So do I just totally suck or what?

[countessamy]

Hello,
I'm a newbie, this is my first post, but i have lurked here for a long, long time. Hopefully this post is in the right place.

Anyway, I work for a walmart-wannabe store. I was a cashier for about a year and then moved up to cash office. I have been in the cash office for a little over a year and have recently completed book-keeping training.

We just got a new front-end manager who does our scheduling, she doesn't let anyone else touch the schedule. When the schedule was posted for the next two weeks i noticed that I am not scheduled to be in the cash office at all. I think I have been demoted back to cashier. I don't know why (no major oops, and everyone else in the CO likes me), and to make things worse, I can't ask that manager about it as she has taken a week's vacation.

I sort of have a fear of failure and am absolutely bugging out here, so I am asking for your advice. How does a normal person deal with something like this?

[Gurndigarn]

I sort of have a fear of failure and am absolutely bugging out here, so I am asking for your advice. How does a normal person deal with something like this?

Your boss is on vacation for a week, and the schedule has you out of the cash office. This may not be intentional, or it may, but there's no way of knowing unless you ask the person making the schedule. Or wait out the week, and ask your boss when he gets back. Either way, it's only a week.

That being said, you might want to make sure the fact that you're not in the cash office is documented, just in case there are issues, whether they're intentional or not. (I'm thinking of one time when one of my assistants made an error. Normally, it would have been caught, but one of the other employees was in the arcade killing time during the accounting time of the day. The result was two good friends ready to fight each other over what turned out to be a mistake. Nobody intended it, but documenting that you're not in the cash office could head off issues like that.)

Oh, and while bugging out is a normal response, it's probably not needed. It took me a long time to realize this, but ultimately, it's just a job. It doesn't, or at least shouldn't, define your life or who you are. And while job hunting sucks, panicing about keeping a job isn't worth it. (Yeah, I know it's easy for me to say since I'm not in your shoes. Still, once I realized that the world wouldn't end if I had to get a different job, it made me a bit more confident about defending myself when I needed to.)

[blas87]

I'd ask someone why.

There are some places of employment where higher ups will secretly demote employees or make them work grunt jobs until they quit.

Here's an example. We used to have some really worthless supervisors where I worked that were too scared to fire temps or bad employees. So they'd put them in the testing room at work. There they would sit all night long in the same spot testing product with a probe all night long. They faced the wall and didn't talk. It's a job that most people only have to do once every few weeks or months, if ever. This was their way of getting people to quit on their own. Spineless OR bitchy supervisors who wanted to torture people would keep scheduling them in the test spot for weeks on end until they went crazy and quit on their own accord.

[purplecat41877]

Have you tried talking to the store manager about the schedule? Where I work, the head cashier makes the schedule and he checks with the store director to make sure it's OK before it gets printed out.:)

[countessamy]

Thanks guys. :) I took your advice and talked to everyone i could get my hands on, including the store manager and my union rep. They don't know what is going on, of course, but if i am being demoted they will fight it with me.

Your responses made me feel better, like i wasn't the only one in this retail-hell. Thanks again.

[NightAngel]

You said the manager doing the schedule is new. That may be the entire reason- he/she may not be completely familiar with who does what or even how to make a schedule.

When I worked at BBV I was yo-yo'd between being a Shift Lead and an Assistant Store Manager. The company couldn't decide if there was really a need for the title ASM at our location. I didn't really care- my pay didn't change and the duties were the same. It was just silly corporate BS because all they ever actually did was change my title in the computer.