Sourpuss' Rants: Employee Abuse; A Two-way Street

Most people think of employee abuse as a customer abusing an employee or a management person abusing a lower level employees. There are another forms of employee abuse. These include when an employee abuses customers, vendors and anyone else they deal with while doing their job. I recently was subjected to employee abuse as a vendor to a business.

I did the yearly book reset in a store. I had 12 boxes of books to ship back. My paperwork requires the RTV clerk to scan out the books and generate a report with RTV numbers I need. I did the reset Thursday and was informed by the RTV clerktht she had other things to do besides RTV work and would get to it later in the day. I told her I would be back the next morning to finish my work. I had to reschedule some of my Friday appointments to accommodate this change.

Friday morning rolled around. I walked in the building behind her. She went straight to the employee lounge. I waited 30 minutes at her cage and still no RTV clerk. I went to the employee lounge to find her brushing her hair and catching up on the morning gossip with a co-worker. She again informed me that she had things other than RTV work to do and she would shortly come print out the reports I needed. 35 minutes later she finally arrives at her cage. I should have already been done and heading for my next appointment.

She then tells me she has to enter the books into her gun before she can print anything for me. She had previously stated she just needed to print the reports. So I am not only being delayed by her but also lied to. It took her another hour to enter the books and print my reports. When I asked for key req numbers required by my company, I was informed in a very nasty voice "Jerry could have gotten those for you". All she had to do was enter my purchase order number to find the key req. It took all of 30 seconds of her time.

After two hours of dealing with the RTV clerk, I could finally start to complete my work. It took me about 50 minutes to finish up. While I was finishing my work, I heard her abuse a fellow employee who needed her to do an RTV so he could complete his job. She informed him she has more than RTV things to do and she would get to it when she got to it.

My one hour job became three hours. The delay caused by this one abusing RTV clerk caused me to have to call again and reschedule appointments. I lost over $50 of income and looked bad with my other clients because of one business's abusive employee.