Enough With The Rocks, I'm Climbing Down

I'd have no business calling myself a writer if I didn't now see the foreshadowing I was laying out for myself in my last post. Here I was contemplating what it's like to commit a crime and how that crime would affect its victim and a few days after that contemplation, I became a victim of a crime at work.

There's no loss to me monetarily, but I'm feeling the loss in my career and my emotions. I've been reticent to reveal too much about my job since they have a generally strict policy regarding online discussions of the brand and the company by employees, but it's integral to understanding what I'm talking about to know that I work in retail. I'm an assistant manager with a company that sells fairly expensive items and the other night someone took $3000 worth of merchandise from an active sales floor. I was the only manager on and was tied up with a customer that had me captive in his complaint for most of two hours that night, and although I broke away for moments at a time, I was not 100%. There were about ten or twelve employees there, all of them too busy to notice the theft as well. None of the store's cameras caught the theft and I'm only semi-certain about the timeframe, somewhere within a two-hour gap. It's bad professionally, extremely when I consider that I'd been pushing to get a promotion, even though I've been firm in my belief that the position I'm holding is not what I'd wanted to do for the company, it just wound up being where their path led me. I'm not a retail manager at heart, I don't have the multi-tasking skill set, I hate looking at tables of numbers that I can't decipher into their meaning, I don't particularly like the HR aspects of the job. I'd wanted a different job, I came on board before it was available on the advice of my old boss in order to line myself up for it and when the different job came up, the new boss hiring for it asked why I didn't want to be a manager and didn't seem to understand that I didn't want to tell someone when to go to lunch or to argue with a customer over interpretations of a return policy.

I've been trying to make it work for too long now to look at this event as anything other than a sign that it will never work. I'm the guy you call on to get something done, not the guy who delegates to someone else. The job, so much different than it was two years ago, needs someone that can exhibit false sincerity to customers and staff. I've got my heart on my sleeve. People who do this job well like to think they have thick skins. Some of them may, but most of them are just plain shallow. Most specifically, the company's growth means more hires and more opportunities, but for people with retail experience at other companies. I'm beginning to think my company is slowly being absorbed by double-agents from The Gap. I get it, there are skills you want in a manager that you can't necessarily get from a guy who knows the product. I'm the guy at the store with whom the other managers usually begin conversations with the phrase, "How do I...?" I've never had the opportunity to hold a job interview with an applicant. I've never charted out how many staffers I'd need over the course of the next year based on the previous year's numbers. When I've had conversations with employees that I've had to coach, I'm speaking as myself, not with anecdotes I've cribbed from Duke's Coach K's book.

So I'm not that guy, and it took this long to figure out it's up to me not to try to be that guy. It's pretty damn clear from this side of the bubble, but not from inside. Because of the theft, any hope I'd had to get a promotion has evaporated. I'm a dead man walking the sales floor.

It's going to be difficult, but I've got to turn all my energy to getting a new job, something where I can be myself. I'm a hard worker, almost insane at times in my drive to do the job right. I'm not a manager, someone who corrals and fosters workers along. I don't think I've wasted the last two years, I needed the non-traditional schedule of retail in order to take care of The Prince, but I also haven't advanced, despite my boss' insistence that my 'promotion' from a job title the company was phasing out to another job title was a great step forward. I embraced every added opportunity and shouldered the weight of being short at least one manager ever since I came on board. In return I got a minimal raise, no additional training and a kick out of orbit from my plan to use my time to gather marketable skills I could use should this gig not work out. I'll be calling on old contacts and falling back on my old skills, trying to do something I excelled at before but haven't done in a while.

Making this switch will mean putting this push on hold. I can't justify to myself or my family spending time writing pages when I could be making calls and meeting people. My life will be about punching the clock and spending all other time looking for a new gig, hopefully the right gig and not the right-now gig.

This blog will be on hold for now too. This may disappoint the three or four regular readers I've got, but I'm sure you'll understand. The dream lives on, my head is still swimming with ideas, but time is a precious commodity. I'll check in when things change, and if you have tips, advice, a job, a million dollars, feel free to write me at tom.blogger@mac.com.

And thank you all for what you've given me so far in my push.