First time poster etc. etc.

So for about a year, I worked at a bakery in the UK, pretty simple stuff.  For the most part, I enjoyed the work, although I had to leave (on very friendly terms) due to my uni studies eating up more and more time.  Most of the employees were genuinely nice and fun people, a lot of the customers had banter for days, and even the manager, while often very stern and hardline, had a wonderful joking gossip-y side to him that made shifts that much brighter.

Now for the context to this post.  Our shop, when I first arrived, had two assistant managers, but by the time of these tales one of them had simply quit and gotten the heck away, and the other assistant manager had to take a long maternity leave.   So within a short span of time, our manager found himself down 2 very senior employees, with no one but himself to act as a team leader/assistant manager role, and just generally needing some extra hands.

The call went out!  The alluring promise of flexible hours and not-the-worst pay drew the masses in.  Well, 2 or 3 people at the very least.   A couple new basic employees, as well as two new people who were to be immediately trained up for Senior Team Member positions, which as I understand it is pretty similar to assistant manager, but subtly less glamourous.

Person 1, Jeremy, was an American guy who'd recently moved in to study Psychology, and he was a *GEM* to work with.  Permanently friendly, smart, hardworking, and ~~pretty darn cute~~ generally just a proper good bloke.

 

But then came person 2. **Derek**.

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Derek was something else entirely.  He was, quite simply, every single negative quality of your average chav in spades.  Brutish, aggressive, and with a sense of self-importance fast approaching narcissism.  After about a week of working at the place, however, none of these qualities had quite yet been made apparent.  For the most part, as he was learning the ins and outs of the till system for his first few days, he was amicable and generally at least attempting a decent level of effort.

Then *it* happened.  He began to be trained up for a Senior Team Member position, and he rapidly derailed from there.

There's no particular order to most of this, since it happened basically all at once.  Disclaimer here as well that *much* of this was hearsay from the manager and other more senior staff.

Certain aspects of the job just seemed completely lost on Derek.  For example, one of the basic requirements for a Senior member is that they do the stock count at the end of the day, especially when the manager isn't in.  Somehow, this very simple concept confounded Derek.  His job was supposed to be as follows:

1. **Count the stock**.  Go around the shop, checking all the items according to the big clipboard and sheet of paper and just... counting it up.  If you see 15 bottles of orange juice on a shelf, then there's 15 bloody bottles of orange juice on that shelf.  If you see a full tray of frozen pastries in the back, then you already *know* exactly how many there are because each tray is labelled with the correct number.

2. **Write down on said sheet of paper the number that you came up with.**

3. **At the end of the stock count, return to the office computer and put each number you wrote down into the stock ordering system.**

For clarification, step 3 was super important, as our stock ordering used a newfangled automated system that bases its quantities on the stock count numbers.  You can see why it's a good idea not to get this bit wrong.

Now, let's examine what *actually* would happen when Derek attempted to do the stock count:

1. **Hazily count the stock**.  He can see there's 15 bottles of orange juice on a shelf, so with some good luck he would actually count that correctly.  But for some reason, he was totally incapable of counting the frozen stock.  It had already been explained to him repeatedly that the trays were labelled with the correct stock numbers, but the guy just didn't get it at all, and lord knows what numbers he was coming up with for that.

2. **Write down the number he arrived at**.  Thankfully, he was competent enough to do this step correctly.  If he'd come up with 15 bottles of OJ, that's what he would write down.

3. **Completely fuck over our stock system.**  This was the inexplicable part.  According to my manager gossiping to me after work, what Derek would do at this point is, somehow, put in a completely different number which he'd (presumably) arrived at through some strange voodoo.  He would have counted 15 bottles.  He would have *written down* 15 bottles.  Then off he goes to the computer, and confidently tells it that we have *at least 4 times that number*.

So of course, this leads to our automated stock system assuming "This shop has enough stock" and for WEEKS afterwards, we dealt with low stock on a daily basis.  We never had enough of anything.

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After Derek consistently ruined our stock levels, he began to dodge out on stock count duties where possible. Rather frustratingly, throughout this whole time he *repeatedly chatted up customers*, and often casually dropped in lines like "Oh, I'm the only one who even does any real work around here".  And not in a joking way.  He genuinely believed he was one of the shop's most valuable employees, and it was going right to his head.

To be continued!