every last bottle of cough syrup?

There were many times I can recall almost causing some bodily injury to myself while on the job as an auditor. Take standing on milk crates for instance. Even though this was expressly forbidden by RGIS (according to the Auditor's Handbook) we all knew the real deal. In my district our managers never provided us with enough step ladders to use so if we wanted to count all the products on the top shelf in, say, a grocery store, we had to grab a plastic milk crate from the store's back room to stand on. Of course, milk crates were not meant to be stood on and were most decidely unsafe. You had to be extremely careful when you climbed onto a milk crate, making sure you placed your feet not in the dead center of the crate but sort of to the sides, nearer the edge, where the crate was a little bit sturdier. If you stood in the center your feet might break right through the flimsy plastic webbing. And if you weren't careful climbing up onto the milk crate it could go sliding out from under you and you might go crashing to the floor. Ouch.

We always had to use milk crates when we were counting in Food 4 Less, and I can recall numerous times stepping up onto a milk crate and having said crate shoot out from under me because the floors were so highly waxed that they were dangerously slippery. Oh, and let's not allow those waxed floors to go without comment. We always started a Food 4 Less inventory at 4:00 am, when the 24-hour grocery store was almost devoid of customers. My district had three Food 4 Less stores to do, and I hated doing the Santa Rosa one because they always waxed the floors during the inventory. I mean, the minute we set out on the sales floor to count some Food 4 Less pinhead employee would fire up the waxer and start polishing the floors. For them it was like a signal or something. "Oh, I see burgundy polos out on the floor. Time to start waxing!" It was horrible. The waxer was a hideous machine, sounding like ten lawn mowers and belching more smoke than a coal factory. The Food 4 Less idiot who operated the waxer would come down an aisle I was counting in, getting so close that I swear the waxer brushed the heels of my shoes more than once. Getting run over by a floor waxer was not my idea of fun so I would complain to Team Leader Mondo, which was a complete waste of time as that blob of lard was so afraid of authority and confrontations that he wouldn't say a word to store management. So every time we did a Food 4 Less inventory in Santa Rosa we had to dodge the floor waxer.

Even when we had ladders to stand on in a store, we still had no guarantees of safety. In some stores like CSK (auto parts) the ladders were too short for the back room shelves, and we had to stand on the very top rung of the ladder to reach the top shelf. Yes, the top rung, the one that has the sticker on it that says "Warning! Do not stand on. Unsafe!" But I must, as my Area Manager told me to make sure I count every last gasket and spark plug!

Also a danger in a CSK inventory were the bottles of various auto cleansers and oils and other liquids that you had to pick up and scan. There were always a few leaky bottles, and often green or blue or brown fluids would drip onto my hands or clothing. It could make a person kind of nervous, especially when the bottle had a skull and crossbones on the label and read "Warning! Highly toxic!" So whenever this happened I would rush into the bathroom to wash off the green or blue or brown goo. Of course, the bathrooms in these CSK stores were always incredibly filthy, with thick layers of black grit covering every surface, including the bar of green industrial soap in the sink. Oftentimes there would be no paper towels, so you had to dry your hands on your pants. And do I need to say that one never wanted to use the toilet in a CSK? Their bathrooms were more toxic than any leaky bottles out on the sales floor.

Another place with suspicious fluids to count was a strange little place called Vencare RX. I was never quite sure what this place was. Was it a store? A laboratory? Who knows. It was an odd, dinky little place, kind of like a business office with a few shelves and a couple of mini refrigerators that held bottles and vials of mysterious fluids and powders to count. I never knew what the hell were in those bottles and tubes that I was handling. I would ask Mondo, who usually ran the Vencare RX inventories, and he would say, "I dunno." Okay, thanks, that helps. I could have been holding a vial of anthrax and not have known it. Not likely of course, but it's interesting to think about.

Back to the ladders. The extremely tall ones we used in the back rooms of the Target stores always made me nervous. They reached nearly to the ceiling and when you stood on the top step you never wanted to look down, lest you grow dizzy and tumble off. We used the same kind of ladders on the sales floors of Best Buy, to reach the top stock. To save time a Best Buy employee would push a RGIS auditor around the sales floors (the ladders were on wheels), so the RGIS person wouldn't have to climb down, move the ladder, and climb back up again. This was a nice thing to do by the Best Buy employees, but it too made me nervous as I could easily picture the Best Buy guy who was pushing the ladder stumbling over something and causing me to go flying over the short safety railing on the ladder and landing smack on the floor. Auditor clean-up in aisle 5!

Working as an RGIS auditor almost got me electrocuted once. We were doing an inventory for Spencern, a Halloween supply store. This was a few days after Halloween, and the early November day was cold and rainy. The store was temporarily set up in an old building that used to be a Good Guys store. It was a decrepit old building that had a leaky roof. When I went to count some rubber masks along one wall I could see water coming through the ceiling and dripping dangerously close to some extension cords still plugged into a wall socket. I very carefully steered clear of this area. I liked my job (most of the time) but not enough to fry for it. I never did see who ended up counting the area but they must have made it through okay, as I didn't notice anyone walking around burnt to a crisp.

The most outrageous incident I experienced regarding safety in the workplace occurred in a Home Depot inventory. I was assigned to count a large bin that contained incredibly long plastic pipes. There were dozens and dozens of these pipes standing on end, and they were crammed so tightly into the bin that I couldn't move them around to see how many of them there were. I told one of the many RGIS managers there that day about this problem (we had several districts helping us out in this large store) and her solution was to have me stand on the tines of a forklift and ride up to the ceiling of the store, so that I could look down on the tops of the pipes and count them that way. I told the RGIS Area Manager that there was no way on earth I was going to do that. I mean, I wasn't going to risk breaking my neck by doing this extremely unsafe act all so that I could count some plastic pipes. The AM actually got annoyed with me because I refused to try and commit suicide by forklift and said to me, "Well, someone has to do it." I told her, "It's not going to be me," and walked away. I found out later that she ordered some poor unknowing newbie to stand on the forklift and ride it up to the ceiling. Fortunately the guy didn't fall and go splat on the cement floor. This time. Gee, I wonder what OSHA would say if they knew about this?

It's All In The Mind

2006-07-15T10:29:00.000-07:00

Several auditors in my district were completely delusional when it came to their beliefs in their own powers of attraction. I've mentioned some in previous blog entries, like Blimp Mondo's yearning for skinny Pepper, Hobo Gerry and Troll-faced Romy's desires for young Nicole, and Psycho Anna's crazed coveting of AM Joe.

Another hilarious example of an RGIS auditor's hallucinatory ideas regarding themselves and their crush happened in my district. I warn you, it is funny, but it's also a bit frightening too.

The auditor was named Shannon. She was a woman in her fifties, who sported shoulder-length frizzy grey hair and a wrinkle-filled, scrunched-in, peach-fuzz-laden face. Her body was even more frightening. It looked as though a sack of potatoes had been covered with an RGIS polo. Shannon had extremely poor posture and would constantly stand with her shoulders rolled inward and her back hunched over. She looked like Quasimodo with an audit machine and laser gun. And as if that weren't scary enough she also had a pair of breasts that hung almost to her waist. Someone once said that Shannon actually wore a bra but no one else in the district believed it.

This ghastly-looking old crone of an auditor fell hard for a young Team Leader (or was it AM?) named Marty. Again, another perfect example of a person being completely out of someone's league. And being completely out of her mind. There was no way in hell that a young guy would ever look once, much less twice at an old crumpled hag like Shannon. But that didn't stop Shannon from mooning over Marty like a lovesick puppy dog. It really gave one the willies to think that Shannon could be so completely out of her mind as to believe that she stood a chance with Marty. How could someone be that irrational, I wondered. I mean, didn't she have any mirrors in her home? Couldn't she see that any guy in his right mind would run screaming from her nightmarish appearance? It was so ridiculous of Shannon the be mooning over this guy that one had to feel sorry for her.

Shannon's wild desires for Marty at one point reached such a fever pitch that she actually went out and purchased a set of revealing lingerie and sent it to Marty, along with a note that said something like "Wouldn't you like to see me in this?" Eeuwww!!! Try to imagine a hunched-over, lumpy old woman with breasts resting by her navel in racy, lacy underwear. What a horrifying picture!

Marty finally had had enough of Shannon's truly bloodcurdling behavior. After she sent him the lingerie and that terrifying note Shannon was called into the district office and told to stop her demented stalking behavior. If she didn't she would be fired.

As far as I know, Shannon didn't send any more hair-raising notes or any more packages of underwear to Marty, but she didn't stop her obsessive longing for Marty either. And Marty was perfectly aware of this, because when he eventually left the Santa Rosa district and transferred to the Hawaii RGIS district he left explicit instructions regarding Shannon. He said that in the event Shannon ever tried out for and won the annual RGIS Top Gun contest, she was not to be awarded the prize, which was a two week stay in Hawaii, working for the RGIS district there. He was that terrified of her. And who could blame him? What young guy would want an old lumpy mess like Shannon chasing after him? In lacy bra and panties no less. Eeeekkk!!!

One more thing: it got even more amusing when Michelle, Marty's ex-wife, came back from Hawaii to our district. Marty and Michelle had met while working in the Santa Rosa district, and all under the watchful and jealous eyes of harridan Shannon. When Michelle split from Marty and returned to Santa Rosa it was all Shannon could do to be civil to her. As far as I could tell Shannon never even spoke to AAM Michelle, but instead kept a healthy distance from her. Shannon figuratively burned with hatred at the sight of Michelle, so jealous and irrational was she in her feelings for what she considered to be her rival for Marty. Shannon was so completely out of her mind regarding her interests in Marty. When Michelle returned to our district she also brought her car, with Hawaii license plates. Shannon told everyone in our district that that car should have been hers, had Michelle not "interfered" in Shannon's and Marty's "relationship". Isn't that laughable? And frightening? Naturally, no one took Shannon seriously except of course Shannon herself, living in her dream world.

Dear Employee

2006-07-15T09:48:00.000-07:00

I found an old letter printed on RGIS letterhead the other day. It was sent out to all the auditors in my district from Joe, our former AM who shortly before the letter was written had been promoted to be our District Manager. For your amusement I am reprinting it here verbatim.

September 28, 2001

"Dear Employee,

It was not long ago that the Santa Rosa District was considered one of the top in our division. Due to circumstances in the past, we have allowed ourselves to fall below the company standard, a standard that this district helped to set. We are now going to correct the mistakes of the past and will, with your help, reset the standards for RGIS. We realize that this cannot happen overnight, but the changes that we are implementing will allow us to get back on track.

Fifteen months ago, the districts of the Bay Area came together and agreed upon a set of goals that all districts would strive for. Sadly, not one office was able to achieve those goals. As a result, more than half of the managers that attended that first meeting are no longer with RGIS. Our division vice president, Ray ********, and our operations manager, Nick *****, decided it was time for another meeting to reveal what the problem was. Each district had its' own reasons but it was discovered that there were several common issues. It was agreed that all of our districts would work to a single standard without exception. Although many of the standards set forth are directed toward management, there are some that are directed toward field personnel-you. The plan is very simple. THE BAY AREA DISTRICTS OF RGIS WILL BE RETURNING TO BASICS.

What this means to you is such basic things as confirming your schedules on time, being on time in proper uniform, honoring your schedule, using proper tagging, correct inventory paperwork, following established RGIS procedures and policies, etc. Included with this letter are copies of our attendance policy, dress code, and what is expected of auditors. Sign one copy of each and return them to the office by October 5. The other copy is for your records.

We have begun to track each auditor's average per hour (APH). The goal is to identify those who are doing an outstanding job as well as those who are struggling and need additional help or training to come up to standard. The expected APH will be announced at the beginning of each inventory. We realize that not everybody can achieve the expected APH in every inventory. For instance, those who are assigned to more time consuming areas will, no doubt, fall below the expected APH. Overall, the APH for that inventory will be met.

There are more changes to come. If you have an idea you feel would help our district, please share it with a Team Leader or management. Remember that as an auditor in the field, YOU are RGIS.

We thank you for your efforts."

Make what you like of this letter. I for one found it extremely amusing, having worked in the Santa Rosa district for many years. Some of my favorite parts:

The entire first paragraph, for one. Yes, at one point my district was considered to be first-rate, having been awarded several plaques(still hanging proudly on the office walls) from RGIS as the best performing district in the division. Of course, that was before Kevin and Joe became our managers and fucked things up royally. Um, they would be the "circumstances of the past" mentioned in that first paragraph, the ones that "allowed ourselves to fall below the company standard." (Of course Joe, who wrote the letter, didn't consider himself as having been part of the problem. He believed that the entire mess our district was was caused by Kevin only.)

The second paragraph has some really good stuff too. I especially like the part where it states that all of the Bay Area districts "came together and agreed upon a set of goals that all districts would strive for. Sadly, not one office was able to achieve those goals." Awwww. "Sadly." Well, just let me shed a tear right now. Sniff. A ha ha ha ha!!! Too droll. Even without knowing exactly what those so-called "goals" were, I'm not surprised that my district wasn't able to meet a single one. I can't imagine former District Manager Kevin or Area Manager/DM Joe being able to achieve any sort of "goal", unless it was something like "Take A Quality RGIS District And Totally Fuck It Up And Run It Straight Into The Ground." In that case? Mission accomplished Kevin and Joe!

I also liked the statement printed in all caps: "THE BAY AREA DISTRICTS OF RGIS WILL BE RETURNING TO BASICS." This was an obvious (to us auditors) admittance by DM Joe that he (and loser Kevin) had really let things go in our district. All the things that were mentioned in the third paragraph, like "confirming schedules on time, being on time in proper uniform, honoring your schedule, using proper tagging, correct inventory paperwork..." etc, were all ignored before this letter was sent out, and they were ignored well after the letter was received by all of us auditors as well. Especially by the F.O.J.'s (Friends Of Joe). Guys like Hobo Gerry and Psycho Eric blithely continued to arrive late (or not at all) to their scheduled inventories, and without any repercussions whatsoever from their pal DM Joe. So much for "being on time" or "honoring your schedule." Absolutely no one used "proper tagging", with most auditors continuing to tag sporadically or not at all. And few people bothered with "correct inventory paperwork." Most auditors wouldn't trouble themselves to sign their area tags with their name or worksheet number, nor would we bother to fill out our worksheets with the numbers of the areas that we had counted. I mean, we auditors knew that, despite the above letter and some other vague threats from our ridiculous managers, no one would be fired for not following the rules because our district was so permanently hard up for warm bodies to staff our inventories that the managers couldn't afford to let anyone go. So a letter like the one above was a joke. No one took it seriously because we knew we didn't have to. The only way you as an auditor would leave the Santa Rosa district was if you wanted to and thus quit.

I like that next to last paragraph too, where it says "If you have an idea you feel would help our district please share it with a Team Leader or management." Okay, how about a request that DM Joe stop playing favorites and treat everyone equally? How about DM Joe not allowing friend Gerry to take two dozen smoke breaks during an inventory, and not allowing best pal Team Leader Eric to leave an inventory 3 hours before anyone else because he felt "tired." What about the rest of the crew? We're not tired too, you asshole? Hey, here's an idea. How about when we go into the office to pick up our paychecks, could you please see to it that lazy office secretary Bonnie stops playing solitaire at her desk and gets up off her fat ass and fetches our checks for us. Without an attitude? That would be ever so nice. Oh, and while she's at it, maybe she could wipe that sullen look off her ugly face as well. I mean, after she's finished stuffing her bloated kisser. Every time an auditor would go into the office it seemed as though Bonnie was either playing solitaire or eating. I don't think I ever once saw her actually working on something, unless it was expanding her waistline. Hmm, I wonder if these "ideas" would have gone over well, had I brought them to a TL or management. Doubtful, yes?

And finally, the last paragraph of the letter is a real winner. "Remember that as an auditor in the field, YOU are RGIS." Well, if that's true, then God help RGIS.

Nice Guys Finish Last

2006-07-08T11:53:00.000-07:00

When DM Kevin departed our district, tail between his legs (he had done such a shitty job running the district. Auditor Scott was fond of saying that Kevin had taken the Santa Rosa district and run it straight into the ground) naturally that left us without a District Manager. Some of us assumed that Area Manager Joe would promoted to the position, but Joe claimed that he didn't want the responsibility of heading up a district (Ops Manager Sai later told me differently. He had expressed some doubt as to Joe's abilities, and thought that perhaps Joe was a bit too immature to be a DM).

During the week or two that we were DM-less, a rumor was going around our district that Dan, the AM in Vallejo, was to be appointed as our new DM. This was confirmed a short time later.

Having worked with the Vallejo district on a number of occasions we knew Dan and for the most part liked him. He seemed nice, but of course things could be different when he came over to our district. I mean, he might turn out to be a ogre who played favorites (like Joe) or maybe a complete moron who hadn't a clue (like Kevin or Dave).

So it was a pleasant surprise to discover that Dan was a genuinely nice person. He had a rather a quiet manner of speaking, and during his stay in our district I never once heard (or heard of) him raise his voice or utter an unkind or angry word. He was always in a very agreeable mood, very positive and upbeat. And not in a phony insincere way like former DM Kevin. No, DM Dan always seemed to be honestly glad to see people at stores and interested in hearing what you might have to say.

And wonder of wonders, he didn't play favorites! What a refreshing antithesis to AM Joe's partisanship. Dan treated everyone equally, young and old, male and female. It came as a nice surprise to see a manager manage a district with such neutrality and impartiality.

I remember a Kmart inventory that our district did shortly after DM Dan arrived. During a break, Dan came out of the store and sat right down on the curb next to a couple of us auditors. He started telling us about some of his plans for our Santa Rosa district, and things he wanted to accomplish as our new DM. He seemed genuinely interested and eager to be heading up the district, and it was very cool of him to sit down with us and have an actual conversation with his auditors.

Certainly AM Joe wouldn't be caught dead chatting with us lowly commoners. No, even as Dan was talking I could see AM Joe, across the way in the parking lot, huddled in a circle with his cronies Eric, Romy, Gerry, and a couple of various assorted young girls. Typical Joe. He never made an effort to get to know any auditors, really, unless he had the hots for her.

Also, unlike Joe, Dan never made fun of the newbies or goobers in our district. I don't believe I even once heard him say an unkind word about anyone. He really was nice to all, and it was so bizarre to see and experience an RGIS manager in our district act in such a positive way. DM Dan seemed almost too good to be true.

Having grown accustomed and weary of the negativity and favoritism exhibited by AM Joe, I at first was a bit cautious in forming an opinion regarding Dan when he came to Santa Rosa. After seeing how the F.O.J.'s (Friends of Joe) were favorably treated by their leader, I was a bit afraid that Dan would turn out to be like Joe and have his pets too. But that wasn't the case, not even with auditor David. David had worked under Dan in the Vallejo district, and moved to Santa Rosa before Dan. I thought that perhaps Dan would show partiality to his former Vallejo auditor, but that never happened. David was treated no better or no worse than the rest of us. It was like we were, for the first time, truly all equal. Man did that feel weird!

So, already feeling pretty good about having Dan as our new DM, I felt about a million times better when it came to an incident regarding my schedule. When DM Kevin was in Santa Rosa, AM Joe had somehow convinced him that he, Joe, could make out the master schedule much more efficiently than Kevin. Thus Joe really held all the power in the Santa Rosa office, and as more than one person said to me, "Joe's the one who really runs this district."

Because of this it paid to get on Joe's good side and stay there, if you wanted work. Don't cross Joe and you'll get plenty of stores. Do something to displease him and guess what? You're not working much anymore. And if you questioned Joe about your suddenly light schedule, he would play Mr. Innocent and tell you, "Well, we're really not very busy right now, there's not a lot of inventories going on, but I'll take a look at the master schedule and see what I can do." What bullshit. Joe used that schedule like a weapon, cutting down his enemies and protecting and rewarding his clique.

(One way that we auditors found out what Joe was doing with his scheduling was to compare our schedules. If Joe told one auditor that there wasn't any work going on, and that's why his schedule was rather skimpy, then that auditor could merely compare his schedule with a couple of the other auditors and see if this was true. AM Joe found out that we were doing this and became irate. When he issued our next schedule {handing them out to us during a Burlington Coat Factory inventory} there printed on the bottom of everyone' s schedule was this order from Joe: "Schedules are not to be discussed with other auditors. Termination will result." Everyone was outraged by this edict. Besides a method of comparing schedules as a way to check Joe on his word, we often discussed stores that we might be doing together later so that we could arrange carpools to and from inventories. One auditor anonymously sent a copy of this schedule {with Joe's order on it} to RGIS' head office. The head office immediately contacted Joe and told him that he couldn't threaten people with a dismissal in regards to his auditor's comparing their schedules. Boy was Joe pissed!)

One fall my schedule seemed a bit skimpy, even for early November. I attributed this to the fact that Joe had seen me talking with his arch enemy Psycho Anna. Joe probably thought we were conspiring against him (not true; Anna was on her own one-person crusade to get rid of Joe) and of course retaliated as only he could, with his favorite weapon the schedule. I asked Joe about it and he gave me the usual "Well it's not that busy not a lot of inventories going on" crap. So the next day I went to the office to see DM Dan. Dan immediately said, "Let's take a look at the master schedule," and he started leafing through a big notebook. "I can put you in this store, and this one, and this one. Hey, here's two CSK (auto parts) stores going on in the same day. Which one would you like?" Amazing. This was something that Joe would never have done.

Because of this incident with my schedule and a few others as well, I believe that DM Dan began to recognize what Joe was doing with the master schedule, and how he was using it to reward his cronies and punish the rest of us. So little by little Dan began to do more and more of the scheduling himself. Joe was furious to discover that his power in the district was slipping away bit by bit, leaving him impotent as a manager. He was mad as a hornet at Dan, but completely powerless to do anything about it. It was quite amusing to overhear him fuming about DM Dan depriving him of his baby, the master schedule. How wonderful and how delicious to see the once potent Joe as weak and helpless as a kitten.

