(Late) Quixote Wednesday Update! Free Front Row Seats To The Gamestop Freak Show THIS MONDAY!

Thank god this happened today because I wasn’t sure whether I should go after Gamestop Inc. this week or go off on another crusade. I talked about just such an eventuality weeks ago and the time has finally come. Mark your calendars, everyone, because I rarely call in favors and I’m calling one in today to sincerely ask for your help and support. Take a seat and listen up.

After four straight months with absolutely no benefits or financial help from the State Of New York after being terminated for little more than a trifle, the Department Of Labor has FINALLY gotten off their ass and schedule a hearing for my unemployment benefits. After going through hell and back, getting fired for the wrong reasons by a woman (Lisa) who would rather maintain incompetent women and spineless yes-men rather than top salespeople who know how to drive business, we have reached a crucial plot point in the Buffalo Gamestop saga. If you care at all about the Great Depression we are in the middle of, the manner in which Big Business has been choking out the Little Guy, or the fact that the better part of Corporate America has been trimming jobs from hardworking people who have earned their positions just for the sake of saving a few pennies off the bottom line, then know this: This Monday is your time to speak up.

The Department Of Labor was proactive enough (give me a break) to give me SEVEN days notice that my unemployment hearing will occur THIS UPCOMING MONDAY on MARCH 9^th, 2009 at 2 PM. Here is the address downtown for your edification:

290 Main St., Room 207

Buffalo, NY

14202

I find it ironic that a departmental organization that was formed to inspire people to find gainful employment would have the complete lack of foresight to give anyone LESS than a week in terms of notice regarding their public hearing. Yet another example of how dysfunctional our system is when it comes to compensating those of us who have actually worked for a living with benefits that we’ve contributed to our entire lives.

 

I’ll be there.

Even with only five days notice, count me in, front and center. If my instincts are correct, we can expect a three ring circus with a great goddamn deal of soulless clowns, godless misanthropes and black-hearted, money hungry whores. In the spirit of traditional and textbook investigative journalism, you had better believe that I’ll be recording the scheduled hearing for inclusion on my radio show site, which remains online for no less than one year.

If you’ve read these Quixote Wednesday Updates with any degree of frequency, you know exactly just how far in the wrong Gamestop was in terminating my employment. I’m sure they’ve got some very high priced lawyers and a lot of money (possibly the money I didn’t get after six years of faithful service and a full roster of sales awards) to throw around in their favor.

Again, I NEED your help.

I was fired a week after my honeymoon for no reason other than the amount of money in my bi-weekly paycheck and the sheer fact that my new boss preferred the company of attractive women, bottom line. Lisa (the woman I was unfortunate enough to have as a boss for a year and a half) has a previous history of a) favoring females in the workplace, b) losing her own job with former employers for sleeping with the female managers she was in charge of and c) giving higher annual review raises to girls simply because they were girls. I realize that we live in a world where the white male is the new devil, but Lisa is in the wrong. So far in the wrong that an example needs to be made so that Gamestop and this individual should be taught a lesson.

Since the merger a few years ago, Gamestop has been ‘phasing out’ (I.e. ‘letting go’, I.e. ‘terminating for whatever reason they can come up with’, I.e. ‘laying off to trim manager salaries so that they can replace their workforce with their own Gamestop crop and/or young kids who are foolish enough to accept chickenfeed in place of an honest year’s pay simply because they have the supposed privilege of working around video games’. I’ve taken great care and diligence to expose the corruption behind all three Buffalo markets, the slow phasing out of Electronics Boutique employees for their underpaid counterparts on the Gamestop end of the pond, Lisa’s proven technique of rewarding girls that she likes instead of male managers in longstanding positions who made money for the company, and my previous Regional (Kiyeohl)’s direct relation to one of the founding stockholders of Electronics Boutique and his subsequent invulnerability despite his known incompetence based on the District Managers he was handed on a silver platter.

