High Drama in the Workplace

When I came to work on Monday, there was a three page letter to the employees from BossLady sitting on my desk. It turns out that she hired a woman to take on her human resources and management responsibilities for the entire store. She named her the General Manager, but she has really been spread too thin for that title to be of consequence. BossLady hired her three days before she left on a trip to England and expected her to be able to "run the ship" in her absence. By the time I met her on Monday morning, she was already showing signs of being ridden hard and put away wet. She had worked in those three days more than most cashiers to in a week, and has been forced to make the difficult decisions with the knowledge that BossLady has complete faith in her abilities. Fortunately, this doesn't really affect me. I am the quiet one in the back...the resident Silent Bob who listens to their laments and helps them when I can. I am Accounts Payable, IT and apparently now the Spanish translator despite my extreme shortcomings in the subject. I only took three years in school, and did a piss poor job in my classes despite being a year ahead of the other students. My phrase of the day yesterday was, "Lo siento para mi espanol, senor." This was usually met with laughter and a broken response that I think translated to, "My English is poor, also."
The height of yesterday's drama occurred an hour before closing. GMLady noticed that the girls up front were coming to the back to drink water from the fridge and ended up chatting with the office staff for twenty minutes at a time. She told them all that they need to either make their trips quick, keep the water up front or drink on their breaks if they are going to be away for that long. This sounded reasonable to me, but I have the luxury of sitting in the air conditioned offices and avoiding the 100 degrees outside. She offered to bring ice packs for everyone to keep their water in the front...but, the cashiers were sent into hissyfits that resulted in four people giving notice. GMLady began to confide more in me about her frustrations, and spent the better part of that hour hunched behind my desk talking to her girlfriend on her cell phone. It was quite a day, and I ended up staying an hour and a half after my shift to close out the drawers.
BossLady left me to train GMLady on the accounting operations. She didn't give me this little tidbit before she left, and it seems absolutely insane to me that one who has been there exactly a month now is training another new person...and a manager at that...how to do anything at all. The woman who trained me to do the reconciliations has told us both that BossLady has the utmost trust and confidence in us, and that this is extremely rare for her. We spoke of this oddness a bit yesterday over a drawer full of change. Why would this woman who is notorious for her mistrust promote me in just one day to handle all of the AP stuff for her three companies, despite my lack of background and hire GMLady into a position with extreme responsibility? The only thing we could come up with was that she is closet lesbian. She treats the other straight girls with mistrust and disregard...the men are equally treated as dumb animals...and the two lesbians are given positions of this caliber after just a brief meeting in a dusty little office. It's unbelievable.
I didn't really notice much before I left that Prego1, who originally trained me for her job, was teaching her mother how to do the things that are my job, rather than letting me do them myself, as I requested. Prego1's mom has been hoarding things and being generally protective of her daughter's position and responsibilities that had bled into AP before I was hired. It hadn't occurred to me before, but, I get the feeling that she wanted the job I got. It makes sense. It would be quite a promotion for her and it would have been a very sensible one. It probably irked her even more that I have been very nonchalant about it. I was appreciative, and I thanked BossLady for the compliment...but, honestly, I don't give a damn about who does what and all that crap. I don't want anyone else's job. I'm not even entirely sure I want my own. These people are acting like dogs guarding bones rather than mature adults who can handle their own responsibilities. I don't have any room in my life for this kind of drama. I don't gossip, I don't complain to them, and I all around just don't care. I see where the company has gone wrong. I understand what would make it a better place for these people to work. I know when someone is trying to step on my toes, but it is not my job to be the manager. I am accounts payable, and I don't want to take on any more than I already have. This job was supposed to be something simple and tedious...and now it's steeped in the drama of immature and disgruntled employees. I don't get paid enough for this.