Dan also exhibited some first-rate behavior when it came to dealing with Nicole. Malcontent Nicole had been for some time getting away with murder. She would pull many no-shows at inventories, often calling in sick just minutes before she was due at a store. She always managed to keep her job by wearing a short skirt and prancing into former DM Kevin's office. A little wink, a little leg-crossing, and Nicole would remain an RGIS auditor for another day.

But Dan was miles above Kevin in both class and intellect. He wasn't weak and stupid like Kevin and refused to play Nicole's games. After Kevin left and Dan became our DM, Nicole continued right on with her no-shows. Dan gave her a warning: if you pull another no-show you'll be fired. Of course, she pulled a no-show the very next day, at a Long's Drugs. A few minutes after the 5:30 am start Dan was overheard calling Nicole on his cell phone and leaving a message stating that she had been duly warned about her incessant no-shows, and since she had pulled yet another one that she was fired. Yes! Way to go Dan! Nicole was furious and tried her 'short skirt' method with Dan, but DM Dan was unimpressed. Too cool.

Dan was that rarity: a manager who never lost the ability to count on an audit machine. Dan was fast at keying, even faster than Team Leader Eric (who firmly believed that he was the best at keying; he sometimes referred to himself as E-God). With RGIS always promoting from within, auditors who became managers had to (by company rules at that time) stop doing typical auditor's work like counting and stick to running inventories only. By doing so most DMs, AMs, and Ops Managers gradually lost the ability to count merchandise on the audit machine. Oh sure, they still knew how to operate an audit machine, but on that rare occasion that they were allowed to count (like when we showed up at a Long's Drugs in Novato with only 5 people, when we should have had 20) it was funny to watch how rusty the managers were at counting. Most of them could no longer key by touch, and instead had to look down at their audit machines every time they needed to enter a quantity. Hah!

DM Dan loved counting and was still very fast at it. At that time, managers had to first obtain permission from their division office before they could, as former DM Kevin used to put it, "Strap one on." That meant a lot of calls being placed, and playing phone tag took up too much time, especially if you were already running behind in an inventory. So Dan and AM Joe would usually not bother to call one the Ops Managers and instead grab an audit machine and laser and head out onto the sales floor.

It was enjoyable to be counting around Dan because he was always in a good mood. Plus, I think he was happy to be counting again, so he would have a smile on his face and crack jokes. He also had this funny habit of urging you to "race" against him. You might be in the same aisle of a grocery store as him, with you on one side and he on the other. He would say something like, "C'mon, let's race, let's see who gets finished first." I would always laugh and say no thanks. I mean, I really couldn't see any point in "racing". What did I care who finished first? I was going to get paid the same regardless. But DM Dan was always really nice about it and would never push you to race him. It was just his way of joking around, and trying to keep the mood in a long tiring inventory upbeat.

So things were going great in Santa Rosa for a change, with a new DM and all, but I should have known it was too good to last. At a Long's Drugs inventory in Windsor, I was in the warehouse (back room), closing out my audit machine at the end of this October inventory. All of a sudden Dan, who had been busy with some paperwork, started to tell me about how a month or two before he had been ticketed for a DUI incident. He said that he had been driving home from a party and had been driving a bit erratically ("I'd only had a little bit of wine, it was a stupid thing to do and I'll never do it again"), and was stopped by a police car. He had received a ticket for drunk driving, but due to some misunderstanding the ticket never got paid ("I had the court date mixed up with some other date, I don't know how it happened") and now he was in danger of being fired from RGIS.

The reason Dan could be dismissed so easily from RGIS was that according to him, managers must have near spotless driving records, as the company vans that are leased for them are not covered by car insurance, just bonded or something. Apparently it would cost RGIS a pretty penny if a manager, driving the company van, got into a drunk driving accident.

As I was digesting this disturbing information DM Dan tossed off this next remark: "Come January you might not see me here anymore." He was so casual about it that I didn't really take him seriously. But sure enough, some 3 months later Dan was gone. Fired. And there went any high hopes for our district.

(Oh, one more thing about Dan. Just a few days before he left, I was having another one of my scheduling battles with Joe (who despite Dan's efforts still maintained a little control over the master schedule), and again went into the office to speak with Dan about it. Dan seemed concerned and added some more inventories to my schedule. Two days later he was gone, and I said to AM Joe, "I met with Dan a couple of days ago. Did he know at that time that he was being fired from RGIS?" Joe said yes. So Dan had taken the time to bother about my schedule, even though he knew at that time he was losing his job. What a class act Dan was.)

Code of Ethics

2006-06-24T12:53:00.000-07:00

Recently I came across an old RGIS Auditor's Handbook. I opened up the handbook and printed on the inside of the front cover was a piece titled "Code of Ethics". In reading this Code of Ethics I got a few laughs, mainly because the people in my district violated every entry on that list. For my district it was as though this Code of Ethics never listed. Those amusing principles are listed below.

ACCURACY FIRST ABOVE EVERYTHING ELSE: "Like any business, RGIS exists to make a profit but our profitability can never influence the accuracy of our inventories." Okay, so how many of you laughed when you just read that? Of course the above entry is a big fat joke. A lot of us have witnessed Team Leaders and managers ignoring batching in inventories, and some of us have even been told outright to batch by our illustrious managers, all so that RGIS could get out of the store on time or even early, and thus score bigger profits.

NEVER TAKE MERCHANDISE: "Whether or not there's an intention to pay for it later, we regard it as stealing, no matter how small the item." Anyone working the warehouse (back rooms) had ample opportunity to lift merchandise. That happened in my district, as people in the stockrooms would often help themselves to whatever they liked. Usually it was something small and portable, like candy bars or chewing gum.

FOLLOW WRITTEN PROCEDURES: "It's a contract between the client and RGIS, a contract which cannot be broken." Now this one seems to be one mainly for the managers, as the auditors rarely got to see any 'written procedures'. In my district we usually got a few mumbled words of instruction from the TL or manager that was running the inventory. More often we would get no instructions at all, and after we signed the time sheet and grabbed an audit machine and laser we would be shooed out onto the sales floor with nary a word about what to count or how. This was all right for the veterans, but the newbies would be totally lost.

Occasionally we auditors would receive a photocopied page listing the various departments that we were to be counting merchandise in. For the Long's Drugs stores these directions would be on 2-sided sheets of paper. One side would have all the departments listed (from Automotive to Toys/Crafts), with a bar code depicted under each department. The idea with the bar codes was so that ostensibly you could scan the generic UPC for that particular department if you happened across an item that didn't have a bar code (usually from a local independent vendor that didn't have UPC's). Naturally the pictures of bar codes never scanned for us and we would have to key in the 12-digit department numbers by hand. And forget about putting the items in the correct department. A lot of us didn't even bother to learn or look for any department number but one: Miscellaneous. Everything that didn't have a bar code got counted under Miscellaneous.

The other side of the Long's instructions sheet had the cost code on it. In Long's all the merchandise was counted at cost, which was roughly half the retail price. The Long's cost code was 'Charleston'. Each letter in the word Charleston represented one number. For instance, 'C' was 1, 'H' was 2, 'A' was 3, and so on. 'N' was 0, and if we came across an 'X' that meant to repeat the previous number. The cost codes were printed on the shelf labels, just above the retail price. So if we came across something that either didn't have a bar code, or its bar code wouldn't scan, we would enter in a generic department UPC and then the cost price. For instance, if the shelf label had a retail price of $7.99, but we saw a 'RHL' above it, then we would enter in $4.25 as the cost price.

This wasn't too much of a problem unless you happened to have another store called Toyworks on your schedule. Toyworks was the only other store we did that had a cost code. Toyworks cost code was the word 'Pathfinder', with the same rules as 'Charleston' applying. After doing a dozen or so Long's, you might do one Toyworks and really screw up in it, because there were several letters that were similar in the words 'Charleston' and 'Pathfinder'. Many a time we would have to back out several of prices in Toyworks because we discovered that we had been counting in a 'Charleston' code when it should have been 'Pathfinder'. Crap!

Also on the Long's sheet were instructions like: "Different shades, flavors, scents of product must be scanned separately, even if the packaging looks the same and costs the same..." Ha ha ha! (See the blog entry "Batch? Natch." in the May 2006 archives). Another Long's instruction was: "When you run into merchandise that is not on file (doesn't scan), make sure you place one of the item on the salesfloor for the store personnel. They will use this item to update their files." Most of us RGIS auditors actually did follow this one, not that it mattered. I would witness many a Long's employee simply replace the item on the shelf without entering it into their system. I guess they were just as lazy as us sometimes.

NEVER ESTIMATE: "We are contracted to perform an accurate count of our client's inventory." Oh God, these are killing me! It's so fucking hilarious to read over this so-called "Code of Ethics" of RGIS'. "Never estimate"? You've got to be kidding me. I estimated in just about every damn store I did, and I was most definitely the rule, and not the exception. There were countless (no pun intended) inventories where we would estimate how many candy bars there were in a box, how man eyeshadow pans in a display container, and how many boxes of frozen fishsticks in a cold display case (At Food 4 Less it would be quite amusing to witness someone counting the frozen foods. We would just sort of glide alongside the horizontal freezers, called 'coffins', entering in prices (financial inventory) and merely touching the top box of whatever it was. No one wanted to get frostbite of the fingers digging down and really counting how many frozen burritos there actually were). There are only 2 stores I can think of where we didn't dare to estimate (or batch): Best Buy and Comp USA. Those stores had lots of big ticket items and printed out every single area, which would then be gone over by the store's employees with a fine-toothed comb. But in every other store it was Batch City and Estimation Town.

NEVER ACCEPT UNVERIFIED FIGURES: "Pre-listed merchandise and any merchandise not physically present must be verified and documented. Requests for adjustments which either add to or take away from the value of the inventory, after the inventory is complete and RGIS has left the premises are not be granted." Another joke. Anyone who did pre-lists in my district knows that we often would enter in merchandise in amounts just tossed off the top of some store employee's head. Nothing on these 'pre-lists' were ever verified to my knowledge.

NEVER ACCEPT GIFTS: "A gift by a client may be misinterpreted." Laughable. This too went on in my district. Psycho Anna told me that when she was running a Kunde Winery inventory the store's manager gave her two bottles of salad dressing, which she of course accepted.

CONFLICTS HANDLED BY RGIS MANAGEMENT: "Auditors are required to notify management if they suspect that an inventory is being misguided by store personnel or even by an RGIS manager." Good thing I'm almost at the end of this comical list. I don't think I could go on for much longer without throwing up. How many of you experienced your TL or AM or DM turning a blind eye to auditors batching? It happened all the time in my district, and it wouldn't have done one damn bit of good to "notify management" since it was often the RGIS managers themselves that knew of and ignored batching. And if you were so righteous as to care and complain about such "conflicts", and did actually notify a manager it (and you) would be ignored (see the blog entry "Shorts (Long's Drugs)", in the June 2006 archives).

TOTAL CONFIDENTIALITY: "You are being entrusted with information that is the lifeblood of our client's business. It could be used by a competitor as a lethal weapon." Virtually every auditor I know of who did a Long's Drugs inventory told their friends and families about the 'Charleston' cost code. So much for confidentiality. Also amusing was to hear people's outrage that Long's would score such a profit with their markup prices. That every retail store marks up their prices to make a profit didn't seem to register with non-RGIS people. Most would be upset that they were paying more than double the price that Long's had paid for the same item.

Well, that's it for RGIS' "Code of Ethics". Hope you had a good laugh!

Wolves In RGIS Clothing

2006-06-24T10:47:00.000-07:00

Office romances occur at all sorts of businesses all the time, I'm sure. But at RGIS it seemed to happen more often. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that a lot of us worked these really peculiar hours. Due to my district's difficulty in retaining employees, those of us that did stay on had to do a lot of double and triple shifts. And in doing so, people found themselves making close connections with each other and more than a few auditors (and managers) found themselves paired off after work.

By far the two biggest Casanovas in my district were TL Eric and AM Joe. They would hit on any young female auditor newly hired to the district. Of the two, Eric was the more blatant and obvious pursuer of affection. When a young girl named Evan was hired by my district one summer Eric fell for her and hard. He made no bones about the fact that he was crazy about Evan. I think it may have been only the second inventory that Evan did that Eric made it clear he was interested in her. We were meeting at the office to attend a night inventory, and Evan was already sitting in the back seat of a company van when Eric pulled his car into the parking lot. He popped out of his car and scanned the area for Evan. Someone must have told him where Evan was because he shot like a bullet to the van. He slid open the door, stuck his head in and said, "C'mon, Evan, you're riding with me." She climbed out of the van, smiling, and the two of them drove off alone.

Thus began for Eric "The Summer of His Fruitless Pursuit." I say fruitless because Evan had confided to several of us that she already had a boyfriend. However, she didn't let this stop her from flirting with Eric and enjoying the perks of her 'friendship' with him. She no longer had to ride crammed into a company van like the rest of us but instead enjoyed a comfortable drive in Eric's car. And even though Evan had only been with the district a short time Eric, smitten, convinced DM Kevin that Evan deserved a raise. He accompanied Evan into Kevin's office and insisted that Evan be given a raise. Since Kevin and Joe both deferred to their TL on a regular basis Evan was given the undeserved increase in her hourly rate. She knew how to work it all right.

(A side note: AM Dave told me that several young girls within the district had figured out how to get raises from DM Kevin. They would simply wear a low-cut blouse and a short skirt and flounce into Kevin's office, sit down in a chair, cross their legs and presto! Instant raise! Dave was in the office a number of times to witness this happening. He said the best one at it was Nicole. Dave said that Nicole would use the short skirt trick to not only score raises but also to save her butt from being fired. Nicole, the district hypochondriac, would rack up lots of no shows due to one mysterious ailment after another. She often came down with these maladies just minutes before she was due to report at a store for an inventory. Whenever she came dangerously close to being fired, she would just break out the miniskirt and meet with Kevin, and her auditor's job was secured for another day.)

Even though Evan already had a boyfriend it looked like at one point during that summer Eric might actually succeed in winning her over. Of course that blew up in his face during the infamous van ride from Lakeport (see the blog entry "Eric is a Psycho(Part 2)" in the May 2006 archives).

A few days after that eruption of Eric's in the company van, Eric apologized to Evan at at another Long's Drugs inventory in Santa Rosa. Unfortunately I didn't witness Eric's mea culpa to Evan (Damn! I would have loved to have overheard that!) but I did see her walk out of Long's on a break carrying one white rose, which someone said Eric had given her. It seemed to have little effect on Evan though, as she had a rather dismal look on her face and spent the rest of that summer at a healthy distance from Eric. In late August she left RGIS to go back to school at Purdue.

Evan seemed a sensible sort, and you would think that a college girl would be smart enough to realize that her best bet would be to stay far away from Eric, but permanently. However, all that higher education went to waste because when she came back to RGIS a year later on her latest summer break it took her maybe less than a week before she and Eric were officially a couple. They met one night at the office, with Evan once again getting a ride in Eric's car to an out-of-town inventory. Apparently she rode home with him too, as her car stayed parked at the office for the next four or five days. Someone said that Evan had been staying over at Eric's mom's house (he lived with her) all that week.

Eric seemed to be in seventh heaven during his time with Evan. He finally had his conquest and he was a happy man. Eric in love (successfully) was a much kindler, gentler Eric. During the time the two were together he and Evan seemed to get along well. They were very easy and relaxed together, and we would witness them at inventories being very close and cozy with one another.

I remember a Dean & Deluca inventory that we did in St. Helena. It was an extremely hot summer day and the drive to the store was sweltering. When all of us met in the back room of Dean & Deluca's to sign in and get our machines and lasers, Eric very jokingly pointed out that Evan had drained the bottle of ice water that she and Eric were sharing, leaving him only a solid cylinder of ice in the plastic bottle, and no water. Evan was sitting on Eric's knee at the time, and she giggled when Eric said this, and the two of them gazed lovingly at one another. Awww.

Evan seemed to have a good effect on Eric because during that summer when they were dating I only saw him throw one temper tantrum, instead of his customary half a dozen or so. It happened during a Sear's inventory in San Bruno. Eric was counting nail polish in the cosmetics department when he dropped a bottle, causing it to break and splash a tiny bit of polish onto his pants. Eric flew into a rage and started swearing loudly. He slammed another bottle to the floor and stomped off yelling, "Goddamn it! I got fucking polish all over my fucking pants!" The Sear's employee that was in charge of helping us with SKU checks was not pleased with Eric's behavior and said, "Oh, am I going to have to call for Kevin now?" Apparently she did, and told DM Kevin that she didn't want to see Eric back in her department for the rest of the day.

So that whole summer Eric and Evan were a couple, and everything for the most part seemed hunky-dory. Eric was crestfallen when Evan left for college again and sent her off with a big bouquet of flowers. He told us that he missed Evan so much that he even went over to her parent's house a few days after she left and commiserated with Evan's mother.

However, Evan seemed to have felt a bit differently than Eric about their relationship because about two weeks after she went back to school she sent Eric a 'Dear John' letter. We were doing an inventory at a Beverages & More store in Santa Rosa when Eric, who was counting some over-priced candy bars near me all of a sudden said, "Hey, guess what? Evan's a bitch." He said this in a very flat and dejected voice. Eric then went on to explain about the letter that Evan had sent him. Apparently he was completely taken aback by this rejection through the mail and hadn't seen it coming. I almost felt sorry for the poor bastard. He didn't go into detail about what was in the letter, but I heard later that Evan had written something about how she never really cared about Eric, and that he had a small penis, and various other insults.

After this humiliating defeat Eric was never quite the same Lothario that he had been previously. He made a few half-hearted attempts at romance with girls outside of RGIS, but none ever progressed very far. It seemed to me that he was trying too hard to win a girl over too quickly.

Once at a December inventory for a Friedman Bros. hardware store he showed me a ring that he had bought for a girl that he'd only been dating for a month or so. It was a cocktail-type ring with several tiny diamond chips. It was a pretty ring but I couldn't help but think that poor dumb Eric was going overboard in his affections. Again. Evidently the ring had little effect on his girlfriend because she too dumped him shortly thereafter (When Eric showed me the ring he intended to give the girl as a Christmas gift, he also showed me a ruby jewelry set that he had bought at the same time as the ring. The ruby jewelry was intended for his mom, who Eric seemed to be more attached to than any girl).

Where Eric was very garish and gaudy in his wooing of girls, AM Joe was a little more subtle than his best pal. He had to be, given that he was the Area Manager in our district, and it really wouldn't do to be so ostentatious in his pursuit of tail. Also, his live-in girlfriend Muong worked with us part-time as an auditor, and obviously he didn't want her to find out that he was cheating on her.

Which he was, big time. Even though he hotly denied it to anyone bold enough to bring it up, Joe was as big a Don Juan as Eric. Unlike Eric though Joe seemed more in control of his emotions, even the ones going on in his pants. He managed for the most part to conduct his flirtations and dalliances in a rather low-key manner. Oh sure, occasionally we might see him chatting up a girl during an inventory (see the blog entry "Insane in the Membrane", June 2006 archives), but he never went overboard like lovestruck Eric.

But a couple of his amorous adventures did stand out. AM Dave's son Mike, an auditor who worked in our district periodically, told me of this one incident involving him, Eric, Joe and (you guessed it) a young girl. It seems that all three guys were interested in this girl, and all three chased after her. Mike was the one she eventually chose, much to the chagrin of Eric and Joe. They considered themselves the studs of District 414, and I'm sure never thought of Mike, who was a very nice, sweet guy, as serious competition. So when Mike turned out the winner in that contest of intrigue Joe was irate. Mike said that at one inventory he and the girl had gotten quite cozy together, and Joe had witnessed it. On the way back from the inventory AM Joe was driving the company van, with Mike riding in the back. Mike said that Joe was so upset over having lost out to him that he was driving like a madman. Mike told me, "He (Joe) was driving crazy, taking these curves in the road on two wheels." And thereafter whenever Mike's name was brought up, Joe would roll his eyes and always make some disparaging remark about him.

Eric was no more gracious than Joe. I guess Young Girl X enjoyed variety because after going out with Mike for a while she started dating Eric. And of course Eric, ever the mature one, couldn't resist gloating. Mike said that TL Eric would come up to him sometimes in inventories and say things like "I guess she got tired of being with you and wanted a real man." And "Now she knows what a real man is like." Mike just shook his head when telling me this. He was a very nice person who had way more class than Eric and Joe put together, and merely said about Eric's braggadocio remarks, "There's no call to act like that, that's not cool."

(With regards to any competition between Eric and Joe, as far as I know the two never got upset with each other if one won a girl at the expense of the other. I guess the two Romeos of my district only minded when an 'outsider' succeeded over them.)

At one time Joe also had an interest in the narcissistic Nicole. Her friend Tracy was also an auditor in our district, as well as Tracy's boyfriend David, newly arrived from the Vallejo district. David told me that when Nicole first started working at RGIS Joe became enamored with her. David said that Nicole told Tracy (who of course told David) that AM Joe started calling her up at home all the time (while his girlfriend Muong was out of town visiting her family in Oakland) and saying to her, "Why don't you come over (to his place)? I'll make us dinner, and we can watch a movie." David didn't say if Nicole took Joe up on the offer.

David was no fan of Joe's. He said that Joe had once tried to spread a rumor around RGIS about him. David at the time was still working out of the Vallejo district, which was our nearest RGIS neighbor. We would do a lot of inventories together, and David had met Tracy at one of these inventories and expressed an interest in going out with her. Unthinking Joe had carelessly tossed off a remark during one inventory that David was always trying to, in his words, "hook up" with all the RGIS girls. Joe mentioned this to 'bedroom slippers' Erin, who was a friend of both Tracy and Nicole (all three had attended high school together). Erin immediately told Tracy, who gave David hell because she thought that David wasn't serious about wanting to go out with her. When David found out the source of the remark he confronted Joe. What was Joe's response? "I never said that." Typical Joe. "Deny deny deny" was his motto.

