Once a week I have to complete my "weekly notes" and email them to my bosses. There are several categories that I have to comment on... Marketing, Merchandising, Operations, Inventory, Staffing, etc. The upper-cheese levels just want to know what's going on in the field without actually being in it, so they ask us to send them weekly updates.
It was a particularly slow day today, so I had the pleasure of reading thru old "Updates" that were saved on the computer. There were reports dating back three years! 
Bottom line... I stood there laughing most of the afternoon as I read the memos! It seemed as if the former manager must have been on the brink of a meltdown. His comments were priceless.
He told the Big Cheeses that they were "creating monsters by letting the customers combine offers when it clearly states that offers can not be combined." He went to say that our company motto should be borrowed from that hamburger chain (Have it Your Way!). He told of one incident where a customer got upset because we were out of stock on an item, so the customer "threw the ad at him and cursed at him as she left the store". His next comment was "Great working conditions".
And once you create monsters, you can never get rid of them! 
He also snuck in a little gem after stating that they had been waiting five weeks for a computer that was supposed to be there in three, but corporate promised it would be there the next week. His reply to that was "I won't hold my breath".
Apparently, he went out of his way to help a customer, and bent the rules a little by giving the customer a small discount on an item that wasn't on sale. The next day he got a "nasty-gram" (as he put it) from someone at Corporate asking him why he did what he did. His reply to Corp was "It's called Customer Service, or don't we do that anymore".
Don't know how this manager met his demise... but his comments were hilarious. I could totally relate to his total disgust for the drama that surrounds retail. Not sure if the customers drove him crazy, or if corporate did. Hope he's enjoying a padded cell somewhere. He seemed to earn it.
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