"WHEN WILL YOU CRACK?"

"You've gotta punch the clock
Too scared to punch your boss"
-The Dead Kennedys

Why am I Fighting for my job back if I hated it so much?

Because it was my job and they took it from me. Everything they have is because of us, the workers. They take and take and take and then they take some more.

I may have hated the job because of how I was treated, but I didn't hate the work itself. I have never been afraid to work, in fact I have a really high work ethic. I know the value and importance of work and take great pride in everything I do, whether it's dishwashing, barista, prep cook, line cook, construction, washing cars, gardening or selling comic books. And let's face it, working in a comic store was the easiest job I ever had, in terms of the amount of actual manual labor that was involved (which wasn't much) but probably the hardest I ever had in terms of the stress of having to deal with a boss with very serious anger problems. You never knew what was going to set him off. Dropping a pen? Forgetting to do something he asked you to do while you were in the middle of doing five other things, being the one unlucky enough to be near him when he discovered a book was mis-shelved? Accidentally mentioning "Midtown Comics" in his presence? Letting the phone ring one too many times?

Sometimes some little mistake that was totally fixable would set him off and he'd go ballastic trying to find someone to blame when it would be so much easier to just chill the fuck out and fix the problem. He would turn something small into the biggest problem in the world, wasting untold hours of peoplepower. Like that time some guy purchased a bunch of comics during our 50 cent backissue sale and was unable to take them home that day so they were supposed to be put on hold for him but somebody either forgot to put a note on them, or the note fell off so they were accidentally reshelved by someone else who was just simply doing their job. Jeff freaked the fuck out. I was the one unlucky enough to be trapped in the "register pod" with him. You know, those fancy new register stations that Forbidden Planet bought in the middle of a freakin' recession. Jeff went all red, veins popping out the side of his head, teeth gritting, he just starts yelling and pounding on the counter "Fuck Fuck Fuck!!!" The customer is trying to tell him it's ok, he could try to remember which comics he bought, but Jeff was in a rage. He was far more concerned with who was to blame. Luckily the person who reshelved them remembered most of the books. But Jeff was still freaking out. He decides to offer the customer a free Forbidden Planet tote bag so he asks me to hand him one, in a panic I look around the pod and I don't see one. I take a deep breath and inform him we don't have any tote bags in this pod. He shot me such a look. I thought he was going to punch me right then and there, and all I could think was dammit not here- the middle register is the only blindspot from the view of the store cameras. If he's gonna hit me I want that shit on tape. I would sue so fast his head would spin. I would press charges. By the time I got done with them I would own that store. I'd be runnin' shit (nonauthoritarianly of course, we'd turn that place into a worker-owned worker-run collective. No bosses. No parasites. Just us). But no, he didn't hit me, instead he crouched down in the register pod and started hitting himself in the head. The customer looked horrified. I felt relieved he was hitting himself and not me, but it was still kind of scary.

I have tons of similar stories. But the point is, the problem is not with the job itself, the problem is with how the place is run. If they are doing bad financially, which I do not believe (where's the transparency? Show us the numbers!), but if they are doing bad financially it's their own damn fault. They always want to put the blame on the workers, we're not working hard enough, we're talking too much, we're not catching shoplifters, but the management at the Planet (especially Jeff and Rich) are constantly acting in an unprofessional manner, making bad business decisions, engaging in unfair labor practices, often breaking federal labor laws. And for too long we as workers have just let those petty-tyrants get away with whatever they want, when we the workers suffer the consequences. But we have the power to stop them. We have the power to organize against them, whether its an independent business like Forbidden Planet, or a multinational corporation like Starbucks or Whole Foods or Borders or Target or Wall Mart or any other union-busting scum! The only power they have is the power we give them, and we can take it back!

Everything they have is what they take from us.