AM Joe had many minor flirtations with female auditors over the years, but one in particular appeared to be quite serious. Previous passion interest Nicole had referred her brother's girlfriend to our district. This person, a rounded, snub-nosed girl named Deann, put Joe in the biggest swoon anyone in our district had ever seen. He was utterly captivated by her, and for the first time made almost no attempts to hide it.

All of us in the Santa Rosa district became aware of Joe's entrancement of Deann one night during an Orchard Supply Hardware inventory in San Rafael. This inventory was the first as a District Manager for Dan. DM Kevin having left us (Hallelujah!) to go work for the San Jose district enabled Dan, an AM in Vallejo, to be promoted to the DM spot in our district. Dan was a very pleasant man who would be the only manager in my district (so far) that was decent, kind and hard-working. He had been very popular in Vallejo and those of us in the Santa Rosa District looked forward to working with him.

Because the OSH store was Dan's first inventory as our new DM, you would think that AM Joe would consider it very important to stay around after all the counting was done, and help Dan with printouts and possible recounts and corrections. The OSH store in San Rafael was a big one, and we had lots of goobers and newbies so there were sure to be some goofs and screw-ups needing to be taken care of.

But Joe was in the throes of his ardor for Deann and couldn't be bothered by something as trivial as work. Many times during this inventory that night he was seen standing at the end of an aisle that Deann was counting in and staring at her. And when all of us were finished counting Joe had such an itch in his pants for Deann that he couldn't leave the store fast enough. Normally in a big store like OSH he would stay and help close out the inventory, but this time he left new DM Dan and feeble-minded AM Dave to fend for themselves.

Several of us auditors were standing in the parking lot after the inventory, talking and waiting for Joe to drive us back to Santa Rosa in the company van (he had driven us to the store earlier in the day). We watched as various auditors either left in their own cars or commuted home with others. We laughed as Nicole stood waiting by the front door of the store for Romy to bring his car around (I guess the poor thing was too tired to walk to the car herself). For some reason Nicole's arms were filled with four or five bottles of Mountain Dew. "Guess she must really have some kind of thirst," David observed.

Nicole and Romy left, and a few minutes later Joe shot out of the store with Deann. He was holding her hand and practically pulling her along. Deann could barely keep up with Joe's fast trot, and went bouncing along after him. The two headed for Eric's car and hopped in, and with Eric driving the three took off.

Those of us who had just witnessed this fascinating event stood there with our mouths open. None of us could believe what we had just seen. We knew of Joe's amorous ways, but we had never seen him so blatant in his desires for nooky. We immediately began to discuss amongst ourselves what we had just seen. "Did you guys see that?" "I wonder how long that's been going on?" "Who's driving us back to the office?"

When Joe's pet Gerry came out of the store a few minutes later we instantly clammed up because of course Gerry would tattle to Joe anything we said concerning him. Just before Gerry reached us Mondo had been about to tell us a very tantalizing bit of gossip concerning Joe and Deann. Mondo always mumbled when he talked, and David kept saying, "What? What? What was that?" Mondo said, "Ssh! I'll tell you guys back at the office!" So the rest of us had to wait until we got back to Santa Rosa before we got the juicy details.

The van ride itself was uneventful. I found a half eaten Abba Zabba candy bar stuck in the middle seat. I toyed with the idea of offering it to Mondo but decided even he wasn't gross enough to eat someone else's chewed candy bar, and instead I tossed it under the seat. Gerry drove fairly well for one rumored to have no driver's license and numerous DUI's, and one hour later we were back in Santa Rosa.

When the van pulled into the parking lot it was pretty late, I think after midnight. We saw that Eric's Honda Accord was already there. His car was parked at the front door to the office, and inside the office the lights were blazing. We could see Joe scurrying around inside, and Eric and Deann were chatting near the open front door. Gerry parked the van in one of the outer parking spots near the street, and immediately jumped out and headed over to Eric and Deann.

As soon as hobo Gerry left the van everyone else in it began to pump Mondo for more Joe and Deann information. We all got out and stood nearby asking Mondo, "So? So? You were saying?" And Mondo loved it. The huge oily doofus loved being the center of attention. There was nothing more enjoyable for him than having the goods on someone, especially a manager. By possessing such information and being able to relay it to others I'm sure gave him a real sense of satisfaction and temporary belonging. This was why Mondo often broke confidences with others and told us things that he should have kept private.

So Mondo told us that during a very recent Albertson's supermarket run, he had ridden with Joe to all of the Albertson's stores in the East Bay (AM Joe was in charge of those 4:00 am inventories). Mondo said that every afternoon on the way back to the Santa Rosa RGIS office Joe would call Deann on his cell phone. "Wow," we said. "What did Joe say to her? What did he say?" Mondo said that Joe was very noncommittal in his talks with Deann and didn't reveal much in those daily conversations with her. Still, this was some seriously delicious gossip. Joe had always heretofore managed to be Mr. Cool with his lust interests. Deann was the first girl that we had seen him literally and figuratively panting after.

Joe eventually finished up whatever he was doing in the office and drove off in his car with Deann. The rest of us drifted off to our own vehicles and drove home, our ears still buzzing and our eyes glazed over with all we had heard and seen that night.

Of course, since Joe was seriously smitten with Deann she immediately began to get tons of work. The rest of us had to earn our schedules by working hard, showing up on time for inventories and thus proving to AM Joe (who made out everyone's schedules) that we had a willingness and desire to work. But the F.O.J.'s (Friends Of Joe) never had to go through this hazing process and always received as many stores to do as they wanted.

Shortly after the OSH store incident, several of us were doing a CSK (auto parts) inventory in Sonoma. Deann's friend Nicole was counting bottles of motor oil when Joe walked by her. "Did Deann call you?" Nicole grinned at Joe. "I told her that you wanted..." "Ssh!" Joe hissed at Nicole. He took a quick glance around to see if anyone was listening. He then mumbled something to Nicole and walked away.

How laughable. Joe must have thought that he was invisible when it came to his skirt chasing. Mr. Slick whispers in girl's ears, holds Deann's hand and calls her on his cell phone while driving a van filled with auditors, and he thinks that no one's noticing? What a moron.

Another bit of Deann/Joe gossip only confirmed their liaison. This one auditor named Michelle told a couple of us that she had given Deann a ride back to the office one night from an Albertson's in Petaluma (some of the local Albertson's inventories were done at night, usually starting around 8:00 pm). During the ride to Santa Rosa Deann told Michelle, "I think Joe has a crush on me." Deann said that AM Joe kept calling her all the time, and told her that his girlfriend Muong had found a piece of paper with Deann's name and phone number on it and had gotten very upset with Joe.

Also, Joe had earlier that night given Deann a ride to the Petaluma Albertson's, and was waiting for her when she got back to the office later that night. It was very late when Deann reached Santa Rosa, about 2:00 am, but there was Joe still at the district office. He was right in the middle of that grueling East Bay Albertson's run, which was about 2 weeks worth of grocery stores that were at least a 2 hour drive away from our district and all began at 4:00 am, and usually lasted for hours and hours. It was a horrendous commute to and from those stores, and most of the time Joe wouldn't get back to Santa Rosa until 7:00 pm (this after having left for the trip at 2:00 am). So, the one day that Joe has off during the hellish Albertson's run, and he's driving Deann around late at night? That's love, I guess. Or rather horniness.

However, Joe's lust play for Deann didn't last, as Deann only worked for our district a couple of months and then quit. When questioned about this AM Joe said that Deann's life was a bit complicated at the moment (I bet), due in part to her needing to find day care for her young child. And that was the last we saw of Deann.

(I always found it a bit odd that Nicole seemed to aid and abet Joe's play for Deann. After all, Deann was supposed to be Nicole's brother's girlfriend, and Nicole's brother was the father of Deann's child. So you'd think that Nicole would be bothered that Deann was cheating on Nicole's brother, but it didn't seem to bother Nicole in the least. She seemed to find it all very amusing. Weird.)

With Deann gone, Joe was again left with his live-in girlfriend, the ever faithful Muong. Muong was a tiny Asian girl who had a full time office job but worked with RGIS occasionally, usually when Joe could prevail upon her to fill in at the last minute for someone who had cancelled. Muong seemed like a smart girl, so I could never figure out who on earth she continued to stay with Joe, despite his obvious cheating ways. What a doormat she was. I mean, even when district gossip finally reached her ears regarding Joe and another girl, instead of kicking Joe to the curb she incredibly became friends with this girl. How strange and how pathetic of her.

My guess as to why Muong formed this bizarre friendship with Joe's newest conquest was that she was just trying to save face: by showing the rest of the district how chummy she was with Joe's new girl, Mandy, she was sending out the message that of course Joe wasn't cheating on her. If he was, would she be friends with the girl? It was pitiable, how desperately Muong clung to Joe.

I think the reason that Joe ran around with all of these girls at work was that subconsciously he wanted Muong to find out he was cheating. Then she could confront him and leave. Joe had said that it was Muong's idea for the two of them to move in together. He hadn't wanted to but eventually gave in to Muong's pressuring of him. Joe had probably wanted to break it off with Muong for a while, but he hated being the bad guy and didn't want to tell her, "I don't want to see you anymore." But Muong wasn't going to cooperate with Joe's plan. She was going to hang onto him for dear life.

After Deann left RGIS Muong had Joe all to herself. Well, for a little while anyways. Then tall, scrawny butt-ugly Tina referred her niece Mandy to our district. Mandy was a very short girl (a plus for Joe, as he was only around 5'6"), rail-thin with short brown hair and big eyes that she would blink adoringly at Joe when he was around. And bam! Once again, Joe was hooked. And of course Mandy was all too aware of how Joe could help her out, and began stopping by the office frequently and having 'lunch' with Joe in his office.

An all too familiar pattern began once again. Joe's smitten with a young girl, young girl gets tons of work, and the rest of us get screwed over in our schedules. But this time around more people began grumbling about it, including psycho Anna (see the blog entry "Insane in the Membrane", June 2006 archives). She made such a fuss regarding the whole Joe/Mandy affair that people couldn't help but notice and talk about it.

For the first time Joe experienced the new sensation of being unpopular in the district he had once ruled. He began to experience troubles in regards to other aspects of his AM job (more on that in future blog entries), and would eventually be fired (I witnessed him leaving the office shortly after his dismissal. Since his car wasn't running he needed to use someone's car to transport his stuff from the office. So who do you think helped him out? Best pal Eric? Friend Romy? Girlfriend Muong? Nope. It was Mandy who helped Joe load his things into her car). So egregious were Joe's mistakes that he was told he could never again work for RGIS in our district, not even as a lowly auditor. Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

Days Of Our RGIS Lives

2006-06-19T14:53:00.000-07:00

At times it was like a soap opera in my district. There was so much personal turmoil going on, with everyone hating everyone else, and people saying the most terrible things about one another. It was sort of funny to observe, how a manager could be pleasant to an auditor's face, and then the minute that auditor turned around and left the manager would make fun of that auditor unmercifully. The managers also held each other in contempt, and would say mean and biting things about each other. And of course the majority of auditors couldn't stand the managers. Or each other, for that matter. There was little loyalty, as friends would gossip and mock other friends. It made for a fascinating study in human behavior.

Take the managers. DM Kevin was so bland and uninteresting in regards to forming opinions of others that he's hardly worth mentioning. I can't even recall him saying anything about his two Area Managers, Joe and Dave. Occasionally he might make a denigrating comment regarding an auditor's counting ability, but that's about it. Once he remarked that since brothers Mondo and Luis became Team Leaders they hadn't had to purchase batteries for years. He was implying that they took home boxes of the AA batteries that we used to run the audit machines. I don't know what his feelings were regarding Joe and Dave. At times Kevin seemed like a cardboard cutout of a human being, with little emotion expressed about anyone.

AM Dave was similar to Kevin in that he didn't have a whole lot to say about anyone either. He was one the people though who actually made a formal complaint about Mondo's disgusting body stink. Dave told us that he had complained to Kevin about Mondo fouling the air in yet another inventory. Not that it did any good to complain, of course. Such grievances were duly recorded and filed away in Mondo's personal file and immediately forgotten.

Of course, one thing that Kevin and Dave both seemed to agree on was Joe's error in becoming too friendly with some of the auditors. I think a lot of people in my district privately shared this opinion of Joe. We could see evidence of it because the F.O.J. (Friends Of Joe) were accorded privileges like calling their own breaks and practicing haphazard attendance at inventories, with no repercussions from AM Joe. Kevin and Dave didn't like it, but naturally didn't do anything about it.

Now, AM Joe on the other hand was a completely different case. Joe seemed to hold everyone in the district in contempt, DM Kevin and AM Dave included. Joe felt that Kevin was basically a waste of space in the office, because he couldn't seem to get anything accomplished on his own. He had no respect for Kevin's ability to run an inventory and would often make disparaging remarks regarding this to various auditors. Kevin couldn't even handle the responsibility of making out the master schedules of stores and so passed that duty on to Joe. Because of this Joe felt that it was he who was really running the district, and would often comment on how he would make a much better DM than Kevin.

Joe also used to make fun of Kevin's personal life too. At the time he worked for our district Kevin was married with a young son from his wife's previous relationship. When he and his wife split up Kevin was upset at losing the little boy. Joe mocked Kevin's distress and would say things like, "Kevin's stupid for caring. That kid's not even his." He had no sympathy for Kevin's pain and only found it amusing.

And when Kevin eventually left our district Joe was thrilled. Kevin had gotten an offer to run one of the San Jose districts. The district was in pretty bad shape, even worse than ours (My God, is that possible?). The Ops Managers basically told Kevin that if he went down to San Jose and straightened the district out he would be the Golden Boy in this division. Kevin was there in San Jose for about a month before he fucked things up royally. Of course our district gossip Mondo told everyone all the gory details.

At first it started out okay for Kevin. He was put in charge of running the Home Depot inventories in our area. This was a big responsibility and rather a prestigious assignment. It was very important that the person in charge do a good job because at the time Home Depot was a brand new client and RGIS wanted to make a good impression and thus retain Home Depot as a continuing customer. So why they put Kevin in charge I'm not sure. One auditor in my district, a guy named David, said that it seemed as though the Ops Managers were setting up Kevin to fail from the start. I'm not sure that Kevin had any real time to make an impression on anyone from Home Depot as he was only there in San Jose for about a month before he was fired.

According to Mondo, one night Kevin went out drinking with a friend, and of course overdid it with both alcohol and drugs and wound up in the friend's hotel room, alone. He locked his friend out of the room and proceeded to tear the place apart in a booze and coke-filled rage. His friend had to call the police in order to enter the room. Kevin ended up fired from RGIS and entered a rehab program, possibly with community service required. Mondo used to joke that maybe someday we might see Kevin on our way to an inventory. Everytime we passed a work crew picking up trash by the side of the freeway Mondo would yell out, "Everybody wave to Kevin!"

It was Mondo who also told everyone that right before Kevin's hotel rampage he went out drinking one night with Chris, the San Francisco DM, a short Oompa-Loompa-looking woman, and woke up the next morning in bed with her, with no recollection of what happened the night before. Party!

When Kevin left our district Joe was thrilled. He felt nothing but contempt for Kevin and had no problem letting other people know it. In fact, when Joe told me that Kevin was leaving he said, "Well, one down (Kevin), one to go (Dave)." Joe said it with this big smile on his face, like he was so happy to see the Rat Bastard go.

And with regard to Dave, Joe felt nothing but disdain for him as well. Joe thought Dave a useless fool who couldn't run an inventory to save his life. Many times he would complain that AM Dave had fouled up something that should have been very easy to do, like assigning people areas to count in a store. Dave once ran a Pier 1 Imports store, and had David, one of the fastest counters, work one on one with a store employee, counting all the big ticket items like furniture. It was a stupid waste of a fast counter. If AM Dave had been thinking clearly he would have assigned David quantity count areas like table linens, glassware, napkin rings and the like. You don't put someone like that to count areas that just have a bed and a nightstand for one whole ticket, or maybe a table and four chairs. Stupid!

Joe also used to complain that Dave always had to be told what to do, and that he couldn't think for himself. In bigger inventories like Target or Sear's, where all three managers would be present, Joe would grumble that Dave would follow him all over the store like a little puppy, instead of going off and doing things on his own.

Joe's pal TL Eric used to mock Dave's slow dopiness all the time, and told me once that he resented Dave being an Area Manager and being bossed by him because he (Eric) had trained Dave himself. Eric desperately wanted to be an AM, but could never secure the job because he had about a million traffic violations. Both Joe and Eric felt that they would make a terrific DM/AM combination, but that never happened and so they resented anyone else who held those jobs.

That the auditors loathed all the managers in my district and gossiped incessantly about them is a matter of fact. People felt an aversion to DM Kevin because of his stinginess with raises, and also because he projected an air of phony friendliness to your face, while behind your back it was something else entirely. Auditors had little respect for Dave because he seemed so empty-headed. And Joe was disliked because he played favorites. TL Mondo told everyone that AM Joe sold weed in our district. He also told us that our new incoming DM, a guy named Dan, was gay. Mondo at times claimed to be gay himself, so he said he was happy that there would be at least one other gay person in the district.

More gossip: TL Heather told us that another auditor, Sherry, had told her that AM Dave (married) and an auditor named Brenda were having an affair. Sherry said that she was at Brenda's house one day and Dave stopped by. He seemed really embarrassed to see Sherry there, and left shortly thereafter. After Dave left Brenda told Sherry about the affair.

TL Eric used to say quite often that he and AM Joe never listened to anything Team Leaders Mondo and Luis had to say. Mondo and Luis were always full of ideas on how to improve the district, and how to run inventories better but Eric and Joe couldn't stand the brothers and had zero respect for their opinions, so it was in one ear and out the other in regards to anything Mondo or Luis had to say.

And of course auditors felt scorn and would ridicule each other as well. Everyone made fun of Mondo's morbid obesity and putrid smell. They mocked Luis' pompousness and self-congratulatory air. Eric was ridiculed for his childish temper tantrums and blatant skirt-chasing. Anna of course was jeered at for her obvious craziness. Anna and her friend, another auditor named Tina were also referred to by a number of people in the district as 'white trash'. They were very common in their behavior and manner of speech. Tina especially was guilty of such crude behavior as telling us that she called her young son a pussy for refusing to ride a roller coaster, and while riding in the company van she once flashed another car in just her bra on her way to an inventory.

Team Leader Jon, like AM Dave, was made fun of for his stupidity and uselessness at running inventories. Slow counting witless feebs like Erin and Kim were ridiculed for their incompetence. Erin (not the one who wore the bedroom slippers) was also disliked because when her boyfriend Jeff was made an AM, she herself was made a TL even though she was completely unsuited for the job. She was a horrible auditor and couldn't count to save her life, so naturally she was promoted to Team Leader. This was the kind of warped logic that went on all the time in my district.

When Erin became a TL she put on all sorts of airs, like "Oh look at me, I have a grey shirt on, I'm carrying a portable and running inventories so I must be someone important!" It was ridiculous. People laughed at her behind her back because in reality she didn't know her ass from a hole in the ground, and couldn't run an inventory to save her life. Someone was always having to bail her out, and correct her fuckups, which were numerous. Her friend Kim people also felt an aversion for, the two reasons being: 1. She was as lousy a counter as Erin, and would spend most of her time talking during an inventory. For people as brainless as Kim and Erin it was impossible to count and talk at the same time, so of course their scanning of clothing tags would come to a dead halt as they discussed various guys that pale, pudgy Kim had crushes on. And 2. Kim was AM Dave's daughter, and any person related to the dullard Dave was automatically rendered unlikeable. Dave had three of his kids working as auditors in our district, and both Kim and Sean were as repulsive as Dave. Their brother Mike, on the other hand, was a very pleasant guy who had a friendly, sunny personality. The fact that he was Dave's adopted son, and Kim and Sean were Dave's biological children made sense, as Mike was the only one of that family anyone could stand.

Kim was yet another one of those auditors in my district that had a hopeless crush on a fellow RGIS employee. Kim spent one Barnes & Noble inventory counting books next to this guy named Mountain. Because Mountain was an amiable sort who would talk to anyone when he was bored, Kim mistook his generic friendliness for some true amorous intentions, and in the company van on the way home from the inventory went on and on to Erin about how much Mountain was in love with her, and how she was going to slip him some kind of love note at the next inventory they would work together. I mentioned this later to one of Mountain's friends who also worked in the district and she had a great laugh at Kim's delusional behavior. This girl told me that Mountain had been complaining to her that Kim kept pestering him during inventories. He would try to slip off and count in other sections of stores to get away from her, but Kim kept following him around and yakking nonstop around Mountain, which he found incredibly annoying.

Also, no one could stand Jeff, who was Erin's boyfriend and was promoted from auditor to TL to AM in a short amount of time due to my district's desperation for anyone to fill those positions. Anybody who was upright and breathing was given a chance at being a TL or AM, even someone like Jeff who didn't have a clue and was totally inefficient at running an inventory. His self-important arrogance rubbed everybody the wrong way, especially as it was so misplaced. He wasn't one-eighth as talented as he thought he was. When he left the district (after getting another auditor, his girlfriend Erin's best friend Michelle, pregnant) everyone was ecstatic to see him go.

An auditor named Gerry was hated because he was an F.O.J. (Friend Of Joe), and was the most blatant at taking advantage of this. Every inventory that Gerry did would see him take at least a dozen or so smoke breaks. He would just wander out of the store whenever he felt like it, without asking permission or waiting for an official break to be called. He would also show up late for practically every inventory, but never be chastised about this because of his exalted position as an F.O.J. Once Gerry didn't show up for an Albertson's inventory at the 4:00 am start, and on a break 3 hours later AM Joe called him to find out what happened. I overheard Joe cooing to his friend Gerry, "Hey, buddy, what's going on? Are you okay? What happened? Did you sleep in?" Ooh, sickening! If that had been any one of the rest of us Joe would have called us 5 minutes after the inventory began and chewed our asses out for being late. Once I was 30 minutes late to a Border's inventory because I had a flat tire and had to wait for the AAA car service to come and help me change the tire. Even though I called Joe immediately to inform him of my situation and shot right to the store as soon as the spare was on my car, I still got written up by that asshole. That's the way it was in my district. The F.O.J.'s got the royalty treatment and the rest of us got the shaft.

