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As some may know, but most probably do not, I have been working in a toy store for the last three months. That was...probably the most suitable job for me ever.
I mean, I was surrounded by toys. And I got to make people happy. I love doing that.

So why...why did I quit?
It was surprisingly logical, as I tend to be, and not restricted to a single cause, but rather a number of pressing issues that combined into one big pile of unhappy me.

[background]You see, at some point in my life, I decided to sit through a course to become a monitor on a playground(1). You know, just assisting kids in picking interesting games to play, providing some of those games and following through on what could be done with the local materials. I enjoyed myself a lot. Working on the playground like that was, and still is, one of my favourite memories. Eventually, responsibility caught up with me and I attended a second course, to become a 'main monitor', which means a lot more decisions wound up in my hands. I had to keep the team happy, I had to make sure the materials to play with were on my part of the playground, I had to evaluate the team I was working with, I had to make the games we played work. In all, I was responsible. I did a jolly good job at it, too.[/background]

Now, one of the first things to irk me at my work was how the staff treated the material. I mean, if you see a vacuum-cleaner is broken, how about repairing it? I mean, that kind of thing comes natural to me. It's called respect for the material. Kicking things doesn't fix them either. if I had a penny for every abuse of the localized material I saw there...

The next thing was how creepily depressive people were. I mean, if all you do is complain about how retarded your kid is, how much your husband/friend beats you and how you want a divorce, I would suggest to get professional help. Not to bother you coworkers with it. Cause you know, I don't care. At all. I might care if you didn't look like a whale with serious hair-problems. I might care if you had an ounce of brains capable of rational analysis of the situation. Heck, I might even care if you bothered to stop talking about how stupid you are. But surprisingly enough, mrs Whale (taking liberty with names as to protect the subject of my observations) couldn't.
And another thing, I don't care about people's husbands. I don't care about people who I have no ambition to ever even meet. If someone likes to return every conversation to a variation on "My husband is awesome, yet I somehow manage to be completely moronic and oblivious to the actual topic", "These are photos of my grandchildren, whom you have never heard of until today" or "My son is really smart", well, excuse me for stabbing people in the eye with a fork. *sigh* Ahh well, that wasn't the worst though.

A point that annoyed the living hell out of me though was how people clearly not mentally capable of holding a sane conversation about mundane topics like 'reading' or even 'musical genres' were somehow being appointed to be the responsible ones. I can understand that to be responsible for the 'sports and activity'-part of the store, one would seek out a person capable of lifting some weight or someone with a passion for reading to take care of the books section. That is what I would do. If your job consists of hefting bicycles off the shelves, transporting full garden sets from place A to place B and such things, you NEED to be able to lift 15-20 kg with one hand. It's a given. You do not put Scrawny Mc No Muscle (again, not the official name) in charge of it. That's just stupid. You put Scrawny in the books department. You put the Whale in a department where chubby women are generally appreciated such as 'the Girls Department' or 'First Years'. I dunno, really, what comes in to the mind of people and hits them with the Blunt Object Of Random Stupidity that leads to the decision to put the Whale into the 'books and school' department or Scrawny into 'sports'. Feh.

So we arrive at leadership. I heard good things about leadership. I even heard good things about my leadership. It seems to be needed to keep things in check, you know, organized, happy, sane...Strangely enough, the management at the store sucked. If you scare your workers, you are not a good leader. If you get scared by a worker who does not cower as you pass by, you are probably an idiot. If you show your fear in front of the rest of your workers in ways most obvious (2), you are just pathetic.
If your workers constantly are complaining about everything you do (ranging from randomly changing the location of parts of the store to assigning people tasks to a lack of understanding how the group works) and you do not notice, you should really think about getting a different job.
If your assistants are about as capable of working together as a fox and a hen, you either address this issue or you address this issue. There is no other way than to solve a problem in order to get rid of it if you are a leader. You cannot just put your head in the sand and hope it will all just solve itself. Because it will not. It will just adversely affect the moral in your group. Even I know that. On a related matter, if two people cannot stand each other, try not pairing them up every day. Who knows, productivity might go up?

The biggest problem I had though was the utter lack of support and the dose incompetence I was faced with every day. There are regulations. They are there because you want to have proceedings follow certain rules. A 'no' is a 'no'. You cannot just change the 'no' into a 'yes' because you have a bad day. I mean, for starters, private situations translate badly into the work area. Your kid is ill? Tough luck, either you take a day's leave or you come to work. You do not twiddle in between the two. You do not revoke company rules because your daughter kept you up all night and "you really do not want to deal with this". Professionalism seems hard to keep up though.
And dear people, maybe, just maybe, accept that the cleric in the store is right. I had to take back a game because a mother had been too stupid to see that it was not in dutch. Boo-mfing-hoo. I do not care. At all. It says on the back of the game that it is in five obscure languages such as English or Spanish. You know, things your kid will never need in his/her life anyway. If your fifteen year old daughter cannot play MFing nintendogs because the english is too difficult, you should worry about her future, not about the game itself. Anyhow... Apparently steaming off to the responsible person gets you what you want, since creating a scene is generally the best way to get everything. If the cleric then proceeds to point out (calmly) that you are an immature idiot and you get upset about that to the point of uttering threats that you fail to follow up on...well. I pity you.


And well, getting fired every week to save costs kinda does not help your case with my temper at all.

That, in a nutshell, is why I quit my job last week. Merry ******** ******** you, Fun Edegem.
Jorre




(1)Thought it is a pretty huge kind of daycare, we always refer to it as playground. We had approximately 500-600 kids (aged 4 to 15) there daily. It was divided into sections that were rather thematic.
(2)Such as punching two guys who are scared of you and not even attempting to strike the one who is casually standing next to them.