Supervisor Struggles

I got to flex my "shift supervisor" muscles yesterday (and the past saturday now that I think about it...) for the first time and I thought a girl's head was going to explode on me.

I've been working with this girl for the past semester (we worked every Saturday together), so we've gotten to know eachother fairly well (as well as coworkers can). Despite my being a supervisor since pretty much when I started, I've never really told anyone what to do. Everyone really has a pretty good grasp on what needs to be done.

Well, the past few weeks, everytime I work, I always end up filling the beverage cooler (3 times a week) and yesterday, I really didn't feel like standing in front of the coolers for an hour. I mentioned something about them, and the girl I worked with every Saturday mentioned she had never done them before. I smiled and told her, "No time like the present! They're really not bad today compared to what we've had recently." She kinda laughed and blew me off so I left the list of pops needed by her. 5 minutes later, it came up again, and I told her she was going to do it tonight; honestly, it was the best night for her to do it--I already made the list and all she had to do was grab it from the back. She pulled a high school pout and grumbled about how she didn't know what my abbreviations were (mm.....what does MD stand for? Mountain Dew? Who knew?! Especially since I wrote it next to Diet MDew!!).

She finally did it, but not before giving me the silent treatment and pouting for the next hour. She refused to put them away though---geez girl. Is it really that big of a deal? ~sigh~ We'll keep working on it.

I gave a list of 4 things we needed to do, and asked the 3 other girls what they wanted to do. The pop girl jumped in and started delegating what each should do. Authority issues? I'm not sure. Not sure how to deal with that either...

The other girl on Saturday--I think she just doesn't know the rules. Don't eat in front of customers (taking an order with a mouth full of danish stick is not consumer friendly), no free drinks (except brewed coffee), no you can't play on the computer, no you can't bring your computer out to go on the internet, yes you need to wear your work shirt even if you're running late, yes you should brush your teeth... I really did feel bad about "getting on her case" over everything; I hate being the person who has to redirect you if you're wrong, especially several times in a row. But honestly, it's all right there in the employee policy. (And it's really not that hard to use a vacuum. She actually came up to me and asked me what to do if the vacuum won't reach the other side of the room--it came unplugged while she was vacuuming. Mmm....plug it into another outlet? There are 6 in that room....) Sometimes it's hard to give the benefit of the doubt.

All this to say, I feel like a real supervisor now cause I'm having to be the jerk on occasion.