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Hey Pandas, What Is The Wildest Case Of Miscommunication You’ve Seen?
I've worked in retail multiple times.
One of the dumbest/weirdest was due to a manager at Walmart. I was brought to the HR Department training area by a fellow employee to get a deaf co-worker to get his training done. I was recruited because it was noted that I use a lot of hand gestures to be able to communicate with said disabled employees.
This was normally for very simple things like "Hello" and/or "Could you bring down an item for me?" I don't know ASL, but I'm good at using movement to communicate some basic things with more universal gesturing.
We literally had a manager yell at a deaf co-worker to have him do computer training. This was to a completely deaf staff member that was a stocker because he couldn't do most jobs that required hearing in the Walmart. This Deaf Co-worker could read English, so writing for more complex communication was an option available.
*So, we had an over-easily annoyed manager yell at a Deaf Employee to do Computer Training that didn't have an easy way to bring up Sub-Titles without literally sitting down to find the Sub-Titles button to the point said Deaf Employee walked out on the Manager. That says a lot since he literally could hear but knew she was yelling at him over something rather than write a single note down for communication purposes!*
Naturally, I helped said Deaf Co-worker out by: explaining things via written note, helping them bring up the Sub-Titles, and was then, asked by the Personal Manager who just walked in why I was there and not doing my exact job. I simply pointed out the level of stupidity that manager had to be to consider doing that and pointed out another employee saw all that go down, recruiting me to fix the problem.
That manager was spoken too, and I think the Personal Manager pointed out the level of stupid that whole thing was to corporate. I think this because during the Covid-19 Pandemic, they came up with the auto-pop-up during training of a "Reading" mode vs. "Spoken" mode for training for literally all computer training.
I work in retail, and let me tell you, I have seen some wild things go down in my time working here.
I once had a woman come up to me while I was stocking shelves and complain about a worker treating her badly. When she described the worker, I was confused because we didn't have anybody by that description working there. She got agitated and called me a liar, accused me of protecting him, and insisted she would be having words with my manager as soon as she could.
Before I got the chance to say anything in response, this man rounds the corner, fitting her description to a T, and angrily shouts, 'FOR THE LAST TIME, YOU CRAZY B----, I DON'T WORK HERE!' before promptly storming out of the store. She gave me a look and said, 'See! You see what I'm talking about?'I saw she was insane, does that count? I asked her what she wanted me to do about it; he DIDN'T work there, and there was nothing I could do. The last thing she did was rant some more about talking to my manager or calling corporate come tomorrow before storming out herself.
What exactly did she want me to do? Fire him?