Gerry was also scoffed at because he was a notorious cherry-picker. He was so lazy at inventories that at times he moved down an aisle counting at the speed of a sloth. He hated doing anything that would require him to physically stir the air by keying in lots of items in a store, so instead of taking the next available aisle he would skip over a few and do something really easy like diapers. Gerry also was the biggest moocher of rides in the district. Boozy Gerry had no car of his own, and this forty-something man who still lived with his parents would often prevail upon auditor Romy or AM Joe for rides to and from various inventories, even though his parent's home was way out of their way and auditors were supposed to provide their own transportation.

Gerry was yet another one of those auditors who had a ridiculous crush on someone much younger, ala Mondo and Anna. Gerry had the hots for Nicole, a pretty young girl in her twenties. Being that Gerry was a white-bearded, disheveled homely man in his late forties meant that of course he could never get anywhere with Nicole. But that didn't stop this hobo-looking old man from flirting with an out-of-his-league young girl.

Romy was another one of the F.O.J.'s, but that didn't prevent Joe from making fun of his friend. Romy was another guy that had a crush on Nicole, and as with Gerry it was a hopeless one. Romy too was in his forties, and if it's possible was even more physically repugnant than Gerry. Romy was short, round, and had a face that only a mother could love. My God that man was ugly! He was so far out of Nicole's league that it was laughable and more than a little pathetic to see him chasing after her.

Romy was so desperate to win over Nicole that he would do things like pay her cell phone bills and lend her cash, all in the hopes that that might cause Nicole to see him in a different light. But it didn't work, as seen in any light Romy was much too homely for any girl to want. Romy at times too seemed to recognize the hopelessness of his situation and once remarked to TL Eric, "If only she (Nicole) would give me a chance." That Eric was Romy's friend and would share this confidence of Romy's with the entire district only went to show how there was no loyalty between the F.O.J.'s, even by Joe himself.

Once during a Kmart inventory Romy became upset that Joe had assigned Nicole to count an area far away from him. Even though we were less than an hour into the inventory Romy was so despondent that he decided to leave abruptly. He came over to say goodbye to Eric, and when Romy left Eric came over and told me the reason why Romy had gone. Joe came over too and the two of them had a grand time making fun of Romy and laughing at him with Joe saying to Eric, "I thought I was going to have to baby you," because Eric's girlfriend Evan had left for college a few days earlier.

Poor Romy. I often wondered if he realized how much his 'friends' Eric and Joe made fun of him. I too wondered why he would hang out with those two. I mean, Eric and Joe were handsome young guys in their early thirties, and it must have been hard for Romy, a fat unattractive man in his forties. Perhaps he thought that by hanging around Joe and Eric, he could maybe pick up whatever girls that they cast aside. It never happened though.

Shorts

2006-06-17T12:34:00.000-07:00

After doing many inventories, one after another, sometimes several in one day, most of them tended to blur together and it was hard to tell one inventory from another. But actually when looked at in some detail, a few of them stood out for various reasons. Some that come to mind:

J.C. Penney's: A very memorable batching incident occurred at a Penney's in Fairfield. This store was in a neighboring district, and a couple vanloads of auditors from our district went over to bail them out. Robert, a fat blowhard, was assigned to scan a wall full of official Major League Baseball caps. Robert was unsure if he should scan these caps individually or if he could quantity count them, so he made the mistake of asking an even fatter blowhard, Team Leader Mondo. Mondo didn't know about the caps either, but he wasn't about to admit that to Robert. So he told Robert that he could just scan one and quantity count the whole bunch. Robert did so, Ops Manager Keith caught him doing it, and asked Robert, "Who told you this was okay to do?" Robert ratted out Mondo, Ops Manager Keith got on our AM Joe for it, and Joe sought out Mondo and proceeded to chew him out. "Why the fuck did you tell Robert to batch those caps?" Joe screamed at Mondo. Mondo of course was too chickenshit to stand up to Joe and defend himself in any way (as if he had a defense) so he did as he always would do when confronted by authority. He merely stared at the floor and mumbled something unintelligible. Several of us auditors witnessed this dressing down of Mondo and enjoyed it thoroughly. Oh yes, and thereafter Mondo always bore a grudge against Robert.

Long's Drugs: Batching was a bit tricky to do in this store. Some areas would be printed out as requested by the store's manager, but you were never exactly sure which areas the store's personnel would want printed out and gone over. Some areas you could assume would run a high risk of being checked out; areas that would have a lot of dollars in them like electronics, cosmetics, OTC (over the counter products like aspirin and cold remedies), hair color, etc. So in these areas, if you were a smart manager, you would assign veteran or honest auditors of whom you could be certain would count products as accurately as possible. Of course, one thing that could never be counted on in my district was a manager being smart, so frequently newbies or fuckups would be placed in these high dollar areas and then proceed to batch the crap out of them. Then of course those areas would get printed out, the store manager would ask for a recount, and usually I would be sent to recount all the areas that the idiots screwed up. It never failed. This usually happened in every single Long's Drugs inventory. And usually the idiots who batched in these high risk areas would exhibit absolutely no subtlety at all when batching, and be so obvious about it that anyone passing by their area could tell what they were up to.

I once witnessed an out-of-it veteran auditor named Brenda batching while counting some Cover Girl cosmetics. She took one lipstick from the bunch of many, scanned the bar code with her laser gun, replaced the lipstick in the display, stepped back, took one downward glance at the whole lot of them, and entered in a large quantity in her audit machine. Even without knowing exactly how many she entered for that one scanned item, you could tell it was a big number because her audit machine made a beeping sound. In Long's Drugs inventories (and several others as well) anytime an auditor entered in a quantity that resulted in a price amount of $100.00 or over the audit machine would beep. So it was obvious that Brenda was batching.

This was during a time when I still cared about things like that, so I reported it to the nearest TL, a woman named Heather. This Heather was an honest sort (rarity in my district), so she was shocked when I told her that I saw someone batching. She immediately told AM Dave about it. Dave, who was running the store, couldn't care less and neither confronted Brenda (who was rumored to be sleeping with married Dave)nor took any steps to print out the area and check it out. He just simply ignored it. And lucky for him the store never found out. That was the last time that I would stick my neck out and call attention to anyone batching. If the RGIS manager running the inventory didn't care, why should I?

Counting greeting cards in Long's Drugs was always an adventure in batching. Most of the time one auditor, usually a little, spacy guy named Jack would be assigned to count the cards (financially, no scanning) while the rest of the crew counted everything else. He would take the entire length of the inventory (usually 8+ hours) to count 2 or 3 aisles of cards. The whole store, including the back rooms would be finished and Jack would still be on those fucking cards.

I found out why one day when yet another Long's inventory was almost over, except of course for those damn cards. AM Joe sent a couple of us to help Jack finish them out. I happened to be in the same aisle as Jack, so I got to observe him count first hand. I watched him pick out one greeting card, turn it over, read the price on it and enter it on his audit machine. He would then step back (shades of Brenda), take a long look at that section, and enter in one number. He would then grab another card a few rows up, or down, and repeat the process. He would do this several times until the entire section was counted (more or less). Jack would then take a reading of the area in his machine, and if he didn't like the way it looked he would back out all the prices for that area, leaving a zero dollar amount in his machine, and start all over again. Three times I watched him do this. For one lousy area. So that's why the little bastard took so long to count the cards! It was enough to make you want to scream. Or laugh, I don't know. But it was typical of the screwy things that went on in my district, things that the manager knew of but did nothing about. Their excuse for putting up with nonsense like this was that they were always so short of auditors for their inventories that they had to retain everyone, even the goobers and feebs and crazies.

Albertson's: We did this chain of supermarkets about every 3 months. The majority of these inventories began at 4:00 am, when the 24 hour markets were almost devoid of customers, and we could be assured of being able to count most of the store free from interruptions by customers.

Albertson's required a certain number of areas to be recounted, just as a matter of caution. You know, to see if that area had been counted correctly, with cost prices instead of retail ones. Usually the store manager would go around and pick ten sections at random. Each area was one full side of an aisle (or gondola), and the manager would choose one 3-foot section of that area to be recounted. He would write down these sections on a sheet of paper, and give the paper to AM Joe, who was the one usually running these inventories. Joe would then pass the sheet to his buddy TL Eric, who wouldn't recount the areas at all. He would simply check the printouts for these areas, find the totals of the sections needed to be recounted, add or subtract a few dollars, and then write the new totals down on the sheet. He would then present this sheet of 'recounts' to the store manager, who would go over it and be pleased that the 'recounts' were so close to the amounts originally recorded.

The Tides: This was a grouping of three stores located in Bodega Bay (site of the filming of Alfred Hitchcock's movie, "The Birds"). The Tides was a seafood restaurant, with a fish market, gift shop and gas station mini-mart to be counted by RGIS.

There was nothing too remarkable about the fish market (mostly groceries like chips, soda and candy. We didn't count the fish. Or the crabs or lobster. I hated doing that store because I didn't like to see the crabs and lobster, with claws firmly tied shut with rubber bands, all piled one on top of another in a tiny tank. It seemed cruel, and to this day I can't eat either. Once when I was there doing an inventory I saw this little girl of about 10 or so, standing in front of the crab tank yelling at a crab. She was taunting the crab, if you can believe it. It was something like, "Yeah, ha ha, you're stuck in there, and you can't get me, ha ha!" Weird) or mini-mart. The gift shop was a bit more tedious, as it had things like bins of all sorts of sea shells, and polished rocks for sale. Some of the shells were very delicate, and you didn't want to handle them for fear they would break. And the jars of polished stones were loaded to the brim and would take forever to count properly. So you would just guess at the quantity of each jar or box of shells and rocks, and no one was the wiser.

The gift shop also had a tiny back room not much bigger than a closet. It had about 4 metal shelving units jammed into it, against the walls. These shelves contained boxes and boxes full of things like shot glasses, wine goblets, and golf balls all stamped with the 'Tides' logo. There were also tons of toy rubber squeaky things like sharks, octopi, and various other assorted crap. It wuold take hours to count correctly. No one in their right mind wanted to spend a couple of hours in a closet counting thousands of small bits of junk, so you can guess how all of got 'counted'.

Whole Foods: This store was a real pain in the ass to count. For some bizarre reason, Whole Foods required us to count the groceries under five different departments (Grocery A,B,C,D and E). Each grocery item had a shelf tag with its department labeled on it. So instead of flying down an aisle, counting all the items under one department like you would do in every other grocery store, in Whole Foods you would have to stop and check every fucking shelf tag for an A,B,C,D or E. I mean every tag, because you might be counting fruit juices and one brand would be under Grocery A, while another brand on the same shelf right next to it had to be counted under Grocery E. What a pain in the ass! It slowed the inventory way down, especially since people were always forgetting to check the shelf tags and going on to count everything under one grocery department. Then those areas that they had counted would get printed out and gone over by the store manager, who would of course spot all the mistakes and demand that it be recounted.

Then there was the Vitamins area. Oh my God, another huge fucking gigantic pain in the ass. Being Whole Foods, they had a rather large section of all sorts of vitamins, homeopathic remedies and nosodes, herbs and all kinds of natural health care hippie crap. But again, unlike every other grocery store in existence we couldn't count all of it under one department, like say HABA (Health and Beauty Aids). Nope, all the products in this area of the store were divided into 4 departments: Vitamins, Herbs, Body Care and BCM (Books, Cards and Merchandise).

Body Care was pretty easy to count: hair products, skin care items, cosmetics, etc. BCM was simple to do as well, It was just books, greeting cards and jewelry. The real annoyance was counting the vitamins and herbs. There were tons of every conceivable type of vitamin in Whole Food. Shelves and more shelves and one 3-foot section after another crammed full of every vitamin from A-Z. There was just acres of it to count, but that wasn't the bad part. The nightmare came from the fact that there were products Whole Foods called Herbs mixed in with all the vitamin bottles. And I swear to God the herb bottles looked exactly like the vitamin bottles. But some stupid little key ingredient would make one bottle have to be counted under Vitamins, and the other under Herbs. And the only way you could tell which was which was, once again, to read the stupid shelf label. The number '50' was for vitamins, and '52' and '53' for herbs. So again, instead of speeding down an aisle counting merchandise at a rapid pace, you had to stop and read every damn label, looking for a 50, 52 or 53. Aaarrggh. Of course, you can imagine how many screw-ups occurred in the Vitamins section. It took forever to count, even with an auditor experienced at counting in Whole Foods.

And naturally the idiot managers in my district would only compound the problem by scheduling two Whole Foods inventories both in the same night. Every fucking month this would happen. And just to make things a little more fun they would often schedule an Andronico's Market inventory on the same Sunday night as both Whole Foods. Three stores going on at the same time, in a district that was always hurting for people. It was a real invitation for disaster.

One time we showed up at the Whole Foods in Mill Valley with just 3 people. The store manager was furious. He made such a fuss that AM Dave, who was running the Andronico's Market inventory in San Anselmo, was persuaded to send a couple of auditors from his store to ours. He sent four people: Lydia, Jack, LaDonna and Andrew. Now that may sound generous of him, to spare 4 auditors from his own inventory, unless you worked in our district in which case you realized that Dave had sent four of the biggest feebs around. The four of them were not what you would call speedy counters. In fact, at one point TL Eric, who was running the store, caught Lydia sitting on the floor in the potato chip aisle matching up UPCs. She was pulling out every fucking bag of chips, turning them over and reading the UPC numbers. She then made separate piles of chip bags with different UPCs, and then counted them. All this just to make sure she counted the $3.99 bags apart from the $3.95 bags. She spent hours in that aisle. I thought Eric was going to strangle her.

The Fat Man Returns

2006-06-14T13:51:00.000-07:00

I have another Mondo tale to relate. It is yet another perfect example of his nastiness.

On one of their days off Mondo and Luis went up to Lakeport to visit a friend or cousin or something. This friend/cousin/something bravely took the foul pair out onto the lake in his motorboat. At one point the motorboat conked out, and while the friend/cousin/something was tinkering with the motor, Mondo very stupidly stood up in the boat to get a better look at what was going on. The motor suddenly started, the boat took off, and Mondo lost his balance and fell on top of the motor. This caused a huge gash to open up on his left leg. His friend/cousin/something got the boat to shore, found a phone and called 911. As the location was rather remote, a helicopter ambulance was sent. Mondo later told everyone that the EMT's had one hell of a time lifting all 500 lbs. of him onto the stretcher. There were only 2 of them, so both the friend/cousin/something and Luis, plus a couple of innocent bystanders, had to help lift enormous Mondo onto the stretcher. Mondo said that it was at that embarrassing moment he decided to go on a diet. Said diet lasted about one week.

Mondo was transported by helicopter to a local hospital, where his leg was stitched up. He was then sent home and was on leave from RGIS for a couple of weeks. When he came back to RGIS he delighted in rolling up his pants leg and showing everyone the huge slash on his leg. This act never failed to elicit gasps of horror and disgust from his audience. And he would do this all the time! While we were in the office parking lot waiting for a ride to a store; during an inventory, while you might be standing on a milk crate counting jars of spaghetti sauce; or, if you might be so unlucky as to be sitting behind him in the company van. Mondo would prop up his left foot on the dashboard, roll up his crusty pants leg, and give everyone in the van an eyeful of his oozing wound. Talk about making your stomach turn! It was sickening.

This leg wound of Mondo's took an exceptionally long time to heal. It never seemed to close up fully, but instead oozed and dripped around the stitches. His brother Luis kept urging him to go to a doctor and have it taken care of, but Mondo always refused to do so. The rest of the district speculated on why that was. Someone said it probably was because Mondo was embarrassed about his gargantuan size, and didn't want the doctor lecturing him about his enormous weight problem.

A couple of months after his accident, Mondo ran an inventory at a DKNY outlet store in St. Helena. It was a small store, with little stock on the sales floor but with a back room crammed full of clothing and accessories from floor to ceiling. There were barrels of belts that had invalid bar codes, so each one had to be scanned individually and forced into the audit machines one at a time. There were shelves piled high with t-shirts wrapped in plastic; when you touched one shirt the whole pile of them would come cascading down, and there would be t-shirts all over the floor. There was also rack upon rack of shirts and dresses, with each hanger on a 'waterfall' (2 or more items hung vertically in one space). It was a nightmare.

We were there for about 10 hours. Everyone was starved, so we broke for one of those exceptionally rare RGIS lunch breaks. While we were eating, Mondo came downstairs from the mezzanine level of the store and thrust his leg in front of us. He rolled up his pants leg and said, "Check it out!" It was horrible. More than 2 months after his accident and his leg was still red, gummy, and oozing. We said, "Mondo, that's disgusting! Gross! We're trying to eat here, and you're showing us your pus-y leg! Do you want everyone to throw up?" Mondo just grinned and walked away. So foul.

Insane In The Membrane

2006-06-10T12:13:00.000-07:00

Okay, so far you have met the Foul One, Mondo; the Horse's Ass, Luis; the Elbow Bender, Kevin; and Psycho #1 Eric. It's time now to introduce you to Psycho #2, Anna.

How to describe someone like Anna? Let me see...Bats in the belfry? A screw loose? Crackpot? Certifiable? Unhinged? Really, the possible descriptions are endless.

I first encountered Anna one morning at our brand new district office. The old office was in an inconvenient location, and was rather small, cramped and shabby. DM Kevin went scouting for a new office spot and found a couple of choices. One was in an already established business park location. The building that housed the possible office was nice, and there was plenty of available parking. The surrounding neighborhood in this business park too was nice, and appeared clean and safe.

Location #2 (and Kevin's eventual pick) was in a brand new strip mall on the other side of town. RGIS would be one of the first tenants in this strip mall, and would have a much larger office than the old location had provided. And what appeared to be a plus (at first) was that it was surrounded by several businesses that could come in handy to an auditor. Also in the strip mall would be a donut shop (early morning auditor's breakfast), a mini mart (great source of caffeinated products), and a Burger King (late afternoon meals). Plus, across the street was a Rotten Robbie gas station, and an International House of Pancakes. What more could an auditor ask for?

Well, how about parking? See, since RGIS was one of the first businesses to move into this strip mall, the mall was almost completely vacant at first. So in the beginning we had plenty of parking spots. But what brain dead Kevin didn't realize was that duh, that wasn't going to last for very long. As the donut shop and mini mart and flower store moved in, the amount of available parking spots shrank considerably. These fellow tenants resented our numerous cars taking up their customer's spaces, and let our RGIS district office know it.

So at first Kevin told us that when we met at the office to commute to an out of town inventory, we could only park in the spots facing the street, not the ones directly in front of the stores (one auditor named Damian ignored these instructions once and parked right smack in front of the donut shop. When he came back to the office, there stacked one on top of the other on his antenna were about half a dozen donuts. Damian was pissed off, but he never parked there again).

We parked at the outer slots for a couple of weeks, until the businesses complained again. So then Kevin had us move our cars to the opposite end if the strip mall, in front of Burger King. We came back from one inventory to find fliers on all of our windshields. These fliers stated that we were never to park there again and if we did Burger King would have our cars towed.

Next, Kevin had us meet at the Coddingtown shopping mall about 3 miles up the road. That lasted for one night. Mall security discovered that we RGIS people were using their parking lot for commuter parking (they found out mostly thanks to Barbara's noisy behavior) and forbid us to park there again. Finally, we ended up meeting at the park-n-ride in Rohnert Park, a city about 8 miles south of Santa Rosa. Wow, great planning DM Kevin!

Anyway, back to nutjob Anna. She was a short, stocky woman in her forties, with pale freckled skin and light red hair tightly pulled back into one long braid. She seemed to be bright and alert. When I first saw her she was standing in front of the district office talking to another auditor. I heard Anna tell this person, "Well, she's been nice to me, and so has she, and so has he, but that one's kind of stuck up, and..." etc. etc.

As I worked with Anna in several inventories following this encounter she appeared to be interested and eager to work (a rarity at RGIS). She picked up on the inventory game rather quickly and I thought that finally this district had scored themselves a good auditor.

That is, until she worked there for a couple of months and her true self began to emerge. Anna, as it turned out, was a real whack job. I mean like totally loony. She was really good at hiding this nuttiness of hers at first, but one's true self can never stay submerged forever, and soon Anna's psychotic behavior began to bubble up and break free for all of us at RGIS to witness.

It began rather slowly at first. At first you might misinterpret her rapid fire talk as, well, coming from someone who was just really eager to learn. After a while, though, her swift speech increased and sped up until it was almost maniacal and started to give one the heebie jeebies.

Of course, with Anna's mouth always going a mile a minute, anyone in conversation with her almost never got a word in edgewise. Any 'conversation' with Anna was strictly one-sided. You would start by saying "Hi" to her, and that might be the last time you got to say a word. Anna would take a deep breath and then let 'er rip. Her entire life story would come spilling out in excruciating detail. Every little thing that had ever happened to her in her lifetime would be relayed to you at lightning speed. She had no ability to discriminate between what information could be shared with others and what should be kept private. Anna would just open her mouth and vomit out her every thought, feeling and opinion. And 99.9% of it was ugly and negative. It got so bad that people started avoiding even saying "Hello" to her, because Anna saw that as an invitation to spill her guts on everything and everyone. The more she worked with RGIS the crazier Anna got, until she finally exploded one morning at an East Bay Albertson's supermarket and left the company for good. And good riddance.

