Seagull managers.
I think we all know what I am talking about. We have all had one. Hell, some of us may have at some point in time even BEEN one!! That’s right… a seagull manager. Urban dictionary holds the following entry:
seagull manager manager supervisor
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My seagull manager was at my last place of employment. She had come to us courtesy of a demotion from a position at the company’s head office. I think she was somewhat resentful of having to leave a cushy desk job and sitting elbow to elbow with all the head cheeses. She was being replaced by a technician who could do a much better job in the same position for 1/4 of the coin. Now she would actually have to work for her money and toil and slave like the rest of us retail saps. Or would she??
The first day in, she came squawking…everything had to change from a way we were all comfortable with to her way. Her way, or get out. If we all worked her way, nothing would get done. She was (and I suppose still is, wherever she is) a “do as I say, not as I do” person.
Because she was all schmoozy with the RPMs and other head office people no one would dare to question her. This lady simply did whatever she wanted, preaching company policy to us, yet blatantly disregarding her own sermons. I will give you an example of this. One of her biggest lectures to us was about our customer service standards. The company sets out certain behaviors that we are to follow and regularly sends secret shoppers in to test us out. Technicians may be shopped, and the shoppers are trained to look for different things for a tech and a pharmacist. The techs must offer the services of a pharmacist in all cases, and for anything that demands more than a “item x is right here, there is a 18 pack and a 40 pack in both brand and our store brand” requires us techs to have a pharmacist come and give drug information, recommendations etc. One day I had a lady approach me at the in counter and ask me for the “best cold medicine” I told her I would have to have a pharmacist come out front and give her a recommendation based on the symptoms she wanted to treat. There were, at the time 5 pharmacists in the store. One in the back doing nursing home work, another at the till counseling, and two in the middle of checking scripts… and seagull… she was reading her emails. I asked her (as she was the least occupied with critical tasks) if she would mind going to give a recommendation. She put up her finger in my face and said “I am busy.. in a minute”
What the bloody hell?? That customer will walk out… your email will still be there in 2 minutes!! Meanwhile I am left holding the bag… “she’ll be right out with you.. sorry for the delay.” Someone else ended up helping that lady. Customers were definitely NOT her first priority!
I also wondered why it was acceptable for her to go on hour and half long breaks.. to go to the gym, the hair dresser, the nail salon, while if we were more than a few minutes overdue on our breaks, it was grounds for discipline. She would take 3 hours to slap together a schedule for one week. Schedules were supposed to be posted at least THREE weeks in advance. Some people have family lives to arrange around their work schedules and having a schedule for the week posted only the Friday before was disruptive. Requests for time off were virtually ignored. Most times she would take her paper work/schedules home with her during the work day saying it was the only place she could work undisturbed…. or claim she would come in before the store was open to get it done and then leave early to make up for it.
I dreaded having to go to work when it was just herself and me. She had no concept of time management, or any sort of priorities. If she was the only pharmacist in the pharmacy at the time, even if there were very few scripts to process, we learned to tack an extra 10 minutes (at least) on to pick up times to accommodate her flitting around to all corners of the dispensary doing god knows what. She certainly wasn’t checking rxs! If there were more than 2 pharmacists there at one time, we usually had a work flow established and each person found themselves a station and stayed there. She would plant herself as far away from actual work as she could. There were days when I would have 6, 9 or even 12 screens plugged with overrides to do, and she would ignore our pleas for them to be done.. flapping her hands as she would run around on unknown (but very important) tasks. Other days, we would be happily plugging along, typing in rxs. Usually when we have a screen full ( 3 tabs) we would call for overrides and continue entering on the other screen, by which time the overrides would be done on the first one and we could seamlessly trade sides and continue working. Every other pharmacist understood this pattern and followed through with overriding as required. Not her!! She would flap her way by and pretty much shoulder you aside to do ONE override while you have a stack of scripts in hand, then flap away again leaving everyone in her wake…. staring…shaking our heads.
This lady almost caused me to abandon my chosen field of work. I left that pharmacy on almost a daily basis wondering why the hell I put up with it. Now, I am very glad I stuck out the few months until I could get a transfer to another store. Reading over what I have typed out here… doesn’t seem so bad, but dealing with this type of incompetence on a daily basis was enough to drive one mad. All the little things added up to be one great big hassle.