It was the end of my shift, a relatively short one at six hours but still intensely annoying. Some problem at the server end had card transactions processing at glacial speed. The customers were mostly understanding, especially those who’d already seen this problem at other businesses. The manager on duty, though, was not.

At one point, after a sadly typical two-minute wait before the card reader would time out and let me try again, this guy — who should have known about this problem, because we’d been having it for about 18 hours — came over to breathe down my neck, relentlessly talk over me, blunder around trying the simple fixes that had already been tried, and basically show me how stressed he was and try to spread that stress around. And when I objected to some of this, his response was “you don’t talk to me like that” and to repeat “you’re being confrontational” a few times. (This is how he often talks over people, by the way; if he doesn’t have much to say, he just says it over and over so no one else can get a word in.)

He ran the next couple of transactions by himself, because I couldn’t be trusted or something, and suddenly the card reader was an unacceptable and unsolvable burden and we went cash-only for a few hours.

So by the end of the shift I was more than ready to leave, but I couldn’t just yet. It was also the last day of the schedule week, and the next week’s (and next day’s) schedule hadn’t been posted yet. I had to go around asking for it.

I asked the assistant manager I hadn’t already had an argument with first, who for accuracy’s sake I’ll call Pissant Pete. His response was “do you have Crew?” followed by a snotty “it’ll be posted before tomorrow” and then “I don’t appreciate being laughed at” and an irrelevant tangent about how he was covering another manager’s shift to give them some time off.

So Pete doesn’t like being laughed at. I must not use this knowledge for evil.

At Pete’s suggestion I asked the other guy next. He was holed up in the office, talking to the store manager via FaceCall or whatever it’s called, and after “do you have Crew?” and repeating “you’re making a big deal out of nothing” three times failed to deflect me, he had to ask the store manager if I was working the next day, and he promised to post the rest of the schedule to Crew “in a few minutes,” which in fairness to him turned out to be (slightly) less than an hour.

So there wasn’t even a copy of the schedule in the building at 5:15 PM.

I can’t help but wonder: if I’d left it alone, as they would rather I had, would the schedule have been posted at the same time? Or at 11 PM? Or not at all?