Losing a member of the Crew

   Monday, August 2nd

    My work crew (aka parts group) got thrown for a loop Monday. Our boss came in and put in his 2-weeks notice. Now, while I’m not overly surprised, it was definitely a shock. Now, let me tell you, I have a fantastic boss. He’s kind, attentive and protective over our crew. There are only 4 of us including him and we are a tight-knit group. We work together like a well-oiled machine. None of us get in trouble very often because we know how to do our jobs & our boss lets us do our jobs without micro-managing us. We all have our own personalities and work styles, and yet each one of us compliments the other. Every morning, as my boss comes through the door and past the parts counter, he says "Good morning kids". This is because we are a family here and he's been the figurative "father" as the manager of our crew.

    There has been a lot going on in my company the past 2 years and while I don’t agree with a lot of it, the worst part was last year, during the height of the pandemic, they told us to do more with less. Then they cut our hours, just the hourly employees though, not salaried people like managers. This resulted in a lot of the locations losing people who really couldn’t live on 32 hours a week. This being said, the business never slowed down. As an “essential” business, we never got any downtime. No days closed. No outbreaks of that stupid virus. Nada. Just fewer hours, less in our paychecks, and still having to show up 5 days a week. 

    My boss did his best to shield us from a lot of the junk coming at us from corporate, but there’s only so much he could do. I am going to miss my boss. He’s been a good mentor and manager.

    About once every couple of months, we would meet outside of work to have a drink, discuss work, and just relax while we talk about life. Sometimes these meetings were just us complaining and airing out our grievances about work. Sometimes we didn't even talk about work. 

Not the best pic of all of us, but it's all I've got!

    While our team won't ever be the same now that he's gone. He will never be forgotten. As a boss, he killed it. It would be hard to ask for more from someone and it'll be dang hard to replace him with someone half a good.

Processing It All

I can run the emotional gambit pretty quickly when it comes to processing grief.

Shock.

Denial.

Anger.

Acceptance.

Guilt.

Reflection & Depression.

    Monday, was all about shock. I was shocked that J decided to leave us, as well as I felt some guilt thrown in there for harboring bad feelings towards him for not talking to us about it first instead of turning in his notice & then telling us. I mean, I get why he did it that way, but I'm still irate about it. I don't hate him. That's not who I am, but I was shocked and a little hurt. This is normal.

Tuesday, August 3rd

    Tuesday, I am just angry. I'm angry about the way this happened. I'm angry at the company for enacting such stupid rules. I'm angry at everybody. I'm just angry.

    Walking into work on Tuesday morning, I could already tell that it's going to be a rough day. The GM looks grumpy, my cohort D is grumbling at his screen....this is what we deal with on a daily basis. No-one is really happy about any of the changes that the company is going through. This is mostly to blame on the corporate big-wigs. There's such low communication from them on what is coming, what to expect, what is going to be expected of us. They just throw new rules and policies at us, expect us to have time to read and understand it all, and then gripe at us if we ask any questions or push back on the "stupid". I call this stuff stupid because some of it really doesn't make any sense. It adds steps to processes that don't need micro-managing. These have been the biggest offenses lately. They are also adding KPIs (Key Point Indicators). Basically, these are reports that they are going to be looking at to see if we are selling as many parts as we should. Not gross profit or gross margins, lines per hour. Yep, that's right, they are measuring us like they do the cashiers at Wal-Mart. So basically, I can get a better score if I sell the 4 parts needed for a small generator service twice an hour than if I sell 1 overhaul a day, despite the MASSIVE profit difference. This pisses me off.

Wednesday, August 4th

    Wednesday I was still angry. A little more so, since management basically said to my boss "no need to work out your notice". I presume it was something like that anyway, I can't be sure. After that, the rest of our crew (all 3 of us) were called into a meeting with our GM, DM & RM. They sang us a line & did a pony dance about being here for us as we transition. That's a bunch of malarky, but whatever. We already know how to do our jobs, lucky for them.

    While we make this transition to working without a direct supervisor, I can't help but think about some of the other branches that have gone through similar changes in the last 18+ months. My heart goes out to them, just as it does to my boss & his wife. Change is hard sometimes, especially when it's not wanted.