Daniel: The Trainee: Week One The Petrol Station

So, in a previous blog I mentioned that I had another job that I worked all of two days. I of course was anxious and nervous my first day. The orientation and heading out to the location that I was assigned to work at. I have some other complaints and grivences with the the entire situation and the company. We will get to that. I'm going to add some humour into this so it won't be as bad as it seems. There were some highlights, don't get me wrong. I don't want you guys to think the entire blog is negativity. But let's start back at the begining. It actually starts on Thursday of last week after I had a meeting with Chuckie in the office. (It's all happened so fast. I can't believe that I went from a steady job (3 years there nearly) to the two day stint and now into a new job that will take me an 45 minutes across the state for training. Feels like a lot of shit has happened in the week and it really has.) After hearing him defend that piece of shit Jorge again, I knew it was the last straw. It was time for my shift to end and I wasted no time in leaving the office, heading into the breakroom and calling the petrol station that I had applied to the trainee manager position with. They had rung me the previous day but I'd missed the call due to being at work. I rang them back and accepted to come in for an interview the next day, seeing as I had it off. I did well in the interview and was offered a position right away and I could start my training on Monday. Having Friday off, I spent the day in a tizzy. Trapped between wanting to quit and take the other position and continue with the security of my job. (Now that I think about it, was my job really safe with Chuckie as my boss? His distaste for me seemed to know no bounds.) I woke up Saturday morning, filled with nerves, still unsure of what I had to do. Then I thought of all the shit that's happened to me at work, I wanted to breakdown. I reminded myself that I wasn't valued as a human being or at the very least, an employee. I unlocked the building, let the guys in and when I saw Chuckie heading in, I told him that I needed to talk to him. I handed him my keys and said that I was done. It was a combination of the last few months, the shit with Jorge and the decline I'd seen in my mental health. I offered to work the last shift and be done when it was finished, so they didn't fall too far behind. He didn't even try to convince me to stay. He seemed both annoyed and gleeful that we were parting ways. He decided he didn't want me to finish the shift. We shook hands and I walked out of the building, him locking the doors behind me. Walking out into the rain, the weirdest sensation washed over me. I was closing a chapter of my life that had been both a comfort and a hell for the longest time. I had spent years of my life there, given my health to that place and in the end, it just wasn't enough. I really feel as if I was pushed out of the job by mismangement and not really on my part. I had no back-up. He allowed the place to be a circus and certain employees were allowed to act like animals. THE INTERVIEW I make it to the interview 15 minutes early and wait for the 5 of before making my way into the building. There's three other people huddled over clipboards filling out paperwork. Surely, they have mine on file when I applied here three years ago? A woman behind the front desk hands me a clipboard and tells me to hand it back to her when I finish it. What did she think I was going to do with it? I fill out the paperwork before the others finish and hand it back to her. "That was fast." "It was only a page." I only have to stand for about 10 minutes before I'm called to the back for an interview. The guy interviewing me has Olver Peoples glasses and all I can think of is Patrick Bateman. I follow him up the stairs and down the hall into a small and dumpty little office. I'm not really expecting all that much here. i've interviewed with this company before and never made it past the first interview. I don't know why I'm trying again; it's a bloody petrol station. I could take this as a sexual metaphor for something, but that would just make the blog even longer. Maybe that could be a topic for another day. Fuck, I still have the blogs from last month to focus on and finish. He asks me what position I've applied for and if I'm over 21. I told him the manager trainee position as I was a supervisor in my previous job and yes I was over 21. He looks through my resume and asks me some of the standard questions about employment, why did I leave my previous post, etc. He taps the paperwork together on his desk and tells me that the position is mine, I can start training on Monday if that worked for me. I was surprised and happy. I did it. I got another job just like that. I don't have to worry about anything. The starting base pay for this company was basically what I was making as a supervisor, so I'll be making more money. He told me it was 26 hours to start and I wasn't bothered by that. (What I didn't realise was that he meant was after training that would be my usual hours give or take a few hours or two. And really, who the fuck can live on that? It's cute if you're in school, living with your parents and not paying bills. I have a house, bills, debt, publishing expenses. It's just not gonna work out.) I should have realised something was wrong there when he said those hours, but in my glee that I got a new position, I overlooked it. DAY ONE I arrive back at the headquarters building, donning my usual all black. I don't know what kind of clothes they really want us to wear so I wear a pair of black jeans and my black eclipse t-shirt. Simple and clean. (On a totally unrelated note, that is an old banger of mine that still hits just has hard.) I don't know why they didn't give us some sort of dresscode. Just show up at the cooperate office for orientation. I guess just use common sense. I shuffle into the room that I'm told to go into and