What the article fails to mention is if the imbibing of alcohol during work hours actually had any negative effect on productivity. My guess... no. So, what's the point? Other than to make idiots in boardrooms happy.

That's the only point, to give the suits the impression that they're actually being important for the company.

I hate 'managers'. My manager sits in meeting 80% of the time, then tries to lay down law on things he's no longer familiar with. He makes so many idiotic pronouncements, everyone just mainly ignores him, and he doesn't remember his own pronouncements, so things just kind of go away if you ignore it. It's so sad.

Who doesn't hate managers. I've had a long run of rubbish ones in Game. I'm going to rant now so I'm giving you fair warning this might be a long post

My first store we had Dave. Wonderful guy, huge bloke (could play Santa in 3 shopping centres at once ) but my god was he lazy. He would spend at least 7 of the 8 hours we were open sitting upstairs with his portable DVD player, more food than a supermarket and a few 2 litre bottles of pop. I can kind of understand why though; he'd been with the company for at least 8 years by then and was having to travel for about 2 hours each way to get there. On the train. Trains are rubbish in Yorkshire.

My second one, Nils, was amazing. That's all that can be said about him. Everyone loved him and he got results.

The third manager, Suneel, was ok but not great. He used to be fairly laid back but would at least always be out on the till with us guys. He knew sod all about games though. If someone asked "Here mate, what's this one like?" he'd just take the box and read the back to the customer! He went to another store to help out over summer before he left though and in between returning and leaving, he became overly pushy about getting things done. He'd give you an hour long job then come back 10 minutes later nagging why it hadn't been done.

Then we get onto Mike. Mike seemed awesome at the start, he was a promotion from another store from Deputy so he was really putting in the effort. But after about 6 months he lost his enthusiasm and literally spent all day out the back (admittedly processing delivery and preowned, though he always did it wrong so we still had to redo it ), getting phone calls from his wife or sitting outside smoking and either reading wrestling magazines or playing pokemon. Eventually we ended up on the underperformers programme as a store and he decided it was too stressful and returned to his deputy position.

So now we have Helen. Technically she was promoted though she'd been acting manager at another store for 6 months previous. And somehow she's the worst. At first she seemed great, full of new ideas, listening to the staff, actually improving our figures. We wanted to work for her. Then Christmas hit and she's no better than Mike. Worse actually. She's never on shop floor and she's obsessed with the idea that paperwork == success. The more target sheets and figures we fill in, clearly the better we'll do! Well...I beg to differ but the more people we have on shop floor means the more stuff we can sell. Particularly as our local Gamestation is closing in two weeks so we'll have all their customers to serve as well without getting any extra hours.

People only bother to make any effort if I'm running the shift. Mainly because I act like a Sales Assistant who just checks the figures every hour or so and says "sell more accessories" or whatever is currently needed. They kind of make an effort for a deputy but only depending on their own personal moods, John is far too laid back to actually say "sell more accessories" and is also rubbish at delegation and organisation.

haha... don't worry about the rant, it seems familiar enough. My current boss used to rock... then his boss came along and starting beating the corporate mentality in him. Now he's just a corporate drone. I've complained about him before, so I'm not gonna rehash it... but I understand. Sometimes I wish my boss, and my boss's boss, would fall over dead. I'd be willing to move up into a managerial position just so I didn't have to deal with stupid managers... though inevitably the person above me would be an idiot.

Of course. And somewhere else on the world wide web, there would be a post complaining about this idiotic texan manager who just doesn't seem to give a shit about his job and only ever sits there programming his website...

hehehe.... shhhh!

My current boss is a pretty good guy overall, so not complaining. Unlike my previous one who was quite literally insane.

He'd write memoes to his superior about plots to damage/unseat him, he'd actively curb his employees' initiative and responsibilities out of fear of them eclipsing him or passing him by (cfr paranoia) and I've seen him go through a colleague's personal (!) e-mail and print out some stuff when he was out and forgot to lock his pc. Oh and there was this time when he, completely out of the blue, wrote me an angry e-mail telling me to shape up or I could pack up. His office was literally next door. Maybe calling me in and talking about it first would be more appropriate before sending me an -email threatening to fire me?

Oh and I later also learned that he actively discriminated against a Moroccan girl who'd applied to the same job as me. We both did well in the selection process but she held a bachelor's (which was the job prerequisite) against my master's. So technically speaking I was overqualified and they were aware that I'd leave as soon as I found a better paying job, but they still hired me. Why? Because one of my colleagues was an incredible racist, and my boss was afraid it'd be a problem.

So he was pretty much breaking all kinds of labor laws and doing everything you ever learned about man management wrong. I almost miss him.

Rofl he sounds awesome, but only because while I was reading that I had an image in my head of the insane sims in Sims 3. I can see him riffling through people's trash cans or telling them about evil plots when he's only just met them!

My job just got a tiny bit better. As in an extra 2 hours contracted better. 26 hours, yay, go me! However I have to work ten full days in a row this week. Fun.

Congrats Pev!! Now it's time to hatch a plan to dethrone your superiors, take GAME for yourself and declare it to be a freestate of games. Which would be awesome until your stock runs out because GAME stopped delivering.

Well, i was supposed to go on a business trip to Turkey this month, but i've been given lead position on a project instead. Which is probably 10 x better for me in the end run. w00p w00p!

grats derfonator. Let me know if you need any freelance web development.

or a shotgun to blast away all those fools who'll be pissing you off.

Congrats derf!

I just had an irritating day at work, Gamestation closed last Saturday so we're the only game store in the town now. As such we're basically coping with Christmas size sales (£7k today as oppposed to our usual £3-4k) on summer hour staff. Yep. 4 staff to deal with £7k on 2 tills is great fun.

Screw you Game. You can't afford to keep our hours up where they were or even all the stores open but you can give Lisa bloody Morgan (ex CEO of a few weeks back) £1.5million because she chose to leave. Thanks a bunch.

What's the project about exactly? Congrats in any case Derfmeister.

@ Pev: wow, how long do they think they're gonna be able to keep that up with no extra staff/capacity? Sounds pretty fucked up! You better get paid for overtime...