05.10.01
Carol goes and hires the Babbler, arranges some sketchy register training for him, and then turns him loose on the salon.
I tend to have more free time than Carol, so I decided that since I was already doing things like folding towels and putting them away, hanging up client gowns, tearing foils for highlights, and the like, that I'd show the Babbler how we do these things, and why. Always a reason why.
"If you put the plastic capes in with the regular capes, Carol will use them for haircuts, when they are only meant to be used for chemical services. We aren't allowed to order any more capes for the time being, and we only have two plastic capes left. State law states that all chemical services are to be provided to a client wearing a waterproof/chemical-proof plastic-type cape. Plastic capes have a very short life if they are washed and dried as often as they are here, so we need to wash and dry them as little as possible. They get put on this shelf here.
"We hang the client gowns this way because it is not only uniformly pleasing to the eye, but for some reason people have a strange tendency to hang used gowns in the other direction. Therefor, a gown hanging in the opposite direction will automatically get thrown in the machine to be washed by either Carol or myself, because it must be dirty if it's hanging there in the non-uniformly pleasing way. Besides, washing a clean client gown wastes laundry detergent.
"After you fold the towels, stack them in cabinet this way, because if you stack them the other way, Carol will grab one halfway down the stack and topple the whole stack onto the floor, rendering them all dirty, which means they have to be washed again, which wastes even more laundry detergent. I don't know exactly why the toppling thing happens, except that it just does. Stack the towels this way, please.
"When we tear foils, we tear them in half, because we have a limited supply of foils to use, and we need to maximize our usage. If we need smaller foils, we will ourselves tear the smaller foils as needed. You don't have to tear smaller foils when you are doing the regular foil tearing."
(At some point it all comes down to the fact that this company won't let us order much of anything. Capes, foil, laundry detergent -- they're like gold around here.)
This all is just stuff I'm already doing, and the Babbler is following me around and babbling incessantly anyway, so I take these opportunities to point out what I'm doing for his elucidation. I take great pains to be nice and friendly, and non-pushy. Friendly suggestions. Not orders. The Babbler is sort of emotionally frail and has to be dealt with gently. He has a lot of issues, and I try to let him be as much as possible.
I told him that we used to have problems with 'he said, she said' at the salon, where one person would say something to another, that person would turn around and tell the third person a different version of what was said, and then the third person would be pissed off at the first for a reason that didn't really exist. I told him that we got it all straightened out and promised to not act like that anymore, and that we were fairly successful in our endeavors, at least on a professional level. I encouraged him to tell me if he felt like I was being pushy or throwing too much at him, because I could appreciate the fact that I was throwing a lot of information at him, and that I wouldn't get mad or hurt. I like to be dealt with up front.
A bunch of times now, the Babbler has seriously messed up my client bookings. People showing up for colors are down as haircuts on the books, which is bad because colors require an hour more time than a haircut, and the clients tell me that they very clearly said they wanted colors. People who want updos for prom on Saturday are erroneously scheduled for updos on Wednesday night. My clients are telling me that when they call to make an appointment with me for a later time, the Babbler tells them that he can get them in sooner if he does them himself.
Do I yell at him? No. Do I accuse him of trying to steal my appointments? No. I point out the errors and politely ask him to be more careful booking my appointments in the future. I do not mention the attempted larceny. I am being on my best behavior.
I know that he doesn't fully know how to use the cash register. I know he didn't have complete register training and certainly doesn't know that you can look up a person's Younkers card number at the register, when you used to have to send them back to the office for that sort of thing. That is why when he told someone she could go back to the office for the number, I stopped blowing my client's hair dry, and told him that he could look it up on the register, offering to either show him how or to talk him through it.
I never expected Carol to shoot me a dirty look and hiss at me to leave him alone. I couldn't figure out why Carol kept frowning at me everytime I even looked at the Babbler.
The Babbler has a serious habit of jumping into conversations. If Carol or I are talking to a client about something, he will insert himself into the conversation, sometimes not clearly understanding what we were talking about, and unwittingly makes a fool out of himself. He doesn't know, and we don't tell him. I jump into conversations too sometimes. I think everyone does. But when I am in the middle of a sentence and he jumps in and completely interrupts me to monopolize the conversation for the next five minutes, and then wanders off, I have a problem with that. It is one thing to join a conversation, but it is quite another to hijack one. Clients notice this sort of thing too, and have mentioned that the Babbler is either very rude or very stupid to do things like that. I tell them that he's really a nice person, he just has a strange compulsion to talk all of the time. I think it might be a pathological disorder, honestly -- the boy has some very, very serious mental health quandaries.
All I really wanted to do was pull him aside before I left work to nicely explain to him that I didn't mind if he joined a conversation, but that when he interrupted me when I was talking that I would lose track of what I was saying, and that this was very disturbing to me. I was going to turn it around on myself, saying that I had the problem, and then let him help me out by trying to only insert his commentary when it was appropriate.
But after Carol's odd behavior, I decided not to say anything until later. And the next day, before I could say anything, Carol pulled me aside and told me that it wasn't my job to tell the Babbler what to do or how to do it -- that she was the manager and it was her job to show him the ropes -- and I could mind my own damn business. She didn't appreciate me bullying the Babbler, and that he had repeatedly complained that I was pushy and treated him like he was ignorant of how a salon worked, despite the fact that he's been doing hair since I was in first grade, and it was starting to give him an inferiority complex.
