The Big Beautiful Investors
Today I realized I’m basically the corporate version of a cashier.
It’s a cashier dealing with a lot of ambiguous, nonsensical (and stressful) problems. I don’t actually work at a grocery store, let’s just say it’s a people leader role with a focus on Operations.
But if I was a cashier, it’d be very similar to my current job if it followed these specific conditions:
Half the grocery staff was fired. But don’t worry, you got left 4 whole people to manage and 2 of them have roles that don’t make any sense. I’ll get to that later.
So 4 people sounds like a lot, but you’re the only grocery store in the entire town, and there used to be twice as many employees with less work to do. Meanwhile your franchise owner pops in randomly to tell you all the new plans for redesigning the store, and everyone is so excited about the upcoming store design (which means everyone basically expects it’s happening before you could let the franchise owner know if it’s realistic for you to pull off). Because it’s so great that the whole town is excited, I have to do the store design as soon as possible, and he says, direct quote, “Fast. We have to go fast.”
So you say it may not be feasible but they just redirect you to how we have to make it happen no matter what because it’s for the investors, oh and that’s so incredible and exciting. And then they leave. And if you say it may not be feasible they just redirect you to how we have to make it happen no matter what because it’s for the investors, oh and that’s so incredible and exciting. And then they leave. And then they come back two weeks impatiently waiting to understand what my plan is and that it has to be perfectly put in a pamphlet for his investors to weigh in on the plan. And he comes back a week later saying we have to do the plan in 5 months, when you knew you needed 9 months. So after getting yelled at for having a bad plan, you start making this new plan that ignored your concerns of feasibility, because you were promised help, instead you were given more things to do. Then the franchise owner pops back in a month later and frantically tells you how we need the redesign ready in a month, we can make compromises but it has to be in a month. And also there’s twice as much redesign. And we’ll just have to yell at anyone that doesn’t help us in time, because this is for the investors. And you need him to make critical decisions but he’s gone.
Oh, and meanwhile, through all of this our entire team scheduling system got changed. And we were told 2 days before our new deadline to migrate everything ourselves from the old system. And the new system is going to be set up so a new hire can micromanage you on the guise of offering you project management. But this is extra to everything else, you can’t miss any deadlines.
Also, it turns out that Nancy’s entire job this past year was to install the new vending machines. Nancy learned every fucking thing there is to know about those vending machines. She’d been paid to go to training and was asked to make it her whole focus to set up the vending machines. Only the vending machines didn’t have the compatible wiring so it can run. They can pay the electrician a reasonable amount to go get the compatible wiring but someone else at HQ just dropped a SHIT TON on new vending machines, and now nobody knows which vending machine they want to use. Now, they are pretty sure they’ll use the more expensive, newer ones, but just in case, you can’t try and get the wiring for the current ones fixes. Obviously, the minute we set up the ones WE ALREADY HAVE we’d get a TON of value, but we are just going to have nothing for months instead. But Nancy is a go-getter, she gives all the fucks about doing a good job. So she fought the fight like a champ. She took on every meeting, documented everything needed to fix the wiring and just kept trying to get a solution with no money and no decisions being made. So she’s literally been paid for months to fight the doomed-to-fail-fight, until I finally let her get off this hamster wheel of a project.
Meanwhile, the new hire described your job to you when she said what her role is, and nobody shared that with you. So you react a bit confused, and silently worry maybe you’re getting fired because it seems someone was hired to do your job. Next thing you know, you’re being publicly shamed over email, in front of 3 other franchise owners, berated for asking for more Information about this new hire before you ever told your side.
….That as is 100% my job, with a swapped-example of a grocery store metaphor. Those are the EXACT details.
And then my franchise owner pops in to say we need to design a greater, better, overall store and we need to make the new plan that makes that possible. So he can’t answer my urgent question that I’ve been needing his decision on since yesterday. Instead we need the big beautiful plan.
But it’s exciting, this is for the big beautiful investors.
Source: The bizarre renderings of ChatGPT