But before she split Anna left quite an impression on all of us. For starters, she had appointed herself Champion of Underdogs in our district. She would take up any cause or grudge that an auditor might have against someone, even if you didn't want her to. If you made the fatal mistake of confiding to her your unfavorable thoughts or opinions on a manager or fellow auditor, Anna would take it upon herself to go to that person and tell them exactly what you said. I don't believe that by doing this she was pulling a Mondo and deliberately attempting to stir up trouble. She just decided all on her own that it wasn't any good to hide your true feelings but instead you (through herself, Anna) should make them immediately known to the subject in question.

Well, wasn't that super of Anna? Gee, to take it upon herself to make your decisions for you! Gosh, how kind! And stupid! And dangerous! I mean, a person might have just been blowing off some steam when they told Anna how much they hated what this person had said or did to them. They might have just been venting a little temporary anger or unhappiness, and certainly did not expect someone to take this inflammatory talk and run with it, as Anna often did. In this respect she was a bit similar to TL Luis, as she too seemed to feel that she knew more than you about what was the best thing to do. And by God she was going to do it, whethere you liked it or not.

Anna's derangement was also demonstrated in her fierce belief that everyone at RGIS was against her. This persecution complex of hers manifested itself many times during her stint with RGIS. For instance, Anna would tell me that another auditor, Lydia, had deliberately stepped on her foot and pushed or shoved her a number of times in various inventories. Lydia herself completely recognized Anna's looniness for what it was, and would ask me if I believed her or Anna. "What do you think, Lydia?" I asked. "Of course, I believe you." Lydia smiled and thanked me. I mean, who in their right mind would believe a madwoman like Anna?

Anna also claimed that TL Jon almost punched her. It supposedly happened during a Target inventory. On a break, Anna was walking past Jon, who was holding a cup of coffee. Anna said that she accidentally bumped into Jon, causing him to spill some coffee on himself. She said that Jon was so mad at her that he drew one arm back and was about to punch her, but at the last second he changed his mind and didn't sock her. Yeah right. We're supposed to believe that an elderly, frail, diabetic man in his sixties was going to knock out a squat vigorous woman in her forties? C'mon, get real!

Just two days after this incident at Target, Anna claimed that during our Long's Drugs inventory that very morning, another auditor named Jack was rude to her, swore at her, and told her to get the hell out of his way as he walked down an aisle of the store. Anna then went around telling everyone present at the inventory (RGIS manager excepted) that she was going to take Jack out to the parking lot and "kick his ass." This threat was never carried out, of course. And it wasn't too long after this latest extreme of Anna's that she told us that at her previous job her boss almost punched her in the face but stopped himself from doing so at the last minute.

Do you see a pattern here? Does it spell wacko to you? It told the rest of us in the district that Anna might benefit from a stay in a padded cell. A long stay.

Anna also was firm in the belief that after just a short time with RGIS, she was already far superior to everyone else in the district. Maybe the company too. Maybe the whole damn world. She told me on several occasions that she was a much more accurate counter than two other auditors named Evan (a girl) and Nicole. Anna said that TL Eric had taught those two how to count, and not very well either. She said that they were more fast than accurate. Anna said that they may have counted 6 or 7 items when there were really 9 or 10. She would then tell me that that wasn't a good thing to do, that she (Anna) was better, that she was "dead on accurate". The phrase "dead on accurate" was said emphatically by Anna, while she slammed her right fist into her left palm with each word. Give me a break.

At a Food 4 Less inventory one time Anna said that she was so ticked off at DM Kevin (who was running it) for some unexplained reason that she deliberately tried to make mistakes so Kevin would have more trouble to deal with. But Anna said that she was so good at counting that she couldn't make mistakes even when she tried. Can you believe her crap?

She also had something of a problem where jealousy was concerned. Anna felt that she was so valuable to RGIS that no one could possibly choose another auditor over her. When the whole "Lydia stepped on my foot and pushed me" fiasco happened, Anna picked up on the fact that I was on Lydia's side, not hers. She then informed me rather imperiously that she knew for an absolute fact that if it came down to her and Lydia, that our district office would definitely keep her (Anna) and not Lydia.

But her envy of others really showed itself when it came to our Area Manager Joe. AM Joe had a way with the ladies, that is to say the young ladies in their late teens or early twenties. We had several of these young girls as auditors in our district, and if one was even halfway cute Joe would be all over her like a cheap suit (or "like white on rice" as Anna herself put it). During inventories that he ran Joe would go up to a girl that he fancied and stand next to her as she counted at an end cap. He would spend considerable time chatting up this young girl, smiling and whispering in her ear the whole time.

Anna would go ballistic when she saw this. The rest of the district was used to Joe's loverboy ways and either joked about it or ignored it. But not Anna. It seemed to make her absolutely furious for some mysterious reason.

I believe that I discovered the reason for Anna' green-eyed behavior one morning during another Food 4 Less inventory. Corpulent Mondo was running this store, but Joe had stopped by to ostensibly check on how his Team Leader was handling things. In reality though Joe was just there to flirt with his latest girl toy.

I guess Anna must have witnessed yet another one of AM Joe's "Let me whisper sweet nothings in your ear" episodes because shortly after his arrival at the store she came storming over to talk to me. Right away she began ranting about Joe and this girl, Mandy. "What," she was practically shouting, "Is Joe saying when he's going up and whispering in all these girl's ears? Do you know know how close he gets to them?" She then demonstrated how close Joe had gotten to Mandy. Anna was practically bumping noses with me as she yelled, "He (Joe) thinks those girls are so hot! I know that if I lost 20 pounds I would look damn good!"

At that point I did two things. First I took about 3 steps back from Anna. Then I thought to myself, "Oh my God, you have to be kidding, Anna. Do you really think that Joe would in a million years be interested in you? He's a young good-looking guy in his early 30's, and you're a stout, cheese-faced woman in your late 40's. Get real!" It was almost as sad and demented as Mondo's mooning over Pepper.

Another annoying thing about Anna was that she had a habit of telling you the most intimate, personal details of her life, whether you wanted to hear them or not. She would think nothing of dropping into a casual conversation her fervent belief that she had been abused by many people during her childhood. And every time she told you this it was someone different who had done horrible things to her. This family member, that family member, another one, yet one more...but maybe not, as she wasn't quite sure about that one just yet. She claimed that no one in her family believed her accusations of abuse, and at times Anna herself wasn't certain that anything had happened to her at all.

It was a very sad thing to hear, that people might have done such terrible things to a child. And if it was true then it would seem to go a long way in explaining some of Anna's odd behavior. Like her obsession with cleanliness. She always made sure that she was absolutely spotless for every inventory. Hair washed and tightly braided, with nary a strand allowed to escape. Face scrubbed to within an inch of its life. Not a trace of makeup, and her RGIS polo and slacks were always clean and pressed. Now of course I'm no psychologist, but you don't have to be Freud to figure out why she was fixated on appearing sparkling clean. Anna probably still felt some residual effects of having been allegedly abused during her childhood. It probably made her feel 'dirty' to have had those things happen to her, and so to combat that feeling of being 'dirty' she overreacted and became obsessed with being 'clean'.

If this was true then I really felt sorry for Anna. No one should have to go through what she might have gone through. But at the same time I felt bad for her I was also secretly wishing that she wouldn't feel so compelled to tell anyone with a pair of functioning ears all these deeply personal stories about herself. She would tell you these things at the drop of a hat. And even if you had only known her for about two hours. And even if your conversation had been nowhere near the subject of abuse.

For instance, say you might have been scanning stuff in a J.C. Penney's back room. You're just going along, scanning bar codes, beep beep beep...when out of nowhere this woman comes up to you and tells you that when she was a child she thinks her mother used to hit her in the face with a shoe. How are you supposed to react to something like that? Do you say, "Oh, no, that's terrible." Or "I'm so sorry to hear that." Or do you say what you're really thinking, "Um, that's awful, but why on earth are you telling me this? I hardly know you." I just used to wish that she would please keep some things to herself. But instead, if you said to Anna something like "It's a really nice day today, isn't it?", she would reply that she thought an uncle or someone had molested her when she was young. She did this on a constant basis. Again, I felt bad for her, but I scarcely knew her and wasn't a friend, so I really didn't understand why she kept telling me and everyone else in the district stuff like that. I mean, if there was anyone who could have benefitted from seeking professional mental help it was Anna. Hopefully by now she's done just that.

After Anna had been with the district for awhile, there was an attempt (desperation time!) to promote her to Team Leader. Like most of the other attempts at this within my district, it was a resounding failure. Anna had the skills to run a store all right, but her deep emotional problems affected her ability to last very long as a TL. She would get frustrated at the slightest mistakes made during one of her inventories and shout and be constantly on the verge of tears.

Like when she ran one of her first stores, a Wilson's Leather shop in the Santa Rosa Plaza. It was a night inventory, and the next morning (probably at a Long's Drugs inventory of course) Anna told me all about it.

Anna said that at one point during the inventory AM Joe stopped by, unnanounced and uninivited. He usually didn't do this, but Anna was sure she knew the reason why. "Because Mandy was there!" she yelled (Anna was never one for whispering). Everyone in the district knew that Joe was infatuated with Mandy and didn't care much about it, but it absolutely infuriated Anna to see Joe within ten feet of Mandy.

And when Joe interfered in her inventory Anna erupted. She had assigned Mandy to count a certain section in the store. Mandy pouted at having to climb a ladder to scan some leather jackets displayed high up on one wall. But instead of going to Anna, who was running the inventory, she instead complained to Joe. Joe told Mandy, "No problem", and sent another auditor (Anna's fat daughter) up the ladder instead. Anna was hopping mad. "What business does he have doing that?" she raged. "He was only there because Mandy was there! He spent half the night pressed up against her!"

So of course since Anna had appointed herself Champion of Victims Everywhere (even if they didn't consider themselves victims) she called RGIS' head office in Michigan to complain about Joe and Mandy. She got her daughter to call in too, as a witness to AM Joe's alleged sexual harassment of Mandy. Anna even tried to get me to call in and file a complaint. "But I wasn't even at that store, Anna," I told her. She replied, "Yeah, I know, but you know how Joe is, you've seen him do stuff like that all the time. Can't you call in too?" But I refused to do so. I mean, none of those girls that Joe flirted with ever seemed to object to it, you know what I mean? So I saw no point in filing a useless 'complaint'.

Anna didn't feel the same way. She placed so many calls to RGIS' human relations department that finally they sent a couple of Ops Managers to our district to interview Mandy. They called her into the office and asked her, "Is Joe sexually harassing you?" Mandy told them "No", and that was the end of it.

But not for Anna. She kept up such a steady barrage of phone calls to RGIS' head office that her daughter used to tease her and say that Anna had her own personal 1-800 number to RGIS.

I can't imagine what RGIS must have thought of Anna calling in so much. I think that after a while they must have realized what a crackpot she was, and in true RGIS fashion probably just began to ignore her, and hope that she would go away.

Which she did, eventually. The last straw for Anna came one morning at an East Bay Albertson's supermarket. Anna had driven herself and couple of other auditors to this inventory, and had arrived for the 4:00 am start a little too early. So she and the others went over to an all night store and bought some coffee. When they arrived back at Albertson's they signed themselves in at the time they had originally arrived at the store. Ops Manager Ralph observed them doing this and told them to change the start time to the immediate present. Anna refused, and when Ralph insisted that she change the start times she blew up and left the store. She also left RGIS too, which was probably a good thing for everyone concerned. Especially everyone at RGIS. People had gotten sick and tired of her constant friction and chaos and madness, and it was good to see her go.

Fat Man And Lil' Hitler (Conclusion)

2006-06-06T12:30:00.000-07:00

If there was one person that was even more abhorrent than Mondo in the district, it was his brother Luis. Hated more for his personality disorders than his questionable hygiene, Luis would never win a popularity contest at RGIS or at any company.

Like his disgusting brother Mondo, Luis operated under the delusion that he was God's gift to the inventory service. He seemed to have decided very early on in his time with RGIS that he was always 100% right, and everyone else was always wrong. Always. No exceptions. Even Mondo felt that you could learn something from anyone, even a newbie, but not Luis. His way was the only right way to do things, and if something got messed up then it was someone else's fault, not his. Even if it meant lying about some screw-up he had committed while running an inventory. He would rather blame a completely innocent person than admit he made a mistake.

A perfect example of this aspect of Luis' defective personality occurred one evening at a CSK (auto parts) inventory that he ran. Team Leader Luis had me and several others start counting in the back room. He told us that when we were finished counting there we could move out onto the sales floor. I asked Luis where he wanted us to start on the sales floor. "Oh, anywhere, it doesn't matter," he told me airily. "We have a late crew coming in, and they should be here by the time you guys are done back there. So you can just take the next available aisle." So when the back room was done I did just that.

Even though it wasn't a very large store, the sales floor took an exceptionally long time to finish (This actually was a common occurrence when Luis or Mondo ran an inventory. Even though they had been with RGIS for a number of years, they still fouled up about every store they ran, due to their incompetence and ineptitude). Luis as usual was screwing up left and right. He kept the early crew at the store counting long after we should have been sent home. Not only was this practice of keeping both the early and late crews until the end of the inventory usually not done at a CSK, most of the early crew had a Long's Drugs to do in the morning. It was almost 11:00 pm, and we had to be at the Long's at 5:15 am the next day, but Luis refused to let us sign out. What an asshole.

I decided that I wasn't going to put up with this crap, and went into the bathroom and called AM Joe on my cell phone. I explained to him what Luis was doing, and Joe expressed surprise that Luis hadn't let us go yet. He told me that he would take care of it.

I went back out onto the sales floor, and a few minutes later Luis' cell phone rang. It was Joe, telling Luis to send the early crew home. Finally shithead Luis did something right and told us to finish up our areas, collect to the Ray, sign out and go home. We did, and I gave no more thought to that inventory.

That is, not until a few days later. Word got back to me that in that CSK inventory a small but densely packed section of nuts and bolts and screws on the sales floor had been overlooked. When it was finally discovered and counted the inventory ended up lasting hours more than it should have. TM Luis got chewed out by AM Joe and Ops Manager Sai. He was asked why did the inventory take so long? Luis' reply was that he had told me to count that section the minute I walked in the door of CSK, but that I simply chose not to do it. So of course it was my fault, not his.

That fucking pudgy, big-hipped asshole lying little bastard Luis! He would rather make up a complete bald-faced lie than to do the right thing and say, "Oops, my fault. I forgot all about that section. I should have caught that. Sorry." But of course he would never do the right thing in a million years, because he was afraid and unwilling to admit to any mistakes at all. What a cowardly little scumbag. He was always doing shitty things like that. It was one of the chief reasons why he was so detested by so many at RGIS.

Another problem that Luis had was that he could never answer a question with a simple, one sentence reply. Even a basic, generic friendly question/comment like, "Wow, Luis, not much stuff to be counted in this store, huh?" could never be answered by him with a "Yes, you're right," or "No, it might take a while." No sir, not by Luis. He would give a big sigh, smile condescendingly at the person who had asked the question, and then give an hour long dissertation on why this would be no easy inventory to do. And all in this very, tired, snobby, slightly feminine voice. He was so annoying and tiresome.

Another thing he used to make a very big deal out of was when he discovered that someone hadn't tagged an area properly. Even if it was in an inventory that he wasn't running. If Luis found an area of books in Border's that only had the beginnings of its shelves tagged and not the ends he would check the area tag to see who had counted there and go find that auditor. He would then bring the auditor back to that area, stand him front of it and say pompously, "Okay, you see this area that you did? Now, I want you to take a really good look at it and tell me where you screwed up." Then Luis would stand there with arms crossed and wait impatiently for the person to answer. When the auditor couldn't come up with anything Luis would tell him snidely about the missing yellow tags. The embarrassed auditor would then tag the ends of all the shelves, and only then would Luis walk away satisfied. Total douche-bag.

Luis wasn't as revoltingly obese as his older brother Mondo, but he was more than a little out of shape. He was rather pudgy and built like a female with large round hips. These womanly hips of Luis' were only accentuated even more by the very snug navy blue Dockers he always wore. I think that Luis fancied himself a sharp dresser, which was ridiculous given his ladylike pants. He would sometimes show up for an inventory wearing a tightly belted, too small beige trenchcoat that he probably thought made him look cool and stylish but instead made him look lame and stupid.

Luis wore thick, horn-rimmed glasses, combed his hair in a wavy black pompadour and had very thin dark lips that one auditor named Barbara swore would turn absolutely black every time he got angry. These lips of Luis' would therefore act as a sort of mood ring-type indicator of where his emotions lay, and when and where he might erupt. Which actually didn't happen that often. No, Luis much preferred the behind the scenes and behind your back method of dealing with his problems.

Wretched Mondo did tell us this one time when Luis lost it, and in doing so gained his infamous nickname. Luis was running an inventory at Giorgiou, an upscale woman's clothing boutique in Sausalito. The store was in a converted Victorian house, and had three open-air floors of clothing that completely encircled the interior. Mondo told us that Luis was frying (really screwing up and running late) in this inventory because AM Joe had scheduled all newbies and goobers for Luis' store (Mondo and Luis would constantly complain that Joe did this deliberately to them when they ran stores. AAM Dave also said much the same thing, and that Joe would schedule the best counters for his [Joe's] stores, and give everyone else the slowest feebs).

Mondo ended up driving down to Sausalito to help his brother out. When Mondo walked in to the store he found Luis standing in the middle of the first floor, looking up at an auditor on the third floor and screaming at him at the top of his lungs. "Goddamn it, I told you not to count that rack! Get over to the other goddamn side of the floor and start there!" Mondo pulled Luis aside and told him, "Luis, you can't talk to people like that." Luis was unrepentant. "These assholes never listen to me!" he yelled. A few hours later Mondo and the store manager were taking a quick break outside. Luis was inside the store, still fuming. "How's the inventory going so far?" Mondo asked the store manager. She replied, after clearly being frustrated over having to deal with Luis all day, "We should be all right if we can just get rid of that little Hitler," meaning Luis. Mondo made the mistake of telling everyone this story and that did it. From then on Luis was known as Lil' Hitler.

Coming soon: More tales.)

Moderation!

2006-06-05T17:15:00.000-07:00

Sorry guys, but I had to install a new feature on this blog. From now on, all comments will be moderated by me before being posted here. A few lunatics from the district that I've been writing about have unfortunately discovered this blog (who knew they could read?), and have been leaving unwelcome comments. So from now on, any comment left here will be read by me first, and then most likely published a day later. Sorry for any inconvenience that this may cause, but anyone who's been reading about the nut jobs that worked in the district that I've been writing about can hopefully understand.

Jkat, AgentSkelly, JJ and others: I have really been enjoying your comments, especially since some of your experiences have been similar to mine. I have appreciated your candor and honesty in relating your RGIS experiences, and really hope you will continue to read this blog and to leave your comments here. Before I started this blog I didn't really have a chance to hear about other RGIS auditor's experiences, except those in the immediate area. It's been fascinating to hear that auditors on the other side of the country could have been witnessing the same types of people and behaviors in the company that I have. Please continue to leave your comments regarding your experiences with RGIS, both good and bad.

Thanks again for reading! I should have my continuation of "Fat Man And Lil' Hitler" tomorrow.

Fat Man And Lil' Hitler (Part 2)

2006-06-03T13:19:00.000-07:00

Mondo was very aware of the fact that he was intensely disliked within the district, and he would pretend that this didn't bother him in the least. I think however that our contempt of him affected him more than he would have us believe. But because he had no positive outlets to vent his anger and frustration and self-loathing, he turned to crueler methods of lifting his spirits.

Mondo's favorite pastime was baiting other auditors. Often he would let drop oh-so-casually during an inventory that a manager had said you were slow, a bad counter, something hurtful like that. This would be relayed to you with the most innocent of smiles on Mondo's face, like he wasn't perfectly aware of what he was doing. But he knew all right. He knew that with just a few choice words he could zap someone's confidence and make them feel as bad about themselves as he did. Even if a person knew the things he said weren't true, and absolutely knew that they had done a good job in that aisle or area of the store, it would still leave that person with a vague sense of dissatisfaction and affect the way they felt for the rest of the inventory. They might begin to doubt their work after a while, as they pondered what Mondo had told them. Could it be true? Could they have screwed up that section of books so badly? It had seemed to go all right, and pretty smoothly, but maybe not... When he was able to goad a couple of auditors into this state of doubt and confusion and vague unease, Mondo was a happy man. Mission accomplished for him. Now someone was as unhappy with themselves as he was.

An added bonus for Mondo by doing this was that he also set some auditors against the managers. By relaying the negative comments he overheard the AM or DM make regarding certain auditors, he would instigate arguments, grudges and name-calling amongst the district. If he overheard DM Kevin say that Scott was taking too long counting in a HABA (Health and Beauty Aids) aisle in Kmart Mondo would make a beeline to let Scott know what Kevin had said. "Hey Scott, Kevin said that you were homesteading in this aisle, and you're going to take all day in here." Then Scott, fuming, would stomp off and yell at Kevin for denigrating his work. Kevin would be pissed at Scott for getting mad at him, Scott would hate Kevin for talking about him behind his back, and the two of them would forget all about Mondo's role in the mess. Thus Mondo would get away with causing all sorts of problems in an inventory. He loved conflict and havoc.

Mondo could get away with all sorts of outrageous behavior and even more outrageously poor hygiene because he claimed that: 1. The district couldn't do without his expertise at running an inventory (fantasy) and 2. He had dirt on managers Kevin and Joe (some truth to that). Mondo used to brag that he could never get fired because of these claims. In reality though, I think the reason that he was never fired was because our managers hated having confrontations with their auditors. They much preferred doing and saying things behind someone's back. Getting rid of someone meant that they would have to fire that person to their face, and thus risk tears and recriminations from an auditor. Something like that was much too messy for Joe and Kevin to have to deal with. Plus, if they fired someone that would cause RGIS to have to pay for the fired auditor's unemployment insurance, and that would make them look bad to the head office. So their method of dealing with most of the personnel problems in my district was to ignore it. And this was how Mondo was able to hang onto his job long after he should have been let go.