Every base has been covered and now we arrive at a crossroads. If you don’t have to work this Monday, I IMPLORE you to join me, my wife, AND the Department Of Labor (oxymoron) to set an example. I need your help more than ever. This isn’t just about me and I could care less about the money at this point. A large conglomerate beast has done everything they can to destroy my longstanding track record (as well as a legion of others across the country and beyond) as an effective manager who fixed problem stores and it was all in the name of saving a few pennies a year because they’re under the false impression that lower paid children can run satellite stores as well as effective individuals with a long history in retail.

I’m asking (begging) you one final time. Please join me on Monday. The money doesn’t matter anymore (although it would be nice in large part because our WEDDING funds were depleted thanks to my wrongful termination based on my gender). My wife and I will persevere and survive despite the fact that Lisa came in a week after our honeymoon and fired me with no witnesses and zero paperwork signed after the help of my former assistant manager (Lewis), a man whom she wanted to fire from the day she met him who is a proven drug dealer, abuser and an established racist. Lewis got promoted into a new store by Lisa as a thank you for saving the company money. Lisa has systematically kept poor managers with a flair for sabotaging their peers or favoring the same sex they were born into.

Last week, I posted a very sincere essay about my thoughts on the gay and lesbian culture. Despite my work in comedy through my pod cast radio show, my essays and my web sites, I have no issues with gays or lesbians. Scroll back if you’re not sure and I’m positive after reading ‘Alternative Thinking’ that you’ll have a full understanding of my thoughts and convictions about the gay and lesbian subculture. I am not a bigot. I never have been. This is not an attack against gays and lesbians and I support their choices and anyone who is lucky enough to find and maintain a happy and fulfilling relationship regardless of their partner’s gender.

My issue with Gamestop and Lisa is this: Lisa is an individual who doesn’t deserve the job she was hired into and her employment (as well as Gamestop Inc.’s behavior since their supposed merger) have gone on long enough. Passing up males who have put their time in and shown everyone (especially their peers) that they’re worthy of promotion and helping out personal friends or females simply for the fact that they’re women is wrong. From a regional and company standpoint, allowing this kind of behavior and pretending that it isn’t happening or continuing to ignoring her lackadaisical leadership skills as a District Manager who rarely (if ever) visits stores is asinine.

I’m toeing the line here. I’m not fighting this battle for selfish or personal reasons. Since I started this crusade, Lisa has stopped terminating male members of her District as some misguided over corrective, overprotective gesture to save her own hide and prove that she isn’t prejudiced against men. It’s too late. After two years of driving male members of management out of the company because they were ignored for promotions and terminating men by any means necessary, the damage is done in Buffalo. Her behavior, her actions and her negligence as a supervisor should be addressed, and apparently, Gamestop is so far gone morale-wise that they can’t fix their own problems in-house. The Department Of Labor is hanging by a thread, because I just happen to be the one loose end that they’ve ignored since the beginning of October despite the fact that I’ve worked and payed into the system that sustains them since the age of 14. This is one of the two times in my life that I’ve depended upon our American system to take care of me after I supported them (with a new wife and family, no less) and our government has failed me.

If you have the day off, please feel free to show up this Monday at 2 p.m. and help to prove a point. A system that’s in the habit of awarding people with no jobs has ignored an individual who’s worked for almost twenty years at any job that pays who got fired by a woman who has been allowed to impose her prejudiced views against anyone with a male chromosome in a District run by a nepotistic fill-in who heads a small part of a company that would rather find a petty and insignificant handbook sub-clause to terminate good people than take care of the individual store managers who made their brand name so successful in the first place. An example needs to be made.

Who’s with me?

Please feel free to leave your comments below this post. I hope that my pessimistic nature will be proven wrong this Monday and that if you can make the time to speak out or prove a point simply with your presence as a member of this nation’s workforce, you will. If (thanks to the unreasonably short notice), you are unable to attend, please take the time to call the number provided (851-2711) to speak your mind and say your peace in defense of such an ongoing practice of corporate corruption.

Thank you in advance,

Tom Waters