When you work for a small business, you want to do everything you can to help make it a success.

What would you do if the business owner made his girlfriend your boss, and she was making stupid changes?

That is what the bookstore worker in this story experienced, so finally he just complied with her foolish demands and customer satisfaction plummeted.

Check it out.

Boss‘ girlfriend thinks she knows my job better than I do, so I decide to comply. The customers aren’t happy.

Let me set the scene for you:

So, I‘ve been an apprentice at a small bookstore for the past two years now, only recently passed my exam to make me a certified bookseller.

Before that, due to a very toxic work environment during covid times, the only other full-time working employee whom I looked up to as kind of a mentor quit barely 4 months after I started my apprenticeship.

I’ve had to bend over backwards ever since trying to fill the holes that were created when she left.

These past two years have been… interesting to say the least.

Starting with the store itself: it’s really cute, the only problem is it is drowning in old books people drop off all the time and just too much stuff cramped into too little space altogether.

This results in a chaos that makes it very hard to keep everything in check and not lose track of anything.

So, I‘ve learned to adapt and combat this chaos by keeping lists of basically everything, double checking to make sure everything is in order etc.

This will come in later.

Now, as for my (ex-)colleagues…

I am on pretty good terms with most of them, except for one.

Why do business owners let their significant other’s get involved?

Enter: my boss‘ girlfriend.

In the beginning I didn’t get why my colleagues didn’t like her very much, now, two years later, she is the main reason I will be leaving this job at the end of September because frankly, I am fed up.

If I put everything that happened in these two years into this post, it would be very long, so I will just cut to the chase:

Due to the aforementioned chaos that plagues this store, I double check EVERYTHING to avoid mistakes.

This includes customer orders.

Basically, we get the books, I find out who the book is for, I call the customer to tell them their book is ready to be picked up by them.

Sometimes people order more than one book, which is where things can get tricky because not every order arrives at the same time due to an array of factors.

Adding to this, we also order used books which has nothing to do with our computer system, which makes it extra prone to forgetting about something.

Because this happens a lot with orders that include more than one book, I just like to take a quick glance at the computer system to make sure nothing is missing from the order before I call, because in the past two years I‘ve made the experience that people tend to get annoyed after a while if you keep calling them about an incomplete order.

This seems like a smart way to do it.

So, say you’ve ordered 5 books and only 4 arrive with the next one probably arriving the day after, we’ll wait until everything is complete and THEN we call.

(Obviously there’s exceptions but you catch my drift)

Then a few weeks back the girlfriend noticed I was doing this and started to exclaim her dissatisfaction with the way I was handling the customer orders.

She thinks doing this quick extra step costs me valuable time that could be spent elsewhere (I would like to add that she spends a lot of the afternoons in the store online shopping and being on phone calls with her daughter) and is all in all completely unnecessary.

I thought that this was a pretty bad opinion, since she rarely ever does the customer calls.

I tried to tell her why I personally think this step takes away the risk of confusion and customers getting annoyed.

She then proceeded to tell me, “Well it doesn’t matter what YOU think, this is OUR store”.

This upsets me because if I weren’t there, the store wouldn’t be running in the first place (they managed to get almost every other employee to quit with the work environment they’ve created the past two years and I‘m the only one who’s in the store every day from 9 to 6).

She also made it a point to tell me how she thinks it’s rude that I always talk back and always have to have the last word.

Ok, it sounds like this worker might be hard to deal with.

(I took this pretty personally, I genuinely just want to bring good ideas in and make the workflow as smooth as possible, and if someone comes along with a point like this I feel like I have to make them see my point of view)

Anyways, since I won’t be in this store much longer and I have stopped caring so much, I‘ve decided to do just as she told me.

Now, say you’ve ordered 5 books from us.

2 arrive on the first day, you get a call from us.

You ask: “Really, all 5 books are there already?”

I say, “Oh no, sorry, only 2 arrived today.”

Then the next day, another 2 arrive.

You receive another call from us.

Surely, we’re calling because everything is ready to go now, right? Right??

WRONG.

This would get old quick.

You see how this might get annoying after a while?

So yeah, I just stopped double checking and everything just kind of went downhill from there; at risk of my seeming unprofessional but to my great satisfaction customers are getting more and more irritated which each call where I don’t seem to know their entire order, incomplete orders etc.

It would have gotten to this point sooner or later anyways since I will be gone with the end of September, it just gives me that little bit of personal satisfaction after two years of this insanity.

Hopefully the store owners will realize their mistake before it cost them the business.

Let’s see what the people in the comments think about this.

Yeah, he should explain it.

I was wondering this as well.

This would be the smart way to do it.

This commenter is right.

This is a good suggestion.

Sometimes you have to follow dumb policies to get them to change.

Or you know, just quit.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.