Fuck these assholes

I have never encountered a more poorly managed organization than my new employer. Since "Knife Crime" (see previous posts) took over my health club/spa it has been nothing but mass confusion in every department. For a while I thought it was just the spa as we've had compounded problems due to our manager "quitting" and the mass exodus of front desk staff, but as I talk to more people throughout the club I'm finding that we're all in the same sinking boat. No one, and I mean NO ONE, knows what's going on and who's in charge. The Corporate Brass are so busy traveling to newly acquired locations - literally, a new club somewhere in the country every week - they've left the people on the ground with no support. While they managed to send an HR guy to blather on for two hours about Knife Crime's mission statement, they've failed to present anyone who has concrete information on anything else like, say, how much we will be paid, when we will get new products, what the new products will be, upcoming renovations, etc.

I have, however, been able to glean some new information on the curious exit of our former manager. Knife Crime sends all of the managers in the clubs they acquire to a 2-week certification course to see if they're a good "fit" for the position and the company. They are given study materials 2 weeks before they go to certification and they take a test on that material the first day. Apparently, if they score below 90% they are asked to leave the training and are not allowed to keep or get promoted to the manager position. That's what happened to my boss. He failed the test, scored a 60% or something, and was asked to leave the training IN FRONT OF EVERYONE IN THE ROOM. People who were there said it was so painful to watch. So. That explains his leaving his position "effective immediatly" and the company's offer to help him find a "more suitable" position within the organization... meaning, he was demoted and given a severance through the end of the year and, funny, hasn't been able to find another position or had any real support from corporate in trying to do so. This is their legal way of "trimming the fat" and whether or not one agrees with the practice, I don't think it needs to be cruel and humiliating like it was for my boss.

Was he the greatest manager who ever lived? No. Did he have faults that drove everyone crazy? Yes. But don't we all? And what he did so well was engage the customers and take care of his staff, he made it a place where we all enjoyed coming. We all had a saying about him that summed up his skills in one breath: he could take a call from the angriest customer who had the worst experience and at the end of the call, he or she would be laughing and will have purchased a $500 gift certificate to the spa. No lie, I personally witnessed it several times while he was managing. Sure, we ran out of products from time to time. Yes, every now and then we would have to call him to remind him to come in to do payroll. And certain people did get away with murder under his "watch." But the rest of us worked hard for him because we knew he would go to bat for us if we ever needed it. We made him look good and he made us look good, it was a mutually beneficial relationship where the customer ended up on top every time. The ends justified the means with him as the boss and he trusted us to be professionals.

No trust now. No trust, no benefits, no freedom to be ourselves. Just the bottom line and the Knife Crime way.

Ch-ch-ch-Changes

Quite the week. My tendonitis flared up again in my right elbow prompting a trip to the orthopeodist's office. Good news in the end, a few weeks in rehab ought to make a huge difference and I am still able to work.

On the way home from the appointment, however, I blew a tire on a major interstate. So there I stood on the side of the Crosstown in heels with a bum elbow emptying out the trunk of my car for the world to see. I couldn't believe the things I pulled out of there... note to others, clean out your trunk every five years or so in case you ever need to go for that spare.

Oh, yeah, and my beloved boss quit, effective immediatly. I guess I'm not surprised. Since Knife Crime took over the spa his job has basically been reduced to glorified receptionist and he hasn't been happy at all. We walk a fine line between friends/colleagues/boss-and-employee so I haven't known the details of his doings lately but I knew something was brewing.

I talked to him for a while last night and even though I'm glad that he's moving into something that will make him happier (he took an esthetician/massage therapist position at another Knife Crime location) he sounded like he's been drinking the Corporate Kool-Aid. He went on and on about how the company really cares and the people that have been helping him with the transition really believe in the "mission" and I should really give them a chance to show me how great they are and blah blah BLAH! Whatever. I know how they can show me they care... how about sending a person or at least a scrap of communication to the staff at the location you just took over to meet us, maybe, and tell us what our wages will be and what products we'll be using and what our holiday hours will be and when the new software is coming? Despite my boss' good experience with them, I haven't seen one person come in and actually make an attempt to welcome us to the company... not one. We've been given zero information and have been floundering around for the past two months not knowing what in the world their plans are for us. They can suck it, for all I care.

Shopping: Week of October 7-13

Thank you, Lord, for these jeans which have single-handedly restored my ability to get my old-lady ass and thighs into afforadble, everyday flared jeans again. But, damn you, these jeans which made my ass look soooooo good but that now feel like a tournaquette around my midsection. I had a pair of you on yesterday at Turn Style for only $44 but I couldn't sit, walk or breathe in you... sigh. Good news, tho, found a pair of Lucky's for $29 and my favortie moon boots on clearance at Famous Footwear (I know, went in on a whim) for only $20. All in all, it was a good week.

Dreaming of you...
... fabulous coat
... sassy loafers
... neato bag (could be lose the initials, tho, Bets?)

I guess I'm "indie" after all

As I'm sure many aging Gen-Xers will attest, it's hard to keep an independent spirit as life marches you into your thirties. My husband and I joke that our twenty-something selves would detest us. We've sold out in exchange for property ownership over rental. We now buy cars based on things like number of airbags rather than number of dollars closest to zero. My hair is no longer pink and there is more than one tooth-whitening product in this house. It's not like we've moved out to the suburbs to drive a Windstar and subscribe to Oprah's bookclub but we have started to make more decisions based on comfort rather than on sticking it to The Man.