take a seat with 5 or 6 other people. There's a giant green badge that says "TRAINEE" with my name on it. How classy is this. I feel like Will in The Inbetweeners his first day after transferring schools. I have to resist the urge to laugh and I do so by looking around. Jeez how many managers are in training? Or is this just an orientation for everyone that's new to the company? I shrug it off and start filling out the paperwork that's in front of me. (Another thing I wasn't told was that the orientation day is only a few hours at the cooperate office, the rest of the day you will be at the store you're being assigned to. Now that can be a problem for people like me...I don't drive. I won't have time to run to the bus stop down the road, and transfer two buses in a half hour to get to the store. I wish they had told me this in fucking advance. I manage to get a ride sorted to the station.) It takes about 15 minutes and by then, everyone has their seat in the room and paperwork seems to be all complete. The guy that interviewed me, we'll call him James, so he's not a nameless creature in the story, starts his little slideshow talking about what it's like to work at the company. The give you a little background on the company, standards, what's expected of you as an employee. I'm only half listening at this point, as he's brough up charity. He mentioned that there is a form to have pay deducted each week to donate to one of two charities they generally work with. Excuse me? We haven't even started working for them and they're asking us for money? That rubs me the wrong way. Kinda shady shit. I take it as, "We'll do things for the community so it gives people the impression we give a shit so they'll come work for us and the stupid ones will stay." Now, this could come off as I'm anti-charity and anti-aid. I'm not. I do donate when I can to various mental health charities and a few LGBTQ ones as well. I just think trying to guilt your employees into giving is the wrong message to send. Giving comes from the heart, not cooperate pressure. Or at least it shouldn't anyway. One of the things that they stressed was that this was not a full employment bond. You'd have to complete the training without a guarentee of empployment. What the fuck is that? And more importantly, what the fuck does it mean. It's a petrol station, not MI5. What's there to really train for? What happens if you don't meet their standards or make one of their miatkes they prattled on about during the slideshow? They can let you go, even if you're training and you make the mistake. You're not supposed to know everything right out the gate. I have a bad feeling about this. I wish that I had known a little more about the place before putting in an application. I blindly did it and now I'm starting to feel it. After he collects all the paperwork he hands us out these hideous blue shirts. I pin my giant badge to my shirt and instantly feel a wave of shame wash over me. Is it shameful to work here? For other people, probably not, but this feels like a giant downgrade from what I was doing. (Why do I never learn? Why am I so impulsive in the wrong ways? Or am I?) We go through a few more slides in his presentation and then we're told that we're to head out to our assigned locations. Mine isn't too far away from my house. The downside is that I heard that they can transfer you wherever they need people on a given week, etc, which is a problem for a guy who doesn't drive. And I don't like the uncertainty. Lately, my anxiety has been operating on about a 12 (any guesses as to why??) I arrive at the petrol station and meet the manager. There's a short guy with glasses that nearly does a backflip greeting me into the station. I don't know if he's on something or if it's a gag to get business in the door. Either way, he's got more energy than a kid with ADHD after tooting a few lines of meth. I want some of that energy. I need some of that energy. I'm bone tired. I introduce myself and they show me around the store. It's smaller than it looks. The cooler is a welcomed relief from the heat and humility of outside. If I could hide in the cooler all day stocking things and doing inventory counts, I'd be a very happy guy. The short guy introduces himself as Rick and the middle aged woman behind him greets me with a warm smile and introduces herself as Mary. I'm told that I'll meet other team members tomorrow as the shift rotates. Meeting all these new people is only going to kick my anxiety into even higher, if that's possible. They start teaching me the basic functions of the pumps, how to start and stop them, the lottery machine and all the basic little things that go with working in a petrol station. If they think I'm going to clean up after customers who've been sick in the car park, they have another thing coming. I glance down the list of "homework assignments" that I need to complete throughout the day and what is expected of me each of the first four days. How lovely. I love a little outline. I stay to the side of Rick and watch as he welcomes literally everyone inside. He'd make a hell of a Walmart greeter. DAY TWO I don't want to do this. I can't do this. I feel sick. It's more than just anxiety. I don't know where all the unease is coming from. I think that if I have to spend the rest of my life in this place that I'm going to kill myself. And that's already something that I stuggle with. (Hurray mental illness!!) I don't know much of this I can take. The atmopshere is so depressing. Over the past two days, a few regulars came into the station to buy scratch lottery tickets. Older people who look worn down by life. Their emptiness and lonliness oozing out onto the paper of the scratch ticket as they scratch away, desperately wishing for things to be different for them. They think that money will buy them back the people who forget to ring them, that it will bring those lost to them back. It's heartbreaking. I don't know how the people who work at the station deal with this