BY REQUEST, HERE'S MORE FROM MY BOOKSTORE MEMOIRS.
In 1986, our District Manager gave us a form to fill out about our career aspirations. As Assistant Manager at the Crestview Hills store, I wrote that I hoped to someday get my own store. Then the District Manager’s husband sadly developed a brain tumor and she was, of course, distracted. She later told me that this was why I was passed over for promotion when a few months later my manager, Brenda, was given the much more successful nearby Florence Mall store.
As you might imagine, I was NOT happy.
This situation was made worse with the arrival of a new manager to take over my store. Let’s call him “Bob.” Bob was short and had a huge, almost fake-looking mustache and smelled of cigarettes all the time. In time, he would come to leave a lit cigarette burning in an ashtray just inside the door to the stockroom so he could slip back there and sneak puffs constantly.
Bob was also a massive control freak. On day one, he said he was not going to make any major changes right away. On day two, he handed me a legal pad page filled with changes he wanted implemented immediately.
The one change I remember: Company policy said that all cash had to be face up in the cash drawer. Makes sense. Bob decided that he wanted all COINS face up as well. At all times. I assumed that was a joke, but no. The other employees asked me to talk to him. I did. He said MORE changes would be coming soon.
With Brenda, I could usually talk her into seeing things my way if I felt it was important enough and pushed hard enough. With Bob, he took away more and more of my power as assistant manager and treated me just like another bookseller.
Speaking of other booksellers, most of them quit in fairly short succession, to be replaced by his hires, the most forgettable—and forgotten—employees I ever worked with.
A few of our regular customers complained to me about Bob, too. Bob was also gay and very effeminate and that (and worse, the cigarette smell) didn’t sit well with some of our older regulars who missed Brenda and the more knowledgeable booksellers she had hired.
The next time the District Manager came in, she asked how things were working out between Bob and myself and I let loose about my feelings toward him as a manager and asked her flat out why I was passed over. What had I done wrong? She told me that the form I had filled out never said I wanted to be promoted. I told her it did. She happened to have those forms in her briefcase and took a look, after which she profoundly apologized to me. Damage done, though. I was stuck. But not for long.
I didn’t drive then so I took the bus in to work every day. Sometimes on the bus I’d run into a guy named Mike whom I had known for years. Mike had gotten a job as a full-time bookseller at the Florence Mall Waldenbooks so he was working there with Brenda but not getting along with her, while I was feeling increasingly stuck and depressed with Bob. One day, Mike told me he was turning in his notice.
About a week later, I decided when I got off work one day to take the bus out and see a movie at the Florence Cinemas. The bus stopped at Florence Mall so I dropped in to see Brenda for the first time since she’d left. She was in the middle of interviews to find a replacement for Mike but she told me she wasn’t finding any good candidates. After our brief visit, I went on to the movie… but a plan formulated in my head.
The District Manager said she felt like she owed me, so she, and Brenda, agreed to go along with my idea. I demoted myself and transferred over to the Florence Mall store. There, as just a bookseller, I had less responsibility…but more money! Turned out that since the Florence Mall store was a larger and much more successful store than the dead-end mall I was coming from, the pay was higher! Considerably higher!
Luckily, I got along well with Paula, who was then Brenda’s AM. In fact, Paula treated me almost as a second assistant and would often ask my advice.
Within a few years, Paula was promoted to manager of her own store—ironically the Crestview Hills store I had come from! At that time, I was once again promoted to Brenda’s assistant manager. In all, I spent nearly nine pretty happy and successful years at that store, the highlight of which was meeting and working with Rene, the woman destined to be my bride.
Oh, and Bob? I worked with him once more, at a different location, just to help out one day when somebody quit. I heard later that he was fired from the company for theft.
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