Favoritism in the Workplace

Favoritism in the workplace is a pretty common thing and spans almost every job -- from waitress gigs to retail, all the way to factory work and cubical-monkey setups.

I'm sure you've all seen it at least once in your lifetime -- certain people getting better positions, pay raises, more hours, etc. when they seem to not do anything at all (including their job, which is usually stolen from you).

I've seen my fair share of these dirty dealings, unfortunately.

In particular there are two stories that come to mind, each of a *****iness that even I, in all my acidic glory, cannot stomach.

Part I: The Tale of Uber-Slut

At my last job I was in charge of almost everything -- signing products, keeping up with planograms, customer service/retail/selling, cleaning, etc., and I was damn good at it, too. I'd get all the extended service plans and credit cards (I even won a prize for having the most cards opened up in a month for our district -- 32 if I remember correctly). I was a great sales person.

I was with the company for almost a year when my boss hired a new girl to help out. We'd just moved and our hours had extended a lot so it wasn't that big of a deal; it certainly didn't raise any red flags. That was, until the little ***** came to work.

Now, I've seen some slutty girls in my day. Gosh, it's hard to walk around outside without seeing at least a dozen bottle-blond-bimbos nowadays. But this girl was trashy.

Tight low-cut shirts, low cut pants, fake boobs, heavy makeup...Lord. And she had the personality of a two-faced snake, if a snake just happend to be really really horny about selling appliances without knowing the difference between a washer and a refrigerator. She literally thought bending over to show cleavage would make up for her lack of product knowledge and intelligent vocabulary.

My boss seemed to think so, too. I could tell which head made that judgment call.

Anyway, I was given the job of training this Playboy reject and found out after a day that not only was she stupid, but she definitely did not consider me to be worthy of her time. She wouldn't listen to what I said, she refused to actually do anything besides talk to her boyfriend on the phone, she wouldn't clean, wouldn't sign products, etc. She wouldn't even greet customers!

I basically did my job and hers while she got paid to stand around and do nothing. Oh, but she did know how to take credit for my sales and to blame me for anything that could (and did, with her around) go wrong. Lovely.

My boss did not care when I told him this. Instead, he fixed the problem by giving her all my hours and making her privy to secret information I was never allowed to know. Like the combination to the vault and the password for our computers (with payroll information, etc.). This was after a mere month with the company.

Then one day I was late getting to work (it was a thirty minute drive and it had snowed a lot, no plow, and my car wouldn't start. I would have been late no matter what -- and I had the decency of calling ahead and two of them were already there at the time, so it should have been no big deal).

But after I finished my shift I came home and found a message on my answering machine asking me to call my boss back when I could. Keep in mind he was there working with me that whole time.

Turns out he let me go, claiming it was because I was late. He and I both knew the real reason though. It was a great phone conversation, by the way, because you know after all that time and effort it was the least he could do to call me and fire me over the phone.



...Let's hope he's sterile.

Anyway, the joke was actually on him because it turns out she had no loyalty whatsoever and quit right around the same time he pushed me out of the picture. So my boss lost both of us, ha ha.