At the same time that Mondo was trying to sink everyone to his own oily level, he was also trying to buy their friendship with free meals and drinks. Many an inventory that he ran would end with Mondo offering to buy everyone a round of drinks at a local bar. AM Joe said that he felt sorry for Mondo because it was so obvious what he was trying to do. "He (Mondo) never has any money left because he's always buying things for people," Joe said. "Mondo doesn't really have any friends, and so he's always trying to buy some." It never worked though, because Mondo was so disliked. People would take him up on the free dinners and drinks, and then ignore and avoid him afterwards. The poor sap never learned his lesson and continued to shell out money in his sad attempts to buy popularity.

His most pathetic stab at gaining someone's, anyone's, friendship came when he bought a brand-new Chevy Suburban that he couldn't afford in a million years. He bought this expensive vehicle just to impress a young girl he had a crush on. It was so sad and absurd and ludicrous for Mondo to think that a skinny little girl in her early twenties would look twice at him, a fat, foul, oily man in his forties. He even lent this same girl (an auditor named Pepper) money and his old car just so she would be friends with him. Eventually, Mondo was left with huge debts and no cars, since his Suburban was repossessed (after he made $16,000.00 in payments!) and Pepper totalled his old Jeep. Pepper then hightailed it out of our district so Mondo didn't even have his 'friend'. Sucker!

Even after Pepper left our district, Mondo loved to pretend that he was still a presence in her life. Mondo once made a very big deal out of this story he told concerning his crush Pepper. She had moved to Colorado, leaving Mondo with empty pockets, no cars, and an oily broken heart. Another auditor she had been dating, a slow, mumbling character named Cory, followed her.

Mondo was devastated when Pepper left. No longer could he fantasize that Pepper would one day be his girlfriend and perhaps join him in oily matrimony. Mondo lived in a dream world that saw himself as not being what he was (huge, mean, smelly), but what he wanted to be (normal, kind, odorless). So when Pepper called him from Colorado he was overjoyed. She was most likely calling him to borrow more money, but Mondo concocted this fantasy that she missed him and not his wallet. He even went so far as to make up this story that Pepper's boyfriend Cory was jealous of Mondo, and wanted him to stop calling Pepper so much. Mondo repeated this delusion to as many people that would listen, but nobody bought it. I mean, all you had to do was look at him (and smell him too of course, gross!) to know that no girl would ever be romantically interested in him. A sad case.

(Coming up: Part 3.)

Coming Soon: Part 2

2006-05-30T13:10:00.000-07:00

Sorry I don't have a regular post ready today. I was on holiday this past weekend, and absolutely did nothing constructive. I promise I will have part 2 of "Fat Man And Lil' Hitler" ready by Saturday, probably. Thanks for reading, and hope everyone had a nice restful holiday!

Fat Man And Lil' Hitler (Part One)

2006-05-27T13:15:00.000-07:00

In a district (and well, let's face it, a company) where there were a lot of obnoxious, detestable people, there were two RGIS employees who personified the words villainous, wretched and abominable. Their names were Mondo and Luis. They were brothers, they were Team Leaders, and they were despicable.

Mondo, in his late thirties, was older than Luis by a couple of years. He stood about 6'2" and by his own admission weighed close to 500 lbs. His personal hygiene was deplorable. Besides his mottled, crusty skin and greasy salt-and-pepper hair, he sported a body odor that was NOT to be believed. Oh my God, nothing that man or nature has ever created smelled as bad as Mondo. I am unable to precisely describe his stench. Try to imagine what a 500 lb. dead, rotting skunk would smell like, and you might be pretty close to the truth.

Mondo blamed his rank odor on the fact that he only had a bathtub in his apartment, but no shower. He said that he was so fat he couldn't fit into the bathtub, so therefore he couldn't bathe. I maintained privately that this was bullshit. For one thing, how many apartments nowadays have only a bathtub, and no shower? And another thing, even if the 'no shower' thing was true, if he has some form of running water in his home then there's no excuse for him to smell like a crap-filled toilet. I mean, he could stand by a sink filled with hot soapy water and take a sponge bath, right? And maybe wear some deodorant once in a blue moon, or aftershave, or SOMETHING to mask his malodorous reek. Please, for the love of humanity!

A perfect example of his horrible stink occurred one day during an inventory at a mini mart at Two Rock, a Coast Guard training base in Petaluma. Since it was such a tiny little store it only needed two people to count it, and I was the lucky one who got to work with Mondo.

We did the perimeter of the store first. Then Mondo told me that the two of us would work the gondolas from the outside in. That is, each of us would start on opposite sides of the store and, doing the gondolas, work our way towards and meet up at the center of the store.

All morning long I was aware of a foul odor permeating the store. For a while I thought that it was some food in the store that had gone bad. I kept intending to ask the store clerk if maybe one of the refrigerated cases had maybe gone out, lost its power and caused some cheese or other dairy product to spoil. I never got around to asking him, and once Mondo and I finished counting and met up in the center of the store I realized that I wouldn't need to ask. The smell was Mondo. Imagine hot, rotting cheese on a 90 degree summer morning. Gross! You could smell him from 4 aisles away. It was all I could do to keep from vomiting.

During the busy times of the year, like January and February, our district would have several of us auditors do a lot of back to back to back stores. We were always short of people to staff these inventories, so these back-to-backers were absolutely necessary for the veteran auditors like Mondo to do. As I mentioned in a previous entry we would often only have enough time between stores to rush home, freshen up, grab a quick bite and get maybe 40 winks before we had to head out to the next inventory.

Well, with Mondo being so unconcerned with his hygiene as he was, naturally he would skip the freshening up part, and just inhale a cold pizza or two and crash for a long nap, then wake up and drive to the next store, without bathing or changing his clothes and underwear. He would do this for weeks at a time. Can you imagine someone who nevers showers wearing the same pair of underwear for 2 to 3 weeks? Is your stomach churning at this moment? Then you know how any auditor in my district felt when they had to work next to Mondo. Eeuww, think of what must have been gathering in his shorts. Picture what a 500 lb, sweaty, unwashed man might be producing and collecting in the folds and crevices of his body, and then depositing into his underwear. Vomited yet?

We knew this about Mondo and his undies because he told us. He knew he reeked, he knew we were disgusted by his reek, and he didn't care. During the hot summer months, when his foul stench was particularly pungent, auditors would walk right up to him in a store and tell him flatly, "Dude, you stink." Mondo would only smile and say, "Yeah, I know." He would then explain about his no-showering policy, and his fetid drawers. His outer clothes needed no explanation. We could tell that he never changed his RGIS polo and khaki pants, because he would show up at inventory after inventory with the same stains in the same places on his clothes. The dark patches on his crotch and seat of his pants were particularly noteworthy.

AAM Dave told me one time that Mondo's personnel file was an inch thick with complaints about his personal hygiene. The complaints came not only from us, his fellow employees, but RGIS customers as well. Several stores, like Bath & Body Works for example, banned Mondo from ever doing another inventory for them because they were so offended by his smell.

You may wonder why, if there were so many complaints about Mondo's horrible odor, he wasn't fired by RGIS. Well, as in the case with Mondo's equally distasteful brother Luis and also Psycho Eric, AM Joe and DM Kevin heavily depended on these three Team Leaders to run a majority of the smaller inventories that my district handled. They were the only TL's trusted by the managers to run most of those inventories. The other TL's, Jon and Donald, were both in their 60's and not highly regarded by either Joe or Kevin. AAM Dave ran a few inventories himself but Mondo, Luis and Eric handled the bulk of the non-department store inventories. If any of those three were let go (and believe me, all three deserved to be fired for a number of reasons), that would mean Joe and Kevin would have to run more stores, and the both of them were looking to do fewer inventories, not more. Joe said that his goal was to eventually have enough TL's to ensure that he and Kevin would only need to put in an appearance at a really big inventory, like a Macy's or Target. Then they could spend most of their time back at the office, doing God knows what. I think Joe had dreams of really buckling down and concentrating on making out our schedules weeks in advance, instead of how he usually did them, which was at the last possible minute. Kevin envisioned spending most of his time hustling up scores of new customers, but this too was a pipe dream. Because of their distrust (Justified in Jon's case. Donald could run a store pretty well, but I think Joe engaged in a little age-ism where Donald was concerned) of TL's Jon and Donald's ability to run more stores, because the other auditors (like myself) flat out refused to become Team Leaders (who needs that kind of crap?) and run inventories ourselves, Joe and Kevin needed Mondo, Luis and Eric. And believe me, those three were perfectly aware of their manager's dependence on them. That's why they took the liberties that they did, with their personal hygiene and/or questionable behavior.

Mondo's funky body odor aside, he also offended many with his personality too. Although he tried hard to present himself as the stereotypical jolly fat man, he would be unable to keep up that facade for very long, for his inner being was one of self-hatred, jealousy and rage. Self-hatred of his own wretchedness; his morbid obesity and deplorable smell must have affected him more than he would have us believe. Jealousy in that for all of his and his brother Luis' years of service with RGIS, no manager ever gave Mondo and Luis the respect that they (and only they) felt they deserved. The jealousy came from the fact that other auditors in our district would get the praise and accolades Mondo felt he and Luis had earned but never received.

The rage that Mondo exhibited toward other auditors earned him much contempt as well. When he ran an inventory that didn't go smoothly (a frequent occurrence), his false, happy face would disappear and his true, bitter self would emerge. If some poor newbie had screwed up an area, maybe counting liquor as grocery or grocery as GM (general merchandise), Mondo would lose it and call the newbie every filthy, insulting name he could think of. And often right in front of them too. And God help his crew if the store manager had a problem with the way the inventory was going. The customer might complain to Mondo about some areas being off on their dollars, or being counted in the wrong department. Mondo would take it from the customer, and then proceed to hunt down a scared little newbie in the store and rip the guy a new one. A 500 lb person like Mondo could be very intimidating. Seeing him barrel down a grocery store aisle screaming after a newbie was terrifying, and led to his great unpopularity.

I can attest to all of this personally, as I was often on the receiving end of Mondo's wrath. As a newbie, I struggled at first with the inventories that I did. I made mistakes, and Mondo never failed to point those mistakes out to everyone else and make fun of me for having committed them. But as the months progressed, and I became better and better at counting, and received not only some rare praise from AM Joe and DM Kevin but from managers of other districts as well, Mondo's jokiness dissipated and his resentment and jealousy of me began. He resented the compliments that managers and other auditors would make regarding my work. Just out of my earshot, Mondo would downplay my abilities as a counter. When other auditors would say to him that they really admired my ability at counting, and wished they were as fast as I, Mondo would tell them that no, I wasn't really very good, it just looked that way because the area I was counting was quite easy to do, or had been prepped by a store employee, or any nonsense that he could make up to make him feel better about himself. With newbies, he could get away with telling them crap like this because they hadn't been around the inventory business for very long and were apt to believe anything a veteran had to say.

But with managers, who knew better, Mondo had no recourse but to seethe with resentment when they would say in his presence that I was a really good counter. Instead of being happy for me, or at least being happy that he had a good auditor in one of his inventories, he would instead look for ways in which to make me feel as bad as he did. He would do really lame things like, if I had committed an egregious sin like forgetting to tuck in my polo or was walking around with an untied shoe, he would pounce at me with catty, unkind remarks. Or if I had forgotten to tag one shelf, he made sure that everyone in the store knew it. Really stupid stuff like that. It was pathetic behavior on Mondo's part, and sad too. I understood why he was doing it, but that didn't excuse his actions and words.

(Coming up: Part two.)

Tag You're It!

2006-05-23T13:37:00.000-07:00

Whenever we did an inventory, along with the bags of audit machines and lasers that we carried into the store we also brought along a couple bags of yellow tags. These paper tags, measuring about 2"x10", were used by the RGIS auditors to mark areas in the store that had been counted. That way, there would be no question as to what had been counted and what hadn't. If the store's manager might be a little concerned that this shelf of books or that rack of shirts had been missed, then the RGIS manager could point to the yellow tag marking that section and show the store's employee that indeed that area of stock had been counted.

That was the way it was supposed to work. In my district of course, nothing ever worked the way it was supposed to. For one thing, most of us were too lazy or unmotivated to tag properly. We were supposed to tag the beginning and ending of every shelf, but most of us just tagged the end of each shelf, or every other shelf. Some people would just stick in one tag for the entire gondola or side of merchandise counted, and quite a few people didn't tag at all. District Manager Kevin might raise a little fuss, but he never did anything about it so we continued to tag haphazardly.

Also, Kevin was always too cheap to order more tags. He was supposed to pay for them out of the office petty cash fund, but for some mysterious reason that petty cash fund always seemed short of money (Mondo claimed it was because Kevin's wife had a habit of dipping into it for pocket money).

We would start off the year with several bags chock full of tags, but by around mid-summer we would be down to one bag, about half full. At that point DM Kevin would panic about the tag shortage, and start to get very militant about the tags, and where they were disappearing to. When other districts would show up to help us out in one of our big stores, like a Kmart or Target, at the end of the inventory Kevin would stand by the exit and check the out-of-towner's tag bags (little cloth pouches worn on the auditor's belts). If he saw tags in them, Kevin would tell those auditors, "Hey, those are OUR tags", and make them empty their bags. Of course, when we traveled to another district to help out we always stuffed our tag bags full. Kevin never had a problem with that, naturally. If his auditors could save him a few bucks by pilfering another district's tags, then sweet!

The tags had other ways of disappearing, besides slipping past the watchful eyes of our District Manager. Lots of times Kevin or Joe would forget to tell us to pull tags (remove and collect them after the inventory was done) in the back room of a store, and the store's employees would just throw them out.

A good number of yellow (and red and green and blue) tags also vanished from the district due to my passive/aggressive behavior. Because Kevin fretted so much over the dwindling supply of tags, and because he was so despised by me, I took a perverse pleasure in carrying home from every inventory my own tag bag crammed full of tags. I had no possible use for them (save for a preposterous fantasy of using them in some sort of massive pop-art project, like a giant collage or something). I just took a secret, childish delight in squirreling away those damn tags. Thanks to Kevin I still have to this day five large boxes full of neatly sorted yellow (and red and green and blue) tags. And still no use for them.

Some of the yellow tags also vanished due to their handy use as scratch paper. For instance, auditors would use them to write down last minute additions to their schedules, as frequently we would be finishing up one inventory, and be asked by a Team Leader or Manager if we could stop by another inventory still going on in a different store. "Well, as long as you're going by Wherehouse Records on your way home, couldn't you just stop by there to see if they need any help?" And a yellow tag would be used to write down the location of and directions to that store. The tag would get folded up and placed in someone's pocket and never again see the light of another inventory.

We also lost a lot of tags in parking lots. The auditors in my district were fond of tagging each other's cars. There was no rhyme or reason to it. We would tag the cars of people we liked, people we didn't like, whatever. The only goal was to get as many tags on the car as possible. So, in addition to the most obvious spots, like under the windshield wipers and on the antenna, a bunch of tags would get stuck in the cracks around the doors, hood and trunk of the car, and some would go in the tire rims as well.

In order to pull off a really big tag job, you needed quite a bit of time to operate. So it was usually the guy that had to stay behind and help the manager close out the inventory whose car got covered with tags. That poor sucker would be inside the store, doing recounts and pulling tags (how ironic!), while a couple of auditors would be out in the parking lot smothering his car with tags. Then, when the out-of-luck auditor would finally be allowed to escape the night-long inventory, he would drag his tired ass out to the parking lot and find his car covered with yellow tags. After whimpering for a while, he would spend some time pulling all the tags off of his car, throw them to the ground, and drive home sobbing.

Or he might just do as rotund Mondo did, after his car got tagged one night during a J.C. Penney's inventory. He had to go to another inventory right after leaving Penney's, and was tired and didn't feel like pulling all those tags off of his Chevy Suburban. So he drove to the next store at 3:30 am, yellow tags still dripping off his car, and leaving a trail of them on the streets of Santa Rosa.

I tagged a few cars during my time with RGIS (see above paragraph), but there was one particular tagging incident that I was most proud of, chiefly because I tagged a manager's van, and someone else got blamed for it.

It started out one afternoon, as DM Kevin had asked me to meet at the office at 4:00 pm to go to a CSK (auto parts) store in San Rafael. He wanted me to be a part of the early crew and go in and count the back room, before the sales floor got started. However, he got the start time wrong and had me arrive at the office an hour earlier than necessary. Plus, he couldn't get the program downloaded to the portable. He kept having trouble with the phone modem or something. That took another hour. By the time we were ready to leave I was in a horrible mood, and that only worsened as I learned that I would have to ride alone to the store with Luis. Team Leader Luis was foul Mondo's brother, and just as revolting as Mondo, hygiene-wise. In the personality department he wasn't much better, as evidenced by his district nickname, Lil' Hitler.

It was a terrible night all the way around. I did manage to catch a bit of a break as the inventory ended, though. Instead of having to ride back to the office with Lil' Hitler, I instead rode back to Santa Rosa with Romy, one of the other auditors. And as we arrived back at the office a golden opportunity awaited me.

There, parked right smack at the front door of our district office was Kevin's van. And me with a tag bag full of yellow tags. It was after midnight, the office was closed and not a soul around. Oh, happy birthday to me!

Romy parked his car and I hopped out. I told him what I was going to do and he laughed and said that since he was no fan of Kevin's either he would join me. We had a fine time tagging the DM's van. In addition to all the usual hot spots, we were able to slap a number of tags on all the windows and doors of the van, since it had rained for most of the night and the van was still wet. The tags stuck anywhere we placed them. It was silly and childish, but we were laughing hysterically, letting off some post-inventory steam and having fun doing so.

When both of our tag bags were finally depleted, Romy and I said goodnight to each other and drove away in our cars. The evening had ended on a high note for me, but the best was yet to come.

The next morning we were all at a Long's Drugs inventory when gross-out Mondo came up to me. He asked me if I knew who had tagged Kevin's van. I of course played innocent and said "No, of course not", and "Why? Did Kevin's van get tagged?" Mondo said that yes, it had gotten tagged at the office, but that wasn't all. Apparently it had misted all night long, and the yellow tags stayed put on the van. Then, when dawn arrived the sky cleared and the sun broke out fully. The hot sun dried all of the tags and they were stuck like glue to the van. When Kevin arrived at the office and saw his van he was angry. Then when he discovered that the tags had dried onto his van, and the only way he could remove them was to peel and scrape them off in pieces, he was absolutely furious. It took him forever to clean it up. Yes!

And as if that wasn't great enough, Mondo got blamed for it! See, in a district where quite a few people tagged cars, he was the one that was really known for doing it. So when Kevin saw his van he immediately called Mondo. "Goddamn it Mondo, I know it was you!" Of course Mondo hotly denied it, but I don't think Kevin believed him. Ever. To this day, several years later, Kevin probably still thinks it was Mondo that tagged his van so memorably. But you and I know the truth!

(Coming up: Meet Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber.)

Eric Is A Psycho (Part 2)

2006-05-19T13:54:00.000-07:00

The RGIS district I worked for covered a lot of territory. We handled inventories not only for our home city and county, but also several counties to the north and south as well. Our district's western border extended to the Pacific Ocean, and east to our nearest neighboring RGIS district, Vallejo (pronounced 'Va-LAY-ho, or 'Valley Joe' as we liked to call it).

So as a consequence we spent a good deal of time on the road. As a newbie I wasn't yet familiar with most of the out-of-town stores that we inventoried, so instead of driving myself I would ride in the company van. This was always an adventure, since you were never sure until the last minute who would be driving. It might AM Joe who was a speed demon and one ticket away from getting fired, or maybe AAM Dave, who would be so fried from last night's inventory that he would keep nodding off while driving, so that one us auditors would have to keep an eye on him and yell out, "Dave, you're drifting!" when his head would fall forward and the van would veer towards the shoulder.

Plus you really didn't have much of a choice of who you could sit next to. There were a lot of fat people that worked in my district, and if you were so unlucky as to be squeezed between two of them in the van, it could make for one long and painful drive to San Francisco. Or maybe you might be fortunate enough to score a window seat, but then be jammed up against the window when two heifers crowded in next to you.

And as bad as that sounds, the people with BO? A million times worse. Besides Mondo the Foul One, he of the 450+ lb. unwashed-for-weeks body, there were a couple of people in my district who must have been taking those garlic tablets, because oh my God they reeked of garlic. The stench was so thick and pervasive that you could almost see the fumes rising out of their bodies and flowing into my nose. Puke!

So the van rides to and from the stores were usually quite unpleasant. Between the speeding drivers and sleepy drivers and the cattle squeezing the life out of you, and the garlic pill poppers making you want to vomit, you were usually in a foul mood even before you reached the store, which would last through the inventory and only intensify on the ride back to the office.

But there was one van ride to an out of town store once that I thought might be different. For starters, although AM Joe was driving, he had been chastised recently for collecting too many speeding tickets, so he was actually driving at a rather safe and sane speed for a while. Also, everyone in this van ride was of a normal size and scent, except for cesspool Mondo, but thankfully he rode shotgun next to Joe so no one had to be pressed up against his sweaty, reeking greasy blimp of a body.

This time it seemed like the long drive to Lakeport to do a Long's Drugs would be okay, even though we'd be on the road about 1 1/2 hours each way. Boy, was I wrong. The ride to the store was okay, but the ride back home was a nightmare from hell.

It started out innocently enough. The ride to the store was quiet, and the inventory itself went fairly smoothly for a change. Going home it was the same people in the van: Joe driving, half-ton Mondo in the seat next to him. The first bench seat had Cory, myself and Scott and the back seat had Lydia, Evan and TL Eric. Eric normally drove himself to all the stores, but his car was being repaired so he was stuck with us.

Evan, a girl, was sitting in between Lydia, an older woman in her sixties, and Eric. TL Eric had a serious crush on Evan. She was quite aware of this, and even though she had a boyfriend (Not with RGIS. She told me once about her boyfriend, and how she accidentally blinded him with her thumbnail. Not a pretty story.) she didn't let that stop her from flirting all the time with Eric, and every other guy in our district and several neighboring ones.