My husband actually *gasp* works for The Man. A few years ago he decided that his salary as a starving artist working in a frame store was never going to afford him the chance at home ownership, one of his dreams since childhood. So he took a temporary position at a major bank and after a few promotions he was able to afford a tiny little brownstone condo in the city. He put so much heart into fixing that place up... restoring the original woodwork, renovating the bathroom, installing brand new windows. And after I came along and started helping him, I too got a taste for the kind of pride home ownership can give a person. Enough pride, apparently, to make you more able to deal with the fact that you earn your salary from The Man. At least for him.

The spa/health club where I work was recently bought by a major fitness corporation (sounds like "Knife Crime") and I'm not handling the change all that well. The stack of new hire paperwork I had to sign was at least an inch thick containing some of the most ridiculous employee policies I have ever read. The company's corporate lawyer was there to answer questions relating to the policies. This is how the "discussion" went:

Me: Excuse me?
Ugly Lawyer With No Fashion Sense: Yes?
Me: So if I'm reading this employee dating policy correctly, we are to inform the HR department if we start dating someone we work with?
ULWNFS: Yes.
Me: And if we don't we risk getting fired.
ULWNFS: Up to and including termination, yes.
Me: So if two kids in the cafe go out on a date they have to tell you about it.
ULWNFS: We don't encourage dating relationships between co-workers.
Me: I understand that. What I'm saying is that if we chose not to share information from our personal lives with the HR department then we run the risk of losing our jobs? I think that's pretty ridiculous.
ULWNFS: Well, Knife Crime is a publically traded company and under the blah-blah-blah law enacted in blah-blah the company has every right to blah-blah-blah-legal-jargon-that-is-supposed-to-impress-and-intimidate-me-because-I-don't-understand-it.
Me: I used to work in HR and I know companies actively discourage dating relationships betweens managers and direct reports due to the sexual harrassment implications. But I think telling people who are not in reporting relationships who they can and can't date is pretty ridiculous and I don't agree with it.
ULWNFS: Well, if you really worked in HR you would know that this is very common. *shakes head and laughs under breath*
Me: *disbelief* Did you just laugh at me?
ULWNFS: No.
Me: Yes, you did. I just heard you laugh at me.

I left there positively shaking with fury. First of all, you don't laugh at me. Ev-er. No human being, especially one with such monumental green bags under her eyes, has the right to make me feel like I am inferior by making a laughing stock out of me. Second, way to go, Knife Crime, for doing such a bang-up job making me feel welcome. And third, why on Earth was a lawyer sent to help people with their paperwork instead of an HR representative who might (and this is a big might) have a shred of people-skill to help people understand what they're signing?

That was on a Thursday. I returned the next week after being away at a friend's wedding and my boss had some interesting information to share with me. Apparently the lawyer chick felt it necessary to go ahead and call corporate to tell the head of human resources that I was a rude troublemaker. I guess my boss and previous general manager spent the good portion of that weekend convincing HR that I was a great employee and would never respond disrespectfully unless I had felt disrespected... oh, and that I should be allowed to keep my job. The hell?! It was at that point that my boss told me to chill out and fly under the radar for a while until the whole thing blew over.

Since then I have had to sign a non-compete agreement stating that if I leave my position at Knife Crime I cannot have any contact with my clients for one year. And I had to sign that agreement not knowing what my new compensation structure will look like once it's enacted. I have also been informed that the products I have been instructing my clients to use for the last three years may or may not be discontinued at any time and replaced with products of their choosing. I will also be forced to wear a friggin' labcoat (I went to beauty school, not med school, people) and, apparently, I will need to wear a belt if my pants have belt loops... seriously, it's in their three-page "image manual". I know my product discount will be getting cut and they're going to make me pay for spa services now, as opposed to trading services with other providers during downtime. And all of this to ensure that you can walk into any one of their cookie-cutter spas nationwide and not feel as though anything is different between them.

That's not what I signed on for when I decided to take a job at a small, independent spa. I loved that my boss looked to me as lead esthetician for insight on product lines. I loved that I got to choose when to run a promotion for my services and who I could give discounts to. I loved that we always had cool little touches in our spa that made us different from other places. I loved that as I was trusted as a professional to do the right thing for my clients. Now I'm just one of the masses who doles out standard advice on products that may not be good to people who don't want to go to a place that acts outside the box. I now work at the Olive Garden of the spa world and am being forced to serve never-ending-soup-and-salad.

To blog or not to blog

Reasons to blog:
1) Get in the habit of writing daily/weekly/monthly again. All work and no creative outlet makes this gal feel pretty stale.
2) Connect with similar life forms, albeit virtually, for a little back-and-forth.
3) Self importance... period. Why else would someone blog rather than keep a personal journal?
4) Make someone else laugh, scratch his or her head, type angry comments, yawn.

Reasons not to blog:
1) Why should anyone care what in the world I have to say about anything?
2) Re-experience that whole walking-into-the-lunchroom-and-no-one-wants-me-to-sit-at-their-table thing from junior high... sigh.
3) I really should be patching some drywall somewhere in this house.