Candy

 One of my rules, as a supervisor, has been to not take the word of an employee. if they are complaining about another employee.  After all, no one can get along with everyone, because there will always be some quirk that will not sit well with everyone.  So, when I started getting complaints about a girl who worked in Candy, I felt I needed to see what was going on to make a judgement if something needed to be done.
 Paige, Vicki, Michele and Lynn were my best workers on the Stationery/Candy side of the floor.  All four had told me that there was a girl up in Candy that refused to ring up anything except Candy on her register.  The registers were programmed to ring up anything in the store at any register.  The four girls were coming to me on a regular basis about this Candy associate.  The story that was the worst was two elderly ladies walking up to the Candy Department to have their cards rung up, and the associate telling them she couldn't do it, and the ladies had to walk a pretty good distance to buy their cards.
 So, I left my office and went out on the floor to watch this girl in Candy.  I watched as an elderly woman with a cane walk up to Candy to buy a card.  I saw the associate refuse to ring it up, and I watched the old woman walk slowly down the aisle to find another register.  This made me mad.  I went to that associate and asked her why she had done what I had seen.  The girl denied doing it.  I told her that other people had seen her do the same thing, and she told me that they just didn't like her because she was black, and the other girls on the floor were white.  This made me more incensed, as I didn't care what color you were, as long as you did the work assigned to you to do.  She continued to deny to my face that she was doing anything wrong.  I know I shouldn't have done this, but I hit her shoulder and knocked her shoulder padding awry.  I was just trying to get her attention, but I went way out of control.  I had never pushed anyone before (or since).  So, I told her that I was going to Personnel and have her fired.
 I went to Personnel and told the head of that department what had happened.  He told me that she would be fired, and I left.  She then went into Personnel and told him that I had assaulted her.  He didn't believe her, and she was fired.  However, word got out how the situation had escalated, and to keep from having a lawsuit, I was asked to leave being a Buyer.  The excuse was the children's dinnerware buy from the Chicago Market that had not sold.  Everything was hushed up.
 The manager didn't want to lose me, so I was made the Credit Manager for the store.  They called it a promotion.  I really didn't see it that way, but at least I still had a job.  It turned out to be a lot of fun, which I will write about later.  However, they brought in a woman to take my place as a Buyer.  My former co-workers didn't like her and would constantly complain to me about her.  I felt it wasn't fair for her to try and fill my shoes as a Buyer, but I told them to give her a chance.  The problem was, too, that the woman had no clue how to buy for those departments, so I was basically doing her job and my new one for the first three months of her stay as the Home Store Buyer.  It got to the point, where I just had to tell her that she needed to do it on her own, as I had another job to do.  She stayed for about a year, until one day she was driving to the downtown store along Gervais Street.  She had stopped at a light at the corner of Gervais and Sumter, when a man jumped from a tall building and landed on her car.  She turned in her resignation that day.