Evan was busy telling Eric about her parent's house. She lived there during the summer, when she was home from college, and worked with us at RGIS while out of school. Evan told Eric that her parents lived in a very rural part of town, high up on a hill. The only way to her house was a rough gravelly road that Evan claimed was accessible only by a 4-wheel drive vehicle. Eric, smitten, immediately told Evan that HIS car (an early 1990's Honda Accord) could make it up to her house. She kept insisting that no, no, only 4-wheeled drive cars could travel on the road to her home.

The more that Evan insisted that Eric's car couldn't make it to her house, the madder Eric got. Used to Eric by this time I could tell without looking back at him that he was nearing his boiling point. (A word about Eric. He could be a real pleasure to be around sometimes, believe it or not. Tall and good-looking, he was naturally quite a ham and loved nothing better than to be the center of attention. During lulls in inventories, he would often entertain us by acting out scenes from favorite TV shows and movies. Plus, he was marvelous at counting, and one of the fastest auditors in the district. When he was on, and things were going well and nobody crossed him, he was a lot of fun to be around. The life of the party (or inventory). And because I never gave him any trouble, and always did well in any inventory he ran, he was always nice to me.)

Any little thing could piss Eric off at a moment's notice, so most of us had learned to tell when Good Eric was about to transform into Bad Eric, and to leave him alone to cool down by himself. But Evan, new to RGIS, wasn't able to gauge Eric's moods very well and didn't notice that he was building up quite a head of steam. When Eric kept on insisting that she didn't know what she was talking about, and of course his car could make it up to her house, Evan very jokingly told him, "Eric, I am sooo close to hitting you right now!" Her tone of voice was very light and playful, and you could tell that in no way did she mean that seriously. But Eric, Crown Prince of the district and used to getting his own way, was unused to having someone (especially a girl) stand up to him and, in a very characteristic and familiar way exploded as only Eric could. "What?! You want to hit me? You want to hit me? Then go ahead and hit me! C'mon, hit me! Why don't you hit me? What do I have to do to get you to hit me? Do I have to call you a bitch? Fine, you're a bitch, a real bitch. Bitch! You're the queen of bitches! Fucking bitch!"

While this was going on, the rest of the van was completely silent. No one uttered a peep. Not even Joe, the AM, dared to say word to Eric (Joe and Eric, both in their early 30's, were best pals. Eric was most definitely the dominant one in their friendship, and had Joe thoroughly convinced that he couldn't do without him, Eric, in the district. So as a consequence Eric was allowed to do and say whatever he wanted.). And myself, Cory, Scott and corpulent Mondo were not about to confront Eric. The rest of the van just sat meekly by and prayed silently that it would all be over soon.

But not Lydia. She was a feisty, no-nonsense woman in her sixties. She had been quietly sitting next to Evan the whole time, eating her lunch out of a little plastic container. But finally she had heard enough, and muttered to Eric in her somewhat accented English (she was Russian born), "Oh, why don't you just shut up." Eric immediately turned on Lydia. "You shut up, you bitch!" This went on for a while, back and forth, with Eric and Lydia each telling one another to shut up, and Eric telling Lydia to kiss his ass and Lydia saying to Eric "I wouldn't kiss that nasty thing," when Eric, who was now experiencing the unfamiliar sensation of having two females stand up to him in the space of just five minutes, said to Lydia ominously, "If you say shut up to me one more time, you're going to be sorry. " Lydia, never one to shy away from a fight, came immediately back with a "Shut up" to Eric. Eric then exploded a second time. "All right you bitch, that's it! When we get back to the office I'm slashing ALL of your fucking tires!" Lydia then very calmly told Eric, "You do that, and you see this?" She held up the fork that she had been eating her lunch with. "I will take this fork and shove it right up your ass, and I'm gonna shove it up there so hard it's going to come up through your mouth."

Eric was completely taken aback by this. As I mentioned before, he was unused to having anyone, much less a female, stand up to him and he could only sputter in reply to Lydia's threat. He finally managed to come back with a "Oh, yeah, well, you can take your knife there and slice off a piece of my ass", which was a weak reply and didn't even make any sense. It didn't matter. Everyone in that van, including Eric, knew who had won this battle.

We were only about halfway back to the office by this time, with another 45 minutes or so to go until we reached Santa Rosa. But it didn't matter to Eric. He called someone on his cell phone and told them to pick him up in a town nearby. His friend must have asked him was he back at the office already, because Eric said into his cell phone, "No, we're only near Hopland. But I can't stand being in the van anymore with these fucking bitches." He slammed his phone shut and told Joe, "Drop me off in Hopland."

AM Joe, silent throughout this nightmarish ride, finally spoke. "Dude, I have to stop in Cloverdale (at the Long's Drug store there) to pick up the discs, why don't you just wait until we get to Cloverdale (about 10 minutes north of Hopland)?" Eric told him, "No! Drop me off in Hopland!" And of course Joe did as he was told. We reached the tiny dusty town of Hopland about 5 minutes later. It was the longest 5 minutes of my life. Everyone in the van was silent again except for Evan, who was crying in the back seat.

When we got to Hopland Joe pulled over into this old abandoned gas station. Even before he pulled the van to a stop Eric had the sliding door open. As Joe parked Eric leaped out of the van, storming off and throwing his leather jacket to the ground. Joe, like a faithful puppy dog, jumped out too and followed Eric a short distance away. No one in the van could hear what was being said by Joe to Eric, but it was clear that Joe was trying to calm Eric down, placating him with soothing words and gestures.

Now that Eric was out of the van, all of the rest of the he-men in it finally came to life and began talking. Cory and blob Mondo discussed with each other how unreasonable Eric had been, and Scott told Evan not to cry, that she shouldn't let Eric get to her like that.

Wow. Big brave men. Where the hell were they when all of this was going on? I mentioned this later to gargantuan Mondo, who reminded me that "You know how Eric is. It wouldn't matter what anybody said to him, it wouldn't have made a difference, it wouldn't have stopped him." But so what! For God's sake, be a man and say SOMETHING to him. I mean, we had an Area Manager in the van, and he was afraid to chastise one of his auditors. How pathetic was that?

Joe finally left Eric and came back to the van and climbed in. We drove off, leaving Eric behind in Hopland. He refused to look at the departing van and turned his back to us as we left.

As we headed south to Cloverdale, no one said a word. The silence was extremely uncomfortable. I think everyone was afraid to say anything (again). That is, except for Lydia. Maybe one minute passed since we had dropped Eric off before Lydia spoke. She started to say something about how absurd the whole thing with Eric had been, and about how childish he was, when Joe abruptly cut her off. "I don't want to hear any more about it!" he told Lydia.

The tension in the van after that little exchange was so thick you could have cut it with a knife. I was afraid Lydia was going to pop up with some more about what Eric had done, and thereby causing Joe to erupt as well, so I hastily asked Joe about the Long's Drugs store in Cloverdale. We were stopping there to pick up some discs that Joe needed to program the audit machines for tomorrow's inventory. It was a brand new Long's, and this was to be our first inventory there. "So, um, Joe, what's this new Long's Drugs like? Have you been in it before?" I asked him. Joe seemed extremely relieved to be talking about something else besides Eric, and chattered on at length about how much nicer this new Long's was than the old one. My diversion tactic worked, and the rest of the ride back to Santa Rosa was peaceful.

The next day, when we were doing the inventory at the Cloverdale Long's, I spoke with DM Kevin regarding the fiasco that had happened the day before. I told him that I was rather upset that AM Joe had let the whole thing go so far, and had made no move to stop it. Kevin told me that had HE been the one driving the van, the incident would never have happened. He (Kevin) would have nipped the thing in the bud and would have told Eric to shut up.

I, who was no fan of Kevin's, believed him on this one because he wasn't as close to Eric as Joe was. AM Joe had made the fatal mistake of making friends of a few of the auditors in our district, and this I believe affected how he treated these friends/employees. It's one thing to be friendly with your employees, but making friends of a few of them was an error on Joe's part. It clouded his judgment of these special few, and the F.O.J.'s (Friends Of Joe) were treated much better by him than the rest of us. It caused resentment and discontent amongst our happy little district and would eventually contribute to Joe's firing some time later.

(PS: Kevin must have spoken to Eric regarding our conversation, because a few days later Eric came up to me during an inventory at Andronico's Market in San Anselmo and apologized for the horror episode in the van. Wow, that was a surprise. So maybe there's some hope for Eric after all.)

Coming up: More RGIS happiness.

Batch? Natch.

2006-05-16T12:32:00.000-07:00

I was fairly busy with inventory work after my first two stores. I guess I wasn't as completely horrible at it as I thought, because I scarcely got a day off the first couple of months I was there. Of course, January and February were the busiest months of the year for RGIS, with many stores wanting inventories so that they could see how well they had done during the holiday season. My district hired over a hundred people in January one year, and I think about 3 or 4 people ended up staying for more than a couple of days.

This busy time was great for us auditors, as we could really rack up some serious overtime hours and come away with nice fat paychecks. Even at $ 7.50 an hour. TM Eric said that when his mom used to work for RGIS, she made enough money one January to buy a really nice car.

So the work was fairly steady, the hours were flexible, and as I did more inventories I improved my counting skills and my confidence grew with each inventory I did. I began to actually enjoy the process of counting aspirin boxes and pans of eye shadow. I even liked doing the scan-only inventories, where clothing boutiques made you scan each individual blouse and pair of pants in the store. It didn't require much if any thinking, so you could just scan like a robot while you let your mind wander away to more important things.

Of course, a scan-only inventory could be a real pain in the ass when it came to a store like Victoria's Secret. I mean, can you imagine scanning a round table loaded with hundred of pairs of panties? One table with over six hundred pairs of panties, all carefully laid out in neat rows, and you had to search in each frigging pair for a miniscule tag to scan, over and over and over again. Oh, and let's not forget the racks of bras on the walls. Dozens crammed onto tiny metal rods so that when you reached for a bra tag to scan about 25 of them fell off the rack and landed on the floor. And then you had figure out which ones you had already scanned and which ones still needed to be counted, and...fuck it. Just jam 'em all back onto the rack and hope that no one noticed.

There was a dirty little secret to counting in Victoria's Secret, and a few other stores as well. It was that while out on the sales floor you had to at least appear to scan every single item (fragrances and cosmetics excluded; those you could quantity count), in the back room you could batch like crazy. By batching, I mean we would take one bra and scan it like 50 times. This method of counting was expressly forbidden by RGIS, but of course it went on all the time in my district. No Manager or Team Leader (except Eric, who used to encourage me to batch all the time) would ever come right out and say it was okay to batch, it was just sort of implied that it was necessary sometimes in order to finish the inventory on time.

So what we would do in a Victoria's Secret back room was this: We would make ourselves as comfortable as possible on the cold linoleum floor, sitting cross-legged and gathering several garbage bags and huge cardboard boxes full of underwear around us. Then we would dump it all out on the floor. We would pick up a bra, scan it say 50 or 60 times, toss it back into the bag or box and grab handfuls of unscanned underwear and throw them in too. This was a much faster way of counting than having to search and sort through piles of tangled bras, looking for that elusive bar code tag to scan, only to discover that the tag was missing and you had to call "SKU check!" and wait forever until some clerk dragged her ass away from the fascinating conversation she was having with a couple of her coworkers out on the sales floor. I mean, who has time for that crap? If we counted everything the way we were supposed to, we'd have been there forever. Not that I wouldn't have loved the fatter paycheck, but did I really want to spend 10 hours sitting on the floor in Victoria's Secret? No thanks. So, we would batch the hell out of the place, and no one was ever the wiser.

(A side note about Victoria's Secret: a friend of mine shopped there quite frequently, and I used to tell her about some of the creepy people I worked with. I would say, "You know that new bra you bought the other day? Just think, some sweaty oily old man was probably pawing through it, looking for a tag to scan." My friend would be suitably grossed out.)

So as I mentioned earlier, batching was supposedly against the rules at RGIS but it went on all the time. The reason it was forbidden was because the store couldn't get an accurate inventory if you batched. For example, if you were counting cosmetics in a store like Long's Drugs, you couldn't just pick up one tube of Revlon lipstick, scan the bar code and then quantity count the rest of them. If you did that, then when the area was printed out, it looked as though the store had about 756 tubes of the "Love That Red" color, and no "Pink in the Afternoon" or "Berry Brown." Only red. Oops! Busted.

Not that my managers cared. If they thought they could get away with it they would let batching slide. RGIS' official slogan was "Accuracy Is Our Primary Concern." Hah! In my district it was "Our Primary Concern Is Getting In And Out Of The Store As Fast As Possible, And To Hell With Accuracy." My district's inventory reports were never quite up to par, so there was ever increasing pressure on the managers to improve. Of course, that meant more pressure on us auditors to count faster faster faster! Faster counts meant better-looking inventory reports. Better looking inventory reports meant bigger bonuses for the managers. But what did it mean for us lowly auditors? Not a whole lot. If we were fortunate we might get a laconic "Thanks" as we closed out our audit machines and headed out the door. Oh sure, we might get a little raise now and then, but that's nothing compared to getting a nice fat bonus. Or benefits. It really sucked that the managers had medical and dental benefits and a 401K plan AND bonuses, and all an auditor got was maybe a 25 cent raise once a year, if your manager remembered to give you one. I was fortunate that DM Kevin was a happy drunk, because I think that's why I received five raises my first year with RGIS. Two 50 cent raises, two 75 cent ones and one $1.00 raise. I think that in his drunken state he kept forgetting that he'd already given me a raise the month before and then would go ahead and give me another one. Thank goodness for Coors Light.

But back to the subject of batching. When I was a newbie it really used to bother me to see people batching in an inventory. I would think to myself how unfair it was that I was taking the time to count things properly, and others were just blowing through shelves and areas, counting all the different flavors of fruit juice as one. I also felt bad for the store too, in that they weren't getting the kind of inventory that they had paid for (meaning an accurate one). But as the years passed, and my cynicism towards RGIS grew, I eventually stopped caring so much about accuracy and fairness and the customer getting screwed over. Fuck it. If the AM and DM didn't care, why should I? And if the store's employers were too stupid to figure out that they were being had, then that was their own fault.

Batching figured into an auditor's APH (Average Per Hour). In most inventories a record of how many items or dollars you had counted was kept. When we were in one of our Long's Drugs cycles (2 weeks worth of Long's stores, about 1 per day), the DM would print up a list of how many dollars everyone had counted in the previous inventory, make copies, and pass them out at the beginning of the next day's inventory. Of course, if you batched, your APH would be much higher than someone who counted legitimately. Printing out our APH's was supposed to be a sort of incentive for us to count faster, as in "Hey! So-and-So counted $90,000.00 worth of stuff, and I only did half that. Gosh! I had better count faster this time, so I can do as well as him!" What a load of crap. I mean, who gives a damn, right? What did we get out of it, except for bragging rights? Are bragging rights as good or better than getting a bonus? Hell no. Screw bragging rights.

Besides,any idiot there knew that if you got stuck counting in a crap aisle like fishing tackle, with their millions of tiny bags of $1.99 lures (at cost), you would have counted a ton of stuff and ended up with a very low dollar amount. Whereas some ass cherry-picking could score the vitamin aisle and load his machine with over $10,000.00 in one section alone. (Cherry-picking bastards. Another thing that went on a lot in my district. People were supposed to take the next available aisle or gondola to count, but some jerk auditors would take a peek at the next aisle, see that there was too much crap to scan, or too few dollars in it to mean much, and skip over that one, leaving it for someone else to count.) So the posting of everyone's APH didn't mean much to us. Who cared? Give us auditors a bonus or benefits, then we might have cared. Somewhat.

(Coming up: More RGIS crap.)

Eric Is A Psycho (Part 1)

2006-05-13T11:23:00.000-07:00

Of course, like a sucker, I came back to work for RGIS, the very next day. My first road store, a place called Tuesday Morning. A stupid name for a store, and confusing too for some people. "Wait, am I doing Tuesday Morning on Wednesday, or is that Wednesday Morning on Tuesday?"

What I remember about Tuesday Morning (the store, not the day) was that it was a real ratty-looking place. Dirty, dusty or damaged items that other stores had rejected were snapped up by Tuesday Morning and sold at a discount. Anything and everything was sold there. Thus you had cheap duvet covers next to Waterford crystal, which would in turn be standing on a shelf next to a leering papier-mache Santa Claus that was missing one hand.

This was my first inventory that Joe (he of the girly fingernails) ran. Joe seemed nice, but very preoccupied. He kept up a frenetic pace throughout that whole inventory, running here and there, printing out all the areas that had already been counted and constantly checking his laptop computer (called a portable) to make sure all the areas in the store were accounted for. He never stopped moving the entire time we were there. At times he would shoot across the store so fast he was like a blur. He had tons of energy to expend. Where did it all come from? I wondered.

AM Joe was so busy he barely gave any time or thought to explaining what needed to be counted and how. Of course, once again I was the only newbie, so I just sort of fumbled my way through this inventory as well. And like the Miller's Stockman fiasco, all the other veteran auditors were surly and uninterested in answering any questions from me.

Joe did manage to give me one bit of valuable, time-saving advice. At one point I was counting a section filled with hundreds of bath towels and washcloths, when Joe came over and told me, "You don't have to fold them back up, just throw 'em back in there (on the shelves)." He said that the towels had already been all jumbled up and it wasn't RGIS' job to clean and tidy the store, just to count the stuff.

After all of the counting was finished, Joe still had to wrap up a few things with the store personnel before he could leave. Since he had driven the company van and I had rode in with him, myself and a few other auditors had to stay there until he was finished. A few people had driven to the San Rafael store in their own cars, and I enviously watched them drive off. We had been at the store since 8:00 am (having left Santa Rosa at 6:45 am), and six + hours on my feet was a very tiring thing. Plus, we still had that long drive back to the office on the perpetually traffic-clogged 101 Freeway. It would take us at least an hour or more to get back to Santa Rosa. I was beat.

While Joe was schmoozing with the store's manager, I waited outside in the parking lot next to the RGIS van. I was afraid to leave it and go sit down on a bench somewhere, as I thought it would be really easy for everyone to forget I had even been there, and drive off and leave me stranded in San Rafael.

So I was leaning against the van, getting dust all over my burgundy polo, and watching a couple of the other auditors who had remained behind. The three of them were having a very animated conversation, with much laughing going on. There was a tall, skinny guy with short spiky black hair and pale skin who seemed to be the leader of the group. At least he was the one doing most of the talking and gesturing. This was Eric, a Team Leader and AM Joe's best friend at RGIS. With him was Erin, a very short, squat girl with long brown hair. She was for some strange reason wearing pink fuzzy bedroom slippers. She wore these slippers to most of the inventories, even though they weren't the regulation black shoes. I mean, they weren't even shoes, for God's sake! But she was a veteran, and as we all know the vets could get away with breaking any RGIS rule they felt like. Also breaking another RGIS dress code rule was a tiny little guy with them. His name was Sudu or Sulu or something weird like that. He wore a blue plastic hoop earring in one ear, even though it was a no-no for male auditors to wear earrings.

So the three of them were standing in the middle of a parking lot aisle talking when a car came up behind them. It wanted to get past their group, but they were right smack in the middle of the aisle completely ignoring this car. So the car somehow managed to squeeze carefully past them, and I guess when it did the driver must have given them a look because Eric exploded. "What? What the fuck is your problem? You looking at me? C'mon, get the fuck outta your car! C'mon, fucker, get out and I'll kick the shit outta ya!" Eric was leaping around as he screamed, flailing his long skinny arms like an angry orangutan. The car calmly left the parking lot. Eric was still fuming and told Erin and Sudu/Sulu, " I should kicked his fucking door in." The other two just grinned.

I was shocked. I had never before seen someone overreact to something so benign as a look. I remember thinking, "Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into? What am I doing here with these psychotic weirdos? Wah! I wanna go home! But I'm stuck in a parking lot in San Rafael with no way to get back to Santa Rosa until some man with long fingernails is finished chatting up the manager of a crappy discount junk store! Okay, I SWEAR this is my last day with RGIS and this time I mean it!" Um, yeah right. Have I mentioned I worked for RGIS for over 7 years? Boy, was I a glutton for punishment.

Finally about 3 years later Joe emerged from the store, and we could leave. Eric and Sudu/Sulu drove away in Eric's car, and me and Erin joined Joe in the company van. Erin rode shotgun with Joe driving, and I sat behind them. The two of them carried on an exclusive conversation the whole way back to the office, talking about other auditors and various inventories that they had done. I was NOT made to feel a part of this conversation.

Not that I was missing much. Erin seemed chiefly interested in bad-mouthing what seemed like every single person in the district, especially a woman named Lydia. It was "Lydia said this to me, what a bitch", and "Lydia told me and Tracy not to talk so loud in the store, who the fuck does she think she is", and so on. Joe would just nod and say things like, "Yes" and "Hmm" and "I know". Stimulating conversation.

When we finally reached the office and parked I opened the sliding panel door, ready to leap out and make a run for it. At that point Joe seemed to remember that I was even in the van and said, "Thanks for your help", or words to that effect. Erin chimed in, saying "Oh yeah, thanks", very condescendingly, like she was a manager or a Team Leader or something, graciously conveying her gratitude to the lowly newbie. Give me a break. I beat it out of there.

(Coming up: More RGIS horror stories. Actually, soap opera stories might be a more appropriate term.)

My First Day In RGIS Hell

2006-05-09T15:18:00.000-07:00

January, 1999. I was standing outside the locked main entrance to the Santa Rosa Plaza mall at 5:45 am. Like a good little newbie auditor I wore a pair of regulation black pants, all-black shoes and RGIS polo shirt. Nothing over the shirt, and it felt like 30 degrees F outside.

