penguinpride

I’m wrapping up my time at Chick-fil-A. I’ll hopefully make it through the rest of the summer, then come back over winter break. But that will be the end. I’m done with CFA. It is a dead end job.

I’m not going to get another raise. I’m never going to be a team leader. I have accepted these as facts, just like I readily accepted the fact that I would never see my dad’s new SUV anymore, because last night he crashed it.

I wish the managers would be straight with me. Instead, they say nice things to make me shut up and I never know what’s going on. For example, Brian said he’d “think about” making me a team leader. This means no. Also, Jen told me that I should be a team leader, because I had so many good qualities. She also breezed over a few minor things I could do to improve her performance, but I left that meeting thinking it was a done deal. Turns out, she knew I wasn’t going to be a team leader anytime soon. I took a look at my file and she wrote “Needs improvement to become a team leader.”

I feel bad now for siding with her when she got in fights with Tina. It turns out Tina was right all along. Maybe I just find Tina a better manager now due to my new attitude towards work. Now that I’m not busting my ass anymore, Tina’s approach has really looked good. Jen very rarely talks “bad” about customers; Tina does it all the time. I put “bad” in quotations because if the customers weren’t to retarded to begin with, we wouldn’t have anything bad to say.

Interestingly, talking “bad” about customers was one of the three “areas of improvement” Jen told me about. So this is one of the reasons I can’t be a team leader? Oh I forgot, only everyone else is allowed to do that. For me, it’s just unacceptable. (The other two things were sarcasm and “lack of a sense of urgency.” WTF @ the last one BTW.)

This is one of the reasons I have come to the conclusion that they weren’t going to make me a team leader even if I weren’t going back to school next month. The fact that they listed “talking bad” as one of my improvement areas means they were scratching the bottom of the barrel to find reasons I shouldn’t be TL.

Another reason is that even me going to school isn’t a totally valid reason. They promoted Megan, Sean, and Brian Wain shortly before they left, why couldn’t they have promoted me?

Last Sunday (obviously not this past Sunday, the one before that) I hung out with Randy all day. Randy is another fellow who has been unfairly treated by the management. There’s really no reason he shouldn’t be a team leader. He’s only worked at Burger King for a month now (as a second job) and they have already reccommended him to the manager program. I asked Jen (back when we were cool) why he isn’t a team leader, and she told me it was something about attitude and how nobody would reaspect him. I had accepted that answer, but now I realize it was just bullshit.

Just like when I asked Brian for a raise, he told me no because he wanted to “preserve the structure of things.” The structure of things where people who can’t even work drive-thru yet make more than I do. Me, his best DT register and headset.

The lesson learned is to not be naive. Maybe if my mom hadn’t kept me in a box until I was old enough to move out, I would have known that perception is everything. What the fuck does that mean? Well it means that you can’t expect to work hard and get promoted. You also have to do a tremendous amount of sucking up. If you need an example just look at the two extremes. The reason Randy isn’t a TL is because the managers don’t like him. His file was almost an entire page full of managers nit-picking at every little thing over 2 1/2 years. Randy has spent 2 1/2 years trying to show that with hard work, anyone can rise up. This is totally false. It’s all about perception. Kyle Hunter, for example. Worked at CFA for 6 months. Promoted. Why? Because the managers (mainly Nick, Eric, and Tina) love him. He doesn’t do much work. He actually hardly ever works. When he is at work, he usually just talks. In the old days (back around the time when I started) this would have meant that Rohan would have been a TL for sure.

This week I worked 49.5 hours. Brian Smith is probably going to yell at me when I finds out. I will feel bad if I tell him that when I asked Tina if I should talk to Brian about my excessive overtime hours, she said no. I like Tina. That’s something I would have never dreamed of saying a year and a half ago.

Lately, a lot of the old people are dropping away. Amelya got fired last week. Drew quit. Colleen tried to quit and got fired. Megan Bristow put in her 2 weeks notice.

I can’t help comparing CFA to PoFo. The mods are just the TL’s though, and the admins are the managers. The difference is, on PoFo, I eventually became a mod (after 2 years).

Can I take lessons from this situation? Absolutely. At my next job that I will get next spring/summer, I will definitely suck up a lot more. I want management experience.

Today, I worked 8am-10:30pm. Fourteen and a half hours. After I got off, I talked to Tim in the parking lot. He’s a really cool guy. I think he might be my favorite person to work with, now that Megan’s a TL (plus she’s leaving soon). We stayed until 1:30. That was insanity. But we did get to discuss how much CFA sucks, how much ornery customers suck, who the hot girls are at work, and Guitar Hero. I believe he is slightly better than me. He can’t play the intro to “Through the Fire and Flames” but at least he can finish the song after that part. I can do the intro but fail at Herman’s solo. Plus, he can beat Raining Blood on expert. I still can’t beat it on hard.   :(

So work sucks. But I like money, so I spend much of my life at Chick-fil-A.

So today I beat Guitar Hero 3 on medium. As you know if you play GH3, to beat a level you have to beat Lou in a guitar battle with “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by the Charlie Daniels Band. Well apparently Charlie Daniels is not pleased. He’s really Christian now and doesn’t approve of the depiction of the devil and “all manner of weird things popping up on the stage.”

Don’t like the Devil, eh, Charlie? WHY’D YOU WRITE A SONG ABOUT HIM??

In other news, I bought a shirt off the Internet today. Actually not from ae.com either. It’s from some unheard of place called uneetee, but hey at least the shirts are original! Now I can live without fear of wearing the same shirt as five other guys in the same room. With all the energy saved not worrying, I can finally solve global warming in my spare time.

Here’s the design on the shirt I bought:

It’s called “Mysterious Painter” by Wanamas Meevasana. So don’t buy that shirt. If I see anyone, ANYONE wearing it, I will rip out your spine and feed it to you.

TO DO LIST! 

Yes, lovelies. I am instituting a mandatory To Do List of things you have to do.

1. Watch this without smiling.
2.  Listen to the first Lollercast on Sunday, July 27. Info

Failure to do these things will get you sat on by this guy.

So the other day I finally got around to buying Guitar Hero 3. That, coupled with the PS2 I stole from my mom’s house, gives me quite a bit of fun. I know I can play songs on medium (the blue key’s not that hard to hit) but I think it’s actually easier in GH2 because you don’t have to worry about hammer-ons and pull-offs. I REALLY suck at those. In fact, I decided to play a song on hard just to try it and the problem wasn’t so much hitting the orange button as it was dealing with the hammer-ons. They’re just too much work to think about!! haha

Also I decided that the Penguinpride community needs a forum so people can discuss nothing. So I made one here.