Whoa, news to me.
Truthfully, he may have a lot of experience, but he has less than three weeks of experience in our salon. Every salon runs differently, and I was just trying to help him make a smooth transition into ours, especially since Carol didn't have a lot of time to show him how things worked, and I did. I was trying to be helpful not only to ease him seamlessly into the system, but also to take the strain of having to do too many things off of her back, because she's always complaining about how swamped she is and never has enough time to do anything.
The Babbler asks me as many questions about how to do stuff as I offer him suggestions. He even defers to me, which might be the problem.
Carol and I have had our share of problems before about who is running the show. Remember how I was yanked off of payroll and ordering because it was her job? Guess who's doing the ordering and payroll again because someone else is too busy to do it. I don't want to be manager. I just want to have products to use on or sell to our clientele, I want to get paid on time, and frankly, a less stressed out Carol is a much more pleasant Carol to work with. If doing a little paperwork for Carol keeps the machine running smoothly, so be it.
But then, when I am doing all of the salon paperwork, and I'm the one going to classes and then telling her all of the info secondhand because she doesn't have the time to go, and I'm the one taking conference calls with all of the other salon managers because she's too busy to do it*, and I'm the one that ends up talking to all of the corporate suits and the distributors, and I'm the one showing the new guy how to do everything, she gets all hostile. Playing armchair psychiatrist, I'd feel very safe in saying that she's the one with the inferiority complex, and she's the one who feels threatened that someone who was in diapers when she started doing hair is actually doing her job for her.
Well, you know what? She can be as big of a bitch as she wants to, and she can show the Babbler the ropes, and she can take the conference calls, because she's the one getting paid to do it. I'll stick to the paperwork, because someone's got to do it, and God knows that Carol doesn't want to do it herself.
I don't feel threatened by any of this because I've been through it so many times before**. The only thing I resent is that the Babbler didn't have the balls to tell me that I was being a little too helpful to my face, and that because I don't know how much of what Carol said is actually true, and how much is her exaggeration, I can't ask him to stop interrupting me whenever I start talking to my clients.
Imagine the sheer joy I felt today when I found out that we're getting another employee in 3 weeks***!
*Carol informed me an hour before the conference call that I was going to be representing her because she was too busy. Trust me, the last thing I wanted to do with that hour of my life was sit on a phone listening to a bunch of corporate bozos excitedly explaining some sort of stylist reward program that I can only describe as sounding suspiciously like a pyramid scam. (It even has colored tiers of excellence -- bronze, bronze excel, silver, silver excel, gold, gold excel, platinum, and you guessed it, platinum excel.) Everytime you achieve that tier's goal, you get to go to a class and raise your prices, which makes you more money and motivates you as a stylist to try for the next tier, and so on! And you get a plaque with your name on it, every time you hit a new tier! Woohoo!
**Which only tells you how tolerant of a moron I actually am, taking the abuse and never complaining (at least not to her) about it. I'm also incredibly lazy -- I don't want to have to go through the effort of finding another job and rebuilding a clientele when I'm only going to be here for another year and a half at the most.
***Apparently, a girl that works at the Moline Younkers is transferring to our salon because her boyfriend goes to school at the U, and she wants to be closer to him. Conceivably, she might have some of her clients follow her here, since Carol and I both have clients that drive from Chicago and Moline to get their hair done by us. It's just going to totally suck having our staff double in the middle of the dead season, when all of the students have either graduated or gone home for the summer, and walk-in clients are at a premium. Traditionally, I get to do all of the walk-ins during the summer, because the third stylist always quits in the months prior to summer vacation, but now I'm going to have to compete with 2 other people who plan to work full time as well.
I'm fully prepared for Carol to be on super-high bitch level, because payroll is going to be a nightmare with that many hours being paid out. Not enough money will be coming in to meet goals, much less cover payroll for 4 people. Carol and I are most likely going to be carrying the entire salon, which is going to put us at the bottom of the salon rankings. As a two person salon, what we bring in puts us up in the upper levels, but with a four person salon making roughly what two, maybe two and a half people generate, that's really going to change.
You should have seen Carol freak when her personal standing slipped a point from number two in the company to number three. Never mind the fact that she's competing with employees at a million-dollar salon that charges three times what we do for services. Personally, I about peed my pants when I found out I'd gone up 10 places, from 91 to 81, out of 262 stylists in our region. Carol was less than impressed.
At least Carol won't have to train the new girl how to do everything, because she's already worked in a Younkers salon. The only real problems I forsee are that her name is Krista****, and that the only thing we've heard about her work is that Carol's client Lisa got her hair cut by Krista one time when she was in Moline, and that Lisa thought it was the worst cut she'd ever had, which inspired her to vow to never ever get her hair cut by anyone besides Carol. Ever.
****Imagine the field day we're going to not only have with Kristen and Krista, but an all C/K salon -- Carol, Ken, Kristen and Krista.
"Did you want that haircut with anyone in particular?"
"Carol, Ken, Kristen or Krista."
"Did you say Kris-ten or Kris-ta?"
"With Kris-ta, right?"
"Oh, with Kris-ten! Gotcha."
I soooo look forward to that conversation.
