workin' with the drama llama
Way back when, I mentioned the manager who'd gone insane. She's back, is still insane, and is feeling juuuust a little vindictive. (I can tell this because she's taken my hours from fifteen and twenty a week to four, then tried to tell me that my hours had to go instead of any other part-time person's because I was management.) She's currently trying to tell all of us that the dummy cameras the company tacked to our ceiling are really live-feeding to the home office.
We're gonna ignore how I know they're dummy cameras . . . Okay, we're not. They're dome cameras with a red blinking light. Google that and you'll find fakies. They're also a different size and shade than the single real camera (which live-feeds, with no recording, pausing, or replay capabilities, to a highly visible tv). Also, in relation to how it would cost thousands of dollars for one store alone to hook up a transmitting network (a wireless one wouldn't work with our terrain) to an office with limited hours (so we'd have no chance of catching any shoplifters that came in after office hours) when our company is so damned cheap to begin with that it won't even get us a new scanner for our register, attach the credit card machines to the registers to cut down on human errors, or hook up any kind of internet access for real-time, non-faxed intercompany communications--and especially in relation to how a handful of $20 battery-operated plug&play fake cameras costs a hell of a lot less than a handful of installation-required $80-$300 cameras--and my suspension of disbelief has given up completely.
She tried to tell me the live feed story, I asked who told her that one, and she refused to answer.
I started to wonder if she really thinks we're that stupid.
I bounced her stats off a psychologist/social worker colleague and got BPD back: Lying, paranoia & attempted fostering of paranoia, addictions, more lying, (attempted) setting people against each other, starting rumors, smiling while backstabbing, believing a person to be all good or all bad (and idealizing/demonizing them accordingly), so forth. BPD is rough to work with. You can't rationalize with the person (as they tend to believe the lies they're telling) and there's no real slowing them down (note: not "fixing them") without liberal application of psychologists and drugs. The only thing we can really do is much documentation and damage control.