Target: are you seriously forcing your employee to re-gift her GoFundME? What’s wrong with you??
In case you live in the real world and not in the de facto divide-and-conquer operation/echo chamber known as Twitter, you may have missed the absolute fiasco that occurred at a Target store in New England last week.
A guy name David Leavitt freaked out and actually called The Cops when a Target store manager wouldn’t honor a ridiculously low and obviously erroneously priced electric toothbrush. It was priced at one cent. Yes, a penny.
Lol:
The police told him they’d testify that they saw the price — oh, at the store manager’s trial? Where she’s charged for … apologizing? Taking responsibility for some poor minimum wage earner who accidentally mispriced merchandise during their overnight shift? Who is this guy?
Here’s who he is — or at least his twitter bio:
Yes, he’s a classic omega male: plays magic the gathering (#MTG), but assures us he is a casual player only, publicly humiliates himself with abandon, can’t afford a toothbrush, declares this to everyone and doesn’t feel embarrassed about admitting it, pulls authority figures (police) into drama unnecessarily, feels absoLUTEly certain that people in an authority position are out to get him (i.e. store managers). These things don’t make him a bad person. They indicate that he is a sad person. (And sad people will do bad things, do and say things that hurt others, even when they are desperately trying not to.)
That’s when the amazing memesmith known as Carpe Donktum rode up on his twitter steed, and gallantly started a GoFundMe, to send Tori on a vacation because, “anyone who has to deal with this twerp [omega male David Can’t-Leavitt-Alone] definitely deserves one.”
If you have a moment, check Carpe’s TL and replies to his original tweet to see how the Daily Beast and other assorted negative Nelly naysayers twisted this and pretended that he was actually going to keep the money for himself, and even lied about reaching out to him for comment, as they tried to portray his good will as something selfish and sordid. But whyyyyyyy, you might ask, did Carpe call David a twerp? A significant label for someone obviously on the far side of mental illness having a very public breakdown over an incorrectly priced electric toothbrush, no? Well, because Leavitt hates Trump. Like many omegas, Leavitt suffers from black and white thinking, where there is no middle ground, where people — politicians and other authority figures, especially — are all good or all bad. And nothing in between. This inability to see reality — to see the Glass of Life as it truly is, as half filled with water and half filled with air — is a personality weakness. A gaping personality wound. But Leavitt is in good company. Many people have this problem.
And in contrast, Carpe likes President Trump. And is (I believe, I didn’t check with him) sick of people like Leavitt and other members of the mainstream media lying about Trump. Interestingly, a few Trump supporters suffer from the same black and white thinking as our Omega male, David Leavitt, but in reverse, and see Trump as all good, as a savior. The majority of Trump supporters know that President Trump, because he is human, is not perfect. But they like POTUS’ policies and policy goals. Trump is fearless and strong (this is objectively true, whether a voter approves of his actions and words or not), which is better than perfect. Perfect doesn’t exist so perfect can’t check things off the to-do list. Perfect procrastinates and has the best of intentions but never gets anything accomplished. Fearless and strong is who you call when you want to get shit done.
People who were shamed early in life by authority figures for being imperfect often feel compelled to throw public tantrums over perceived external imperfections. Their life, their very existence, has become the crib, and they are still crying out for attention, to Dad (the police, in this example) and Mom (the store manager, Target Tori) to come pick them up and comfort them over something that to you and I would be no big deal, but to them, feels like an outrageous injustice.
It’s as sad as it sounds. (If you are a religious or spiritual person as I am, you might take a moment to pray for David and ask God to send him the professional helpers who can assist him in climbing out of the crib and standing on his own feet, so that in his joyful future, he opens his mouth to release words that help others instead of hurt them. “Please God, let David be miraculously healed of all pain and suffering by the power of your love” is a quick prayer we could all send up. Please invoke the deity of your choice, if you wish.)
Now back to the actual injustice: David harassing this most likely tired and overworked Target store manager in front of her peers and all the other customers, doxing her in an even larger public square — twitter — and generally succeeding at making her life miserable. People are infuriated. The twitterverse is incensed. The outpouring of support for her in reply to David Leavitt’s nasty tweets is astounding. But while yes, it’s true that twitter is very chatty, money really talks. And soon, subjects of the Twitterdom are getting out their wallets as quickly as they can send tweets. Carpe’s GoFundMe’s original $5,000 goal was met in a day. Then donations doubled. Then quintupled. (Yes, as of this blog publication date, Tori could afford a very excellent adventure indeed with the more than $30k crowdfunded by Carpe and Company.)
So, a few days pass and Tori is tracked down and made aware of her good fortune, her reward, as it were, for her patience and good customer service. Carpe announces the good news to his followers and then turns the entire account over to Tori, once he has confirmed with Target Corporate that she is THEE Tori.
And then, to my surprise, she tweets … simply this:
In case her tweet mysteriously disappears, I have saved the image and embedded it in my post. I will also transcribe the text below.
I would like to thank all of you for your generosity. It is inspiring to see so many people united for a good cause.
If I have learned anything from this experience, it is that people are good and that these acts of kindness cannot stop with me.
I am currently working with resources to find a cause that is worthy of your generosity and something that you would ALL be proud to donate to.
Your support has changed my life.
Now, my first thought was immediately, “Tori, no, YOU are the cause everyone was proud to donate to. No one made a donation to some other organization, or wanted to. What? Why are you saying this??”
