Work-Related: when I joined this shop, I took in everyone's personalities. I wanted to know operated how, and that has served me well since I joined management. One of those personalities was Z. Z's been with the company for a while and knows a lot. Add to that the fact that he had something to hold over the head of our last manager, and he got away with murder. He did the work, but he wasn't doing it the way he should, and treated it all like a lark. Yes, he has plans to finish his school situation and leave, but still...as we hired Tobi, she was a great addition, but got annoyed with Z's shenanigans, as it made it hard to learn the right way to do things. When we hired Sergio, Z's friend, it made things even worse, as Sergio got distracted too easily. Something had to break.
Friday, we took some of the downtime to do some painting and maintenance around the shop. Sergio kept disappearing for long periods of time. We discovered, Saturday morning, that those times were spent on the phone to Z and Dave (former manager, now at another store), pulling some high-school bullshit talking behind our backs. When this got around and back, we found that most of it was untrue, but it really pissed us all off.
We traded Z for Mike (who had just turned in his two weeks notice at Dave's store) and found a team member in the making. He liked it better, we liked him better, so the decision was made to trade permanently and rescind the notice. That got one disruptive element out of my store, and brought in a superior replacement. Sergio is leaving for the other store, too, he just doesn't know it yet. The team is happier and tighter. Since our store is the only one in our district in the top half of the region, we are the golden boys as far as our district manager goes.
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Play-Related: this new game group that I joined/helped form has been going fairly well, except for Chris. Chris is one of these gamers who is more concerned with getting the rules and numbers right, and seemingly less concerned with the fun and creativity of it. now, if that's how your group runs, then perfect, but this group is quite the opposite. We've run several sessions of Low Life, several of Kult, and have started a Pathfinder game. in each of the three, he's been slow to make characters, always claiming he "had no time to read the books" (note that there's a Dropbox set up between us all with PDFs of a TON of books, so having them and reading them is easy, and we all did it...even me, working 55-hour weeks). When he gets a character together, he tosses out a vague and nebulous concept and basically makes the GM make the character for him. Even then, he gives no background, takes no initiative, disrupts the game trying to kill anything that moves, and ignores the storylines to either run off in random directions or sit on his ass. He's annoying, passive aggressive, and arrogant. Yeah, this was a powder keg waiting to blow.
The last straw came in the Kult game I ran last Wednesday. The other three characters have explored their story hooks and come together, found their common ground, and are setting out to try and make sense of what is happening to them. Chris has ignored the hooks I've tossed at him, in favor of going home to sleep or to sit in his shop and do paperwork. The other three have come to him and talked about their experiences, they've found new links, and are enticing him to join them. he continues to sit on his ass, to the point where two of my players said "OK, seriously, out of character, come with us and stop fucking off."
We knew we were done. We agreed he was not our type of player, and I sent out an e-mail to the group saying so, wishing him luck in a different group. He started out by calling another player and wanting to sit down and bitch about it, which the other wouldn't do, and when two other players mailed the group in support, his response was to pick apart one of those e-mails and try to justify his actions, which merely came across as pathetic and defensive. No maturity, no class...it just confirmed for us that we're done with him.
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So, yeah, fun times.