BillLindau

Unbilled star of "Streetcar Named Desire"

posted by Bill Lindau @ 5:29 PM 0 comments

What happened to respect for mourners?

By Bill Lindau
In January I took sporadic jobs as a vendor at Wal-Mart. Not an employee of Wal-Mart, but as a product demonstrator for a company that dispatches persons to various outlets.
I performed one assignment without a hitch, but one day I found myself unexpectedly saddled with another. The woman in Kansas doling out the assigments had me down for demonstrations on March 3-4, but she also thought I'd agreed to do the first weekend of February. She sent me a supply kit by express post.
Then I concluded that I had too much going on the day before assignment to do the necessary tasks, and on top of that I was to cover a game more than 80 miles away the night before. So I fibbed and said I had a death in the family.
What happened the next day was a surprise, and a maddening one at that. For someone who was supposed to be grieving, and whose job coordinator had just granted him leave, I ended up doing quite a bit in order to assist the person who was supposed to be taking my place.
Here's what happened:
I agreed on Friday afternoon, as part of the contract, to leave the supplies I received at the Wal-Mart store for the person selected as my substitute, and drove to Erwin, N.C., the site of the game.
Before I left, I called the store's customer-service center to see when I could leave the supplies. The employee to whom I talked said it was open round the clock and I could go ahead and bring it in when I was ready.
When I came back home at midnight I discovered a message from the substitute to call him and arrange for him to pick up the supplies before he went to the store. It was too late to call him.
At 7 a.m. the next day, I dropped the supplies at the Rockingham Wal-Mart store, but not without a bit of a hassle.
"Are you going to meet him here?" asked the person at the customer service area, after I explained when I was doing.
"I can't stay until nine o'clock," I said, naming the time the demostrator was supposed to come to the store to set up his demo area.
"I can't just keep this here," she said.
"Look, I have stuff do do," I said. "I've just had a death in the family and that's why I'm not working with it."
"Oh, OK," she said. "I'm sorry."
I said I'd already talked to another employee about this and so I left it there.
, went to breakfast and attempted to call my substitute again, using a pay phone, to mnake sure he was all squared away. No answer. I returned home and found another message for him. I called him again. No answer. He had already gone to the store, I assumed. Thinking he might come back before he went to the store, I left messages both times, offering to stay by the phone until a certain time and then he'd be on his own if he still hadn't called.
Then a friend of his called and said she was doing the demo for him, but she could not use her debit card because I had already had mine activated for the demo (demonstrators have to purchase the featured item themselves on this debit card, which the company issued, and the company promised to reimburse us for the expenses up to a certain amount). The only way this woman could purchase her items was to have me come in and let her use my debit card. So I ended up going back to the store, fuming all the while about having to go through all this hassle even though I was supposed to be in mourning.
At the customer-service area, the clerk said the woman had picked up the kit and was off in the assigned area. When I said I was looking for her, they asked me what her name was. I forgot what she said, and the staff asked, "What, you don't remember it?"
I launched into my cover story, working in enough emotion to make it credible.
"Look, my son got hit and killed by a teenager who was trying to impress his girlfriend," I said, "So pardon me if I don't remember every single thing somebody tells me when I'm in this state."
So they backed off and told me where the store was.
I was lying about the death in the family. Sort of. When I called the office in Kansas I had not seen my cat in a day and a half and I feared the worst had happened to "my son". And I did have a death in the family, but it was more than four years ago.
The woman who took the assignment had a bit more compassion. Still, I found it disturbing that a company should expect a person who had just lost a loved one to do so much to help the person who must take his place. When my parents died, the supervisors told me I did not have to take care of anything: Each time, I could go about my affairs without having to worry about the work until next week.
This vendor did not offer any more help than to allow me to take the day off -- theoretically. I still had to do more than I expected before I went about my business.
This sucks. What happened to giving people breaks? I'm not just mad at the vendor, but at the Wal-Mart staff who seemed more concerned with their own little routines, making their jobs easier, than cutting anyone some slack. "I have my own thing to look out for and I don't care what kind of a bind you're in."
I'm looking forward to the day when I can collect Social Security, as small as it is. I may have to live out of my car and eat dog food every other day, but at least I won't be putting up with such callous garbage.
And people wonder why Wal-Mart gets slammed so much.

posted by Bill Lindau @ 7:03 PM 0 comments