every day. Maybe they just don't see life the way that I do. Either that or they're numb to this. These people scratching and playing away their entire life savings and go home to eat a tin of cat food. I don't want that for myself. The idea that could be my future gets trapped in my head and I just can't get it out. It wraps around on a loop, placed there to drive me to excel. The day passes with the same few lotto customers coming in and out. People paying for petrol and wanting to buy beer weave through the line of complusive gamblers. I look at my watch. I've been here forever and a day, it should be close to breaktime so I can go check my phone. I see the time. It's been 43 minutes. I must have entered some kind of time paradox. DAY THREE The last two days mirrored each other so much that I really don't know what else to say. The same boring repetativeness. The same shit over and over again in that little cubical-sized area. I have nowhere to go. Nothing to do but the same mindnumbing things. The lotto machine. Turn on pub. Turn off pump. It wasn't until I made a mistake and got yelled at by a woman who I can only describe as a straw with eyes. You could just tell by looking at her that she hates her life. (And I don't blame her either, can relate.) I confirmed the pump that the car was on, like you're supposed to do, and I must have hit the wrong key on the tapscreen. I put the money on what I thought was the correct pump, only it turns out it was the one next to it. Meanwhile, only five minutes or so had passed when he comes back in and says there's nothing happening with his pump and he pre-paid 15.00 on it just a few minutes ago. He had his reciept and everything. I realise what I did wrong. All you have to do is transer it to the correct pump. But things can't be that simple can they? Of course not. A guy had pulled up on the pump and pumped the 15.00 into his car. He was trying to get more petrol, but didn't realse the machine was capped off at that amount. A mess ensued. Not being a manager here, I have no authority to go out and explain to them what happened and let the other man know that he owes that amount on the pump for the other bloke because that was his money placed on the wrong pump. I let the head cashier/manager know right away and she got all huffy with me. I knew in an instant I had made a big mistake when he came back in and I noticed the other car at the pump, what I didn't expect is her to be so short tempered with me and annoyed that I made a misakte. It was only my third day, so needless to say, there will be mistakes made. And it ended with the blokes sorting out what was what, no one got cheated and everyone drove away happy. I'm learning. That's what training is for. I don't know why they just hire you outright and let you know if things don't work out, we'll let you know. Why waste time and resouces with training? And that brings me to the final nail in the coffin. I'm just coming off break when I'm told that there is a phone call for me. I don't know who the fuck would be calling me here, all I can think of is that I'm in trouble or somethings gone wrong. Turns out its the geek guy from cooperate asking how things are going. I give him the broad strokes, giving him all the details over the past few days. He cuts me off and informs me that he's heard that I'm interviewing for other jobs and that I had one on what I thought was a day off for me because there was nothing written for hours under that date. I had let my manger know right away that I had two interviews in the morning and that I was available for training in the afternoon, as I had thought it was a day off. She must have told him. What the fuck kind of shit is this? Emoloyment isn't promised, so why shouldn't I look at other offers? Don't want to be unemployed. I told him that I did and that they were on my own time, nothing that would get in the way of things at the petrol station. "I want to know if you're just wasting my time." Excuse me? "Well, I'm looking to get back into freight and especially because there's no promoise of a job here, I kinda need some assurance like that." "I see." He went on to ask me if I was just wasting their resources before hanging up on me. The phone call just rubbed me wrong. It felt like he was accusing me of time wasting when all I was doing was trying to keep my options open and support myself. I didn't do anything wrong. Now I see why this company is always hiring. They treat people like shit and accuse them of being scumbags. I'm not going to be treated like shit. If working at my last job taught me anything, it was that I am a human and I deserve to be valued. I shouldn't settle for less, because I am not less. And with quitting there and my new-found burst of self-esteem, I decide not to head back the next day. Originally, I had planned to finish out the week, collect a full cheque, but I just can't. My mental health is at stake here. (God, now I want a steak. Damn English language.) Needless to say, I will be keeping the name badge. Just like I did with the previous job and I think even the job before that? Other positions I've held had security badges. I think I'm getting a new one for the current job that I'm about to start. I'm actually looking forward to the cold. I'm not a heat person. I'd rather be cold than too hot. And the meat freezer gets to -20F to insure that everything is kept frozen. Let's see how well that all goes for me. Until next blog. -Dan Also! I revisit the popular Pooh Bear Pathology test taking it two years later to see if my earlier results have changed or not! I have no idea why that blog is so goddamn popular. I mean, the Taylor Swift tattoo blog I could see, I was stoned and got a tattoo of lyrics by a popular singer, but Winnie the Pooh? I love Pooh Bear. You guys remember the tattoo I got a few years back with Montreal with Winkles? Yeah. Maybe I should do another Winkles blog as well. Who knows. Twitter: Instagram: Summer Reading with As You Were: & the eBook version: