Some bosses just don’t play a fair game. As a follow up to the Saturday, October 13 edition of I Confess, I too need to add my five cents’ worth as I have suffered similar fates.
I work in a particular arcade with a boss who calls the workers “dogs” and “pigs” and such derogatory names, and comments.
This is due to customers who win jackpots in the boss’s arcade. Now mind you, the slot machines in these gaming institutions are such that you can either win or lose. No one has control over it as either the player is just lucky or he or she knows how to play cards exceptionally well.
During the boss’s early morning rituals of visiting his arcades to balance, there is nail-biting, twitching, nervousness and high blood pressure and anything else within the body that can be raised goes up. This is only extra pressure on the mornings after large jackpots have been won.
As long as the boss can collect a player’s money and keep it all to himself it’s alright but let him have to pay out thousands of dollars and all hell breaks loose. This is when we are verbally abused, our jobs threatened and we are told “remember you have bills to pay”. Most of all, we are accused of being involved sexually or are in “cahoots” with the players. Mind you, some of us have never seen them before.
Who can tell how a gambler thinks?
Some of the gamblers are paranoid enough to think some cashiers bring them luck or are blights and can contribute to their winning or losing, so you might find that they come on your particular shift most of the time. After workers get fired from our jobs when there are large jackpots, the players, especially the ones who spend hours playing and putting hundreds of dollars into these machines, are then banned from his arcade. Sometimes a comment of “job well done” or an encouraging word can go such a long way in bringing up the standards of any human being, instead of accosting and constantly banging them on the head.
The arcades that see few customers should be seen as a message that word is spreading and people are taking their business to a more pleasurable environment where they can get their money without all the hassle.
To add fuel to the fire, my boss has a new chief of operations who has already been shaped and moulded to take on the persona of his mentor. Loud and obnoxious, you hear him before you see him, and he really needs to learn how to speak to people. But then again why should we expect better when they already think that we are to be treated as dogs.
Will someone from the relevant authorities please tell me if is it legal for one to employ staff, make them work sacrificially by giving of their time and don’t pay them because they are told they are in training? Doesn’t the broken chain on our statue Bussa represents emancipation from slavery? Yet, these whites are now bringing racial slurs back into this genre of society. This boss has employees who have worked for years and have never given them a raise but changed their job description. Why should these outsiders be allowed to inflict such injustices upon us poor, black people who are just trying to make an honest dollar? The management think that black people are all thieves, but there is a saying, “it takes a thief to know a thief to call a thief a thief and a thief from a thief make God laugh.”
Obviously he knows what he has done to reach the top so he expects everyone will do the same as him.
But be careful, for what goes around surely will come around as we all have to stand before God and give an account of our lives. You see, the chief-in-command professed that he was a Christian but may I remind him that the Bible also speaks about many who will say “Lord, have I not prophesied in your name?” The Lord declares to them “Depart from me for I know you not.”