But then I read it again, slowly. And the word “resources” stuck out like a red flag from the pit of human resources hell. Ah, yes. Ever worked for corporate America and learned their version of Newspeake? HR “specialists” who say, “On the go-forward, we’ll …” and who ooze, “Thank you for sharing that with me!” in an eerily gleeful response no matter the issue and bark, “What questions can I answer!” instead of asking sincerely, “are there any questions?” And assure everyone in a meeting that, “This is just a high level view. View from a thousand feet.” Yuck. Why don’t they just say, “going forward, we’ll….” or say, “I don’t want to go on and on about boring details, this is just an overview” instead of using language that is literally condescending? Let’s not answer those questions now, let’s instead analyze the text of the message that Target Tori tweeted because there are several indicators that someone who speaks HR Newspeake wrote it, and not a normal person who would have been properly socialized to be able to work directly with customers, face to face, as Tori clearly was.
Line 1: “I would like to thank all of you for your generosity.” Fair enough. Saying thank you is always good. “I would like to …” is the HR intro. Normal people tweet, “Thank you so much for …!!” But ok. Not terrible yet. “It is inspiring to see so many people united for a good cause.” This literally isn’t a good cause. Who wrote this? This is everyday people uniting to give Tori a gift of money for having to put up with dickhole behavior. This is not a normal gofundme. Store managers have to put up with horrible customers every day all day. That’s why stores have managers. Literally (and to schedule workers’ shifts). Tori’s car didn’t break down. She’s not crowdfunding a surgery for her kid. There’s no good cause. No one’s homeless or trying to pay for college. This is pure vengeance. This is sticking it to David Leavitt. This is the tribe saying, “David, if you hadn’t been such a dick, maybe someone would have crowdfunded YOU the money to buy an electric toothbrush. But no. So instead we’re going to raise enough money for the woman you treated like shit to buy a MILLION electric toothbrushes.” (Someone, please correct my math — it’s late.) LOL, HR — “good cause.”
Line 2: “If I have learned anything from this experience, it is that people are good and that these acts of kindness cannot stop with me.” There was nothing kind about any single one of the acts of donating money. Generosity? Yes. Kindness? No. TARGET. Do you know what kindness is? LOOK AT YOUR EMPLOYEE, Tori. Look at her face in the photograph Leavitt took, as she humbly and gently tolerates a mentally ill customer’s attempts to humiliate her, in front of her peers and other customers, in your store, after a long day spent constantly on her feet. THAT is the face of kindness. People aren’t good! LOL! (As you well know: remember when you were motivated by greed to lay off half the employees at Target HQ in Minneapolis back in 2017?) Target HR, you lucked out when you hired Tori. TORI is good. Tori is kind. “People” as an aggregate are often neither. And why can’t the acts of kindness stop with her? What weirdo wrote this? It’s rude — impolite — to reject a gift. Are you seriously forcing your employee to re-gift her GoFundME? What’s wrong with you??
Target: are you seriously forcing your employee to re-gift her GoFundME? What’s wrong with you??
Line 3: “I am currently working with resources to find a cause that is worthy of your generosity and something that you would ALL be proud to donate to.”
First of all, Tori, YOU are the cause that was worthy of everyone’s generosity and not one single person who donated to you wanted their money to be “paid forward.” They wanted YOU to spend it. On YOU. Literally, Carpe specified that he wanted you to use it to go on a vacation away from Target. Is Target unwilling to give you PTO or to let you use your PTO? If that’s the case, then you need to talk to an employment lawyer. PLEASE. If their HR team is coercing you to give YOUR money away, again, please talk to a lawyer. Target doesn’t care about you. They care about THEM and their public relations. A WHOLE SHIT TON of Trump supporters cobbled together $30 grand for their beleaguered employee. They don’t want any PR “complications” (read: blowback) from that fact.
But back to the words specifically chosen for line 3: someone, some Head of Human Resources, removed the word “human” before resources because it made it seem like HR was influencing Tori’s decision as far as what Tori will (read: is ALLOWED TO) do with her money. (HER money. Not YOUR money, Target.) But the word pattern takes on a whole new level of sinister when the word “human” is removed. Who or what IS “resources”??? Who or what, indeed, is Tori being forced to “work with” in order to “find a cause”? Gross. My hope is that you the reader can feel the primal pull in your gut when you read the last line, as you imagine the fakiest fake faker of an HR person you’ve ever met pulling Tori off the floor, into a back office, and saying, “We just want to explore the space we’re in as far as gofundme’s in general on the go-forward. So-and-so wanted me to circle back and really engage your thoughts while we thoughtfully path-consider. My hope would be that we can really expand on the team vision while we goal-set and dream-weave and partner in a future that’s 100% focus-based and unity-oriented. Does that make sense? What questions can I answer?”
Yeah. No. If you were one of the many people who donated to Tori’s GoFundMe, I hope you will consider sharing this post and then reaching out to her with a kind tweet (reply to @realTargetTori) to let her know that SHE is the good cause, that SHE is worthy of receiving ALL the money and spending it on whatever SHE wants.
Here was my response to her this morning:
I’m no financial advisor, but that’s what I would wish for anyone who came into an unexpected small fortune. Please, Internet friends and twitter family, let’s not let Target ruin this blessing for Tori.
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