The Little Fairy Syndrome

 Click here for the Wikipedia entry for Tinkerbell

So here's the scenario:

As anyone who has ever bought lettuce and tried to keep it in the fridge for a week knows, fresh produce slowly goes bad over time. Now multiply that situation by a factor of about 496.28 and you see what we who work in fresh produce face everyday. Product that looks fine in the morning may degenerate enough by night time that it is no longer suitable to be merchandised and sold. So it has to be removed from the sales floor and disposed of as a "damage". Damages are a fact of life. Everybody faces it every shift. It is unavoidable.

As a child, most of us have heard of and believed in fairies. There are tons of stories about Fairy Princes and Sugar-plum Fairies and Fairy Tales (or is it Tails?). As we get older, we begin to lose faith in fairies (not to be construed as a confession that there ARE no fairies). I say "we", I should say "most". There are apparently many people who still believe in fairies. I bet you work with some of them too. How can you identify them? Easy. Especially at Sam's Club:

THEY LEAVE STUFF UNDONE AS IF SOME LITTLE FAIRY WILL DROP DOWN FROM THE SKY AND DO IT FOR THEM.

In produce, it's leaving damages piled up all over the place instead of putting them in the barrel that's back there for them (or in the case of the worst offender, ON TOP OF THE BARREL), so that, before a person can pull their own damages, they have to dump those. It's filling up the cardboard compactor and not pushing the button to start the machine, causing someone (ok, me) to have to wait for the compactor to run before putting their own in there. In all the restaurants I ran over the years, there also were numerous ways to identify these people. I, being a grown-up and all, would tell my employees that "There's not some little fairy that drops down and does this. If you don't do it, someone else will have to. " I crushed many dreams back then.

As you can tell, this has LONG been a pet peeve of mine.

How do you identify the Fairy-lovers in your work-place?