I was so anxious to make a good impression on my first day that I followed the dress code rules to the tee. No jacket, even though I was freezing. And of course the all-black shoes. This was stressed many times during my sentence with RGIS. You had to wear solid black shoes, with no other color on them at all. Once this guy wore black running shoes with white soles showing, and DM Kevin went into a panic and grabbed a roll of black electrical tape out of the company van and covered the sides of the white soles with the plastic tape. All this because some of the Ops (Operations) managers were due to make an appearance at this inventory, and Kevin didn't want to get chewed out for an auditor dress code infraction. Not that it mattered. Even without the shoe problem, Kevin usually got nailed on about half a dozen screw-ups anyway.

Finally Dave came out of the parking garage with a couple of auditors all carrying soft-sided brown suitcases. AAM (Associate Area Manager, basically an Area Manager in training) Dave was running this inventory. When he reached the main door he said to me, "I recognized you because you were shivering so hard." I noticed that everyone else was wearing coats and sweaters. Damn it. I didn't realize it then, but you could wear a jacket TO the inventory, but not IN the inventory. Looking back on it now, it would have been pretty barbaric for RGIS to tell their employees, "We don't care if it's 20 degrees F below outside, nothing over your polo shirt!" But again, I was newbie, anxious to please, and did not want to make any mistakes at all. Oh well.

We entered the mall on the first floor and went directly to a store called 'Miller's Stockman' (soon to undergo a name change to 'Corral West Ranchwear'). 'Stockman' carried jeans, tee shirts and some ranch wear, like cowboy boots and long black duster overcoats. 'Miller's Stockman' was my first inventory, and it was a disaster.

At least for me. NOTHING Dave taught me in the training sessions was even remotely similar to what I was supposed to be doing. All the other auditors there were veterans and knew exactly what to do. I was the only newbie and I was completely clueless. There was no counting of quantities and keying them into the audit machine. It was all scan, scan, scan. Scan every single shirt, pants and pair of boots. No one told me what to do if something would not scan, and of course this was not covered in the training sessions that I'd had previously. The other auditors were very grumpy and unfriendly. I would ask them for help and they would say things like, "I don't know, ask Dave" and "I'm busy, ask Dave." Assholes.

So I would go to Dave and ask him how to do something, and he would say, "I'll be with you in a minute," and then forget all about me, or finally come over, try to show me how to correct a mistake, and be so vague and confusing with his explanations that I could have screamed with frustration.

Eventually, after I had screwed up several areas, Dave gave me the easiest section in the store to count: boots. How could anyone fuck up something as easy as counting boxes of shoes? I could that day, and did. Nothing was going right for me. Wah!

The only time I even came close to having a light moment that morning was when I was counting those damn boots. I found a pair of ratty old running shoes under a bench and I asked a store clerk, "Um, am I supposed to count these?" The guy laughed and said no, that a customer must have tried on a pair of boots and shoplifted them by walking out of the store wearing the boots, leaving his sneakers behind. The clerk held up the pair of sneakers and yelled to another store clerk, "Hey Bob, it happened again!"

The inventory didn't last very long, maybe 4 or 5 hours (it probably would have been over a lot sooner had it not been for my screw-ups needing to be recounted). I remember at one point thinking, "What the hell am I doing here? I hate this I hate this I hate this! This sucks. I shouldn't be counting this crap, I should be buying it." Completely illogical thought, since A: Without said crappy job I couldn't afford to buy anything, and B: I wouldn't be caught dead shopping at a lame redneck store like Miller's Stockman. It was just me feeling frustrated over all the mistakes I had made, and my coworkers distinct lack of support, and Dave's confusing vagueness. Whatever. One thing was clear to me. This was my first and last day as an RGIS auditor. I was never coming back. Never never NEVER.

(Coming up: my second day as an RGIS auditor.)

Kevin The RGIS Rat Bastard (aka F.U.R.B.Y.)

2006-05-06T14:59:00.000-07:00

After the five of us finished our second RGIS training session, we were one by one called into a small inner office to meet Kevin, the District Manager. Kevin was a short, fair-haired pink-faced man in his early thirties. He seemed extremely upbeat and very cheerful, and had the pinkest skin I had ever seen. It wasn't just fair skin with a rosy flush, but his face, ears, hands-all visible skin was a solid, bright Play-Doh pink. Very weird, and unnatural looking. Much later I found out via the district grapevine that Kevin was a heavy drinker (he would regularly put away a 12-pack of Coors Light every day), and someone said that alcoholics tend to be very pink because the alcohol brings the blood close to the surface of the skin. I don't know if that's true, but it would explain Kevin distubing pinkness.

Finding out several months later about Kevin's favorite beverage, Coors Light, would also explain the beer cans all over the office. Every single wastepaper basket in the office was loaded with beer cans. In the front office behind the counter, in Kevin's inner office, in the storeroom, in the bathroom...EVERYWHERE. Now, to his credit, I don't think I ever saw Kevin drink before or during an inventory. But afterwards, at the office...a different story indeed.

One time an RGIS Ops (Operations) Manager dropped by the office when Kevin was out, and saw all the Coors Light cans in the wastepaper baskets. He asked the office secretary, Bonnie, "Whose are these?" Bonnie took pity on Kevin (she liked Kevin for some odd reason, and was always afraid he was going to get fired, which was perceptive of her), so she said the beer cans were hers. Bonnie knew that she could get away with beer at the office (at least once, anyways) because she was highly valued by RGIS. She was the only one who knew how to do a lot of stuff at the office, like time sheets, payroll, etc. AM Joe once told me that if Bonnie wanted to ruin a new Manager she could do so very easily, by not telling the new Manager how to do things on the computer.

Kevin could have been a dead ringer for Archie Andrews, the comic book character, minus the checkered pants and black sweater vest with a big 'R' on the chest. Kevin dressed even worse than a comic book character. He liked to wear horrible mustard-yellow dress shirts that clashed with his neon-pink skin.

DM Kevin was a contradiction of sorts. On one hand, he could appear to be quite friendly and personable to your face (probably due to his beloved Coors Light), but behind your back he might be wielding a knife, ready to plunge it between your shoulder blades. He had a reputation of promising raises and then never giving them, of promising more hours and then scheduling you for less, and making rude comments about your counting ability out of your earshot. One auditor named Heidi became so frustrated with Kevin that she found a drink called 'Rat Bastard' and went into Kevin's office and slammed it down on his desk. "Here, just for you, Kevin," she told him. Kevin, in an alcoholic glow, thought that Heidi was only kidding and laughed. But word got around, and from then on Kevin's nickname was 'Rat Bastard'. Odious Mondo embellished upon it and started referring to Kevin as "FURBY", for (F)uck Yo(u) (R)at (B)astard, or F.U.R.B.

Kevin gave me a yellow legal pad to write down the dates and locations of upcoming inventories. He sat behind his desk and began leafing through a big plastic binder. "Let's see...January 4th, 6 am, Miller's Stockman, Santa Rosa Plaza... January 5th, meet at the office here at 6:45 am to go to San Rafael to do the Tuesday Morning store... Jan 6th, 6:00 pm at Montgomery Village for Ross Department Store..." and so on. He then rattled off a string of Long's Drugs store locations and dates and chuckled, "After this, you'll be a Long's Drugs expert!" I smiled and agreed, even though I didn't know what the hell he was talking about.

I accepted all the jobs that he gave me except for one: Macy's in San Francisco, to start at 8:00 pm. I told Kevin that I wasn't too thrilled on driving all the way to S.F., and Kevin explained that for jobs we did out of our district we would meet at the office and commute to the store in company-owned vans. These vans were sometimes driven by the Area or District Manager, but most often driven by an RGIS auditor picked by the AM or DM at the last minute. I mean they picked just about anyone to drive us. Old men in their seventies with bad eyesight, young guys with glassy eyes, people with suspended driver's licenses, ANYONE. RGIS was supposed to check the DMV record of any auditor who was chosen to drive a company van, but to my knowledge Joe, Dave, or Kevin never once did this. They didn't seem to care too much about following company policies. They just wanted to get the whole herd of auditors off to the store, in any way possible.

I asked Kevin what time I would get back to the office after Macy's. He said around 6:00 am. The idea that I would work all night and then get home in time to sleep just as dawn was breaking was unthinkable to me and I politely declined. Kevin said okay, then something like, "Welcome to RGIS, see you again soon!", and I left the office clutching my little yellow schedule.

Of course, in the months and years to come I would become quite adept and used to sleeping in broad daylight. All of us long-term auditors had to learn to catch a quick catnap (usually 40 minutes or so) whenever possible in order to survive a hectic work week. These bits of sleep were often the only time I got to close my eyes for days.

The schedules of stores that we were to inventory were frequently mad. That is to say, often we would do stores back to back to back, and I would only have enough time in between inventories to dash home, grab a bite to eat, quickly freshen up and run out again. Sometimes I wouldn't be able to go home at all between stores. I would leave a Whole Foods inventory in San Anselmo at 4:00 am (having began counting there the night before at 7:00 pm), drive 50 miles north to Petaluma, stop at an all-night Jack-In-The-Box for a burger and Coke, gulp those down, drive to a Long's Drugs down the street, park and catch maybe 20 minutes sleep in my car before I had to report inside the store at 5:15 am. Insanity.

Thanks to this crazy way of earning a paycheck, during my stint in RGIS hell I would come to make caffeine my very best friend. My dearest companion, without whom I could not have survived. I would consume loads of coffee, Red Bull (yuck), Sobe Adrenaline (yum), Mountain Dew only because I'd heard it contained more caffeine than Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola when I tired of the putridness of Mountain Dew, and plenty of No-Doz. One auditor named Cory even tried coffee-flavored yogurt. Anything to stay awake.

For me, anything legal that is. I stuck to the safe-and-somewhat-sane methods of staying awake. Many other auditors (and managers) delved into other less wholesome ways of keeping their eyes open long enough to count cans of soup and bottles of wine. There was much whispering around our district and other ones of who was snorting cocaine, with people claiming to have seen this auditor or that manager coming out of a bathroom in an Albertson's Supermarket with a bit of white powder under their nose or continually sniffling suspiciously during a long drive to a Sear's Department store in San Bruno. I never actually saw anyone do drugs during the time I worked for RGIS, but during that time I heard many rumors of drug use. MANY. Veteran auditors would tell me in my first year that "Well, that's why this company never does drug testing. If they did, they would lose most of their auditors and managers."

So between the sleep deprivation and rumored drug use it's a wonder anything got counted in an inventory at all. Sometimes it didn't. Sometimes certain auditors, Team Leaders, and even Managers would 'plug in the numbers' instead. That is, they would take the totals from the store's previous inventory, change the numbers around a little bit, print out the area, and...presto! Instant inventory! But more on that later.

(Coming up: My first day as an official RGIS auditor. Whee!)

Training Session Trauma

2006-04-29T11:47:00.000-07:00

A week after I had filled out my RGIS application, I attended my first training session at the same office. The training session was run by Dave, a genial, slight man in his sixties. Dave was bland and a rather harmless sort, or so I thought until a few years later when RGIS would end up firing him after they learned that he had lied on his application about having a criminal record. It turns out that he was a registered sex offender, but that's a tale for another day.

There were about 10 of us sitting around a conference table. First we watched a couple of videos explaining the inventory business and how it works. These videos of course extolled the virtues of working for the wonderful company that was RGIS. They made it sound as though we were about to embark on some fantastic adventure, instead of ending up in some dingy drugstore counting bottles of aspirin and boxes of condoms.

Everything else about the videos was so dull that the rest of the contents completely excapes my memory, except that when they were over the office secretary, Bonnie, said from her front desk, "Those new videos were much better than the old ones, right Dave?"

The other people at the training session were unremarkable, and half of them didn't even show up at the second training session a few days later (And those that did return for session #2 I never saw at a single inventory. Apparently I was the only one stupid enough to stick around).

During the second session we were given black webbed belts to wear. These belts had two hooks that the audit machines (micro-computers that we would use to count and total merchandise) would be hooked up to. Later that year I would see and request one of the leather belts that some of the veteran auditors had. These belts were much nicer-looking than the cheap nylon webbed ones. When I got my leather belt, I asked one old man auditor, Jon (who had been with the company forever but could never progress any further than team leader due to the fact that he was as dumb as a rock), why weren't the leather belts the norm, instead of the nylon ones. Jon said that they used to be, but the company had hired so many fat people (like Mondo, another team leader who weighed around 400+ pounds and smelled like a clogged toilet) that they had to switch to the more adjustable nylon belt. We were also given burgundy polyester polos with RGIS stitched in gray on the short sleeves. Dave explained that we always wore these shirts during an inventory, along with black trousers and solid black shoes. No jeans allowed. He said that we also weren't allowed to wear anything over our RGIS polos, nor could we wear anything but all-black shoes. Of course, this was another 'rule' that virtually everyone ignored, as lots of people wore jackets or sweat shirts over their polos and one girl, Erin, would wear her fuzzy bedroom slippers to inventories.

Dave explained that the belts and shirts were ours to keep (whoopee). Then at each inventory we would receive one audit machine and one laser gun (if we weren't doing a financial inventory, which doesn't use laser guns). At the end of each inventory, we would return the machine and laser gun to the team leader or manager or whoever was running the inventory.

The audit machine looked like an oversized calculator. It had a numeric keypad in the center, surrounded by other function keys and a small LCD display screen at the top. The thing took 8 AA batteries to run and weighed about 8 pounds, so that it felt like you had a big tumor hanging off your right hip. They were pretty sturdy little computers, as I would find out in the years to come. I witnessed these audit machines get dropped on cement floors, thrown against walls and banged on a Kmart shopping cart. The latter act was done by a team leader named Eric, when he couldn't get his audit machine to transmit to the Ray 2000 (another audit machine that we would periodically transmit our machine's info to). He tried several times to transmit (99S to 99R) without success, and then in complete frustration he slammed his machine onto a metal shopping cart. He claimed that this was what you had to do when your audit machine froze up. I guess he was right, because after that his machine transmitted the data perfectly.

The laser guns (looking like overgrown retarded water pistols) plugged into the audit machines, and we would be using it to scan bar codes on the store merchandise. Dave showed us how everything hooked up, machine to belt, laser to machine, etc. Since I'm left-handed, I started to fix my belt so that the audit machine would hang down at my left side, and I held the laser gun in my right hand. Dave saw me doing this and immediately told me I was doing it wrong. He said the machine should always hang down my right side, and I should hold the laser gun in my left hand. "But I'm left-handed, I need to key with my left hand," I told him. "Well, my son is left-handed, and he keys with his right hand. WE ALL DO," Dave said pointedly, and I got the message and switched the machine to my right side. Dave was satisfied.

After we were all hooked up and connected to Dave's approval, he showed us how to turn the machines on. Dave explained that when we flipped the 'on' switch, a buzzing noise would occur but that we were never to hit the 'clear' button. This would stop the buzzing but would also erase the program information in the machine as well. No matter how many times this was drilled into our heads, at every inventory at least 2 or 3 people would immediately hit the 'clear' button when they turned on their machines and that dreadful buzzing sounded. You couldn't blame the idiots too much, as the noise was eardrum-piercing, and upon hearing it your first reaction was to just make the damn thing stop. RGIS auditors would quickly grow to hate that sound so much that when someone would accidently bump their machine's keypad against something in a store, the machine would start buzzing and half a dozen people would scream "Clear! Hit the damn 'clear' button!" (It was okay to use the 'clear' button once you had started entering data into the machine.) Sometimes when Kevin, our District Manager, would give the crew our pre-inventory speech in the back room of a store, stink-bomb Mondo would secretly press a bunch of buttons on his machine so that it would start buzzing loudly, interrupting the DM's speech. Keving would look around angrily at the group and say, "Damn it! I told you guys NOT to turn on your machines until I'm finished talking!" Mondo would quietly hit his 'clear' button and look innocently at Kevin, with a "Who me?" expression on his mottled face.

Once our machines were on we practiced scanning bar codes on sheets of paper. Then: excitement! We scanned wall posters that had photos of cans of soup, boxes of cereals, etc. We would scan the product's bar codes, count the number of items, and enter the quantity in our machines. When we finished counting all of the items in the poster, Dave showed us how to take a reading of the totals in our machines. We then wrote the totals (# of items and dollar amount) on an RGIS area tag, along with our last name and our worksheet number. Dave explained that at every inventory we would be given a worksheet on which we were to record every area (shelves and sections in the store were numbered) that we had counted in that particular store. No one ever did this, except for the newbies. Most of us just put a big 'X' on the worksheet and turned it in (when we bothered to turn them in). Once beached-whale Mondo wrote in big letters across his worksheet, "REDRUM". When Team Leader Michelle showed it to Kevin the DM, he said only, "Well, some people have issues with me."

After we had practiced scanning a couple of the posters, Dave explained that next we would be given a schedule of upcoming inventory jobs. He also said that there would be no work until after New Year's Day (this was in December). When the five of us looked surprised, Dave said, "Oh, didn't you know that there are no inventories going on in December? No stores want to have an inventory going on during the holidays. But you'll be busy enough after January 1, and don't forget, you ARE getting paid for these training sessions." Yeah, at $1.00 less than the starting wage ($7.50 at the time). This amounted to a whopping $39.00. Wow. Merry Christmas to me.

(Coming soon: I meet Kevin the DM, he of the Play-Doh pink skin and Coors-Light-beer-can-decorated-office.)

RGIS Sucks!

2006-02-06T15:20:00.000-08:00

The first time I had anything to do with RGIS was one cold and regrettable day in December. I stopped by the office on Neotomas Lane in Santa Rosa, CA, to fill out a job application. I had seen the RGIS classified ad in the local newspaper, and it was sort of promising, as it read 'no experience necessary, paid training, and medical benefits.' Of course, the $7.50 an hour starting wage wasn't so hot, but I was low on skills and high on desperation, which when you think about it perfectly describes about 99.9% of the people who end up working for RGIS.

The RGIS office was located in a 2 story building that housed several other businesses, including 3 or 4 radio stations. To get to the RGIS office you had to pass by a Spanish talk-radio station that always left their curtains open, so you always got treated to an exciting view of a couple of guys screaming something scary and unintelligible into their microphones. Just beyond them was RGIS, and when I opened the door and walked in a young Asian man came out of an inner office and said hello. I told him I was there to apply for a job and he handed me an application and an aptitude test. He told me to sit down at a conference table there in the outer office, and when I was ready to begin the test to let him know, as he would be timing me.

The aptitude test was incredibly easy. A moron could have finished it in no time flat (again, moron perfectly describing much of RGIS' personnel). It consisted of simple addition problems and drawings of piles of blocks, which you were supposed to count and total up. It was a very simple and stupid test, and when I finished it I told the Asian man I was through. He seemed surprised when I told him this, so either I must have had a really retarded expression on my face when I walked in (entirely possible) or he was just used to dealing with imbeciles who had trouble adding 2 + 2 (very probable).

The Asian guy took my test and application and handed me a business card with 'RGIS Inventory Specialists' printed on it(Another example of the company's idiocy was their corporate name. 'RGIS' stands for 'Retail Grocery Inventory Specialists', so their actual name was Retail Grocery Inventory Specialists Inventory Specialists. Morons.). Below this was the guy's name, Joseph, and handwritten on the back was a time and date. Joseph (or Joe) said that I should show up at the appointed time next week and I could begin my paid training. As I took the card I noticed two things about him. One, he had absolutely the tiniest eyes I had ever seen on a person. Yeah, I know, Asian people, slant eyes, blah blah blah, but really, this guy's eyes barely existed in his face. They were miniscule. How could he possibly see out of those slits, I wondered.

The second thing I noticed was that Joe had the longest fingernails I have ever seen on a man. I mean, they were beautifully shaped into long ovals, extending well past the fingertips and looking as though he had just come from having a clear polish manicure. Immediately upon seeing those nails a bizarre thought popped into my head. This guy's a transvestite! He dresses as a man in a white business shirt and tan chinos during the day, but at night he goes out in drag. Maybe in a black strapless evening gown with a pink feather boa or something. Of course, he needs the long nails to complete the picture. It was an extreme assumption to make, but the sight of those long nails on a man really shocked me. Even though I ended up working for RGIS for several years, and got to know Joe pretty well, I never did find out why he wore his nails so long. I never heard anyone else mention it either, so I guess I was the only one freaked out by it. Maybe he did like to dress in drag, I don't know. Joe did have some girly aspects about him. I mean, he was this really big womanizer at work (lots more about that later), but he also liked to cook and sew. And when I say sew (say so?), I don't mean just mending a tear or something. I mean he told me once that he knew how to use a serger sewing machine, which is a little more complicated than a regular sewing machine. And with the cooking, Joe said that his mom was always playing cards or Mah-jongg with her friends, and they would always ask him to cook some snacks for them. A real Renaissance man, I suppose. Or maybe he was bi.

So my first impression of RGIS was as follows:
1. Good help wanted ad
2. Easy and stupid aptitude test
3. Retarded corporate name
4. Possible transvestite working in their office

Quite an interesting afternoon, and I still had the paid training sessions to look forward to. Oh Boy!

(Coming soon: RGIS' lame training sessions, where they weed out the retarded from the semi-retarded.)

Still 'Soon To Be Coming..."

2005-12-27T11:15:00.000-08:00

Found my notebook with a lot of my RGIS horror stories. I can't wait to start posting them here, and share with all you fellow RGIS sufferers. God, doesn't RGIS suck? See you soon!

Coming soon to a blog near you

2005-12-23T12:40:00.000-08:00

This will be the official "Tales of an RGIS Auditor" blog. I screwed up with the blog address on the other one. So if you're interested in reading about all the horrifying stuff I went through as an auditor for RGIS (and of course you are, else why would you be here?), and you can sympathize or empathize, and were (or are) and RGIS auditor yourself, tune in here for all the gory details. I just started this blog, so I'm not exactly ready to start with my first tale. But I have lots of notes at home, so I hope to start with the first chapter soon. See ya!