Amac Productions

Call When You’re Ready

Welcome to Listen To This!

If you’re new here, welcome! Every month, I’ll drop a new wild story from all my years working in retail! Names and other identifiers have been changed so everyone may remain anonymous. All terrible customers will be referred to as Karen.

On with the show!

Sometimes, sometimes, it’s not the customers driving retail workers crazy.

Sometimes, it’s the people you work with. And while I no longer work with this person, this is one of my favorite stories that I probably should have gotten in trouble for, but hey, I was young and dumb.

Or exhausted in this case.

At the time in General Nonsense, I worked in a different branch.

It meant I worked with all the managers and at some point, they’d have to deal with me too. It was a weird job and the basic you need to know is that if I didn’t show up to work the store couldn’t function properly.

Which meant that if I was short-staffed which happened often, I’d work every single day.

Well, after a while working every single day in a grueling and thankless job, I was loopy as hell.

Oh, and grumpy.

Because I wanted a day off, damn it.

I was training a new person so I could take a day to myself, but in the meantime, I was still stuck there every day. I was burnt out. And I worked with some terrible managers at the time who didn’t really give a damn about me but were forced to put up with me because I was important to the running of the building.

One day, I’m tired as hell and the manager of one section has this nasty habit of calling me while he’s still in the middle of a conversation with someone else.

Normally, this didn’t bother me too much because I’d just tell him he needs to tell me what he wants because I’m not waiting around all day for him to be ready to talk to me.

On this day, I’m not so polite.

I’m tired, burnt out, and just trying to get through the last hour of my damn day.

I’m in my office when my phone rings. I pick it up and lo and behold it’s Craig. The manager with the terrible habit of calling me while he’s in the middle of a conversation with someone else.

Is this supposed to be some sort of power move?

Show the barely 20-year-old kid that you’re a big deal and I should be glad to wait for you?

Or that I mean nothing to you?

Well, guess what Craig? I already knew that.

Was I supposed to be impressed or something? That sooooooo many people wanted to talk to him?

Regardless of what he wanted it to do, all it did was piss me off.

Especially so on this day because I’d had it. I worked with nothing but asses in this particular job and no one liked that I had the job because they liked the person who came before me better. Even though I was just as good having been trained by her.

All I ever heard was how much the one before me was.

Isn’t that nice?

What else makes a person feel welcome than reminding them every time you see them that you wish their predecessor was still there?

I can’t think of a single thing.

Craig calls and I can hear him talking to someone.

I said hello rather rudely because I’m annoyed. I have too much to get done and not enough time. And I already worked nine-hour shifts, six days a week regularly. I was not looking to increase even more because Craig is power tripping.

Craig carries on his conversation.

I say hello one more time.

That’s all I had.

That was what was left of my politeness, after that it was gone.

And I can’t take credit for this joke, but I’ve never been so happy to use something a comedian said. I tried googling it to see who made this joke in the first place, but I couldn’t find it. If I don’t, I will credit them for this amazing idea.

When Craig didn’t answer me, I hung up.

I was done.

I had more important things to do than wait around for Craig to shit and get off the pot.

Alas, Craig has the nerve to call me back a minute or two later. Apparently, he realized he had been hung up on.

He called me back and I remember this moment with perfect clarity because I knew exactly how this was going to go.

I picked up the phone and he asked, “Did you just hang up on me?”

I said, “I don’t know, did it sound like this?” And hung up again.

This joke originally came from something I watched, but I was never so happy to get to use it.

I honestly thought the phone was going to ring again or that Craig would run to the manager to tell him that I hung up on him. I truly believed I’d be firmly reprimanded for hanging up on another manager.

But I wasn’t.

Apparently, Craig figured out he was the ass that day or in general.

Because he was.

It wasn’t a special moment for him.

The special moment came from him appearing in my office just a few minutes later to ask why I hung up on him and I told him I was sick of his little play to call me while he’s chatting with someone else. I wasn’t going to deal with anyone and if he keeps doing it, I’ll keep hanging up until he stops.

For some reason, this seemed to work.

That weird habit disappeared.

Apparently, being hung up on with the promise of more was enough to convince him to be an asshole in new ways.

Because he did always manage to be an asshole. Just his tactics about how he did it changed.

And to this very day, I’m surprised my manager at the time didn’t find out and give me shit. He was the type who would have loved to give me shit about this. Telling me how rude and disrespectful I am.

That I’m nothing like the woman who held my job before me and that I should strive to be more like her.

Well, sir, I’d like you and the rest of your management staff to strive to be less like dicks having a pissing contest, but we can’t all get what we want. Can we?

Nope.

Thank goodness I left that job.

What would you guys have done?

Was I wrong? Was I right? Would you have thrown the phone? I’m pretty I got close to chucking at phone at some of their heads while I worked at that branch.

Spread the love and read on!