She sat down on a stack of pallets and told me the transfer had never actually been offered to me. Someone had called the Route 30 store on the ninth and declined the position using my name. I asked whether they had recorded the call, and she said they had a note in the system but no recording. Then she showed me the transfer list from March. My name was marked “pending” until the ninth, then changed to “declined” that afternoon. The other woman who supposedly turned it down had the exact same notation. Neither of us had ever been contacted.
I asked the district manager who had made the call, and she said it came from the store where we had worked. She couldn’t tell me the number because the call had been logged internally, but she could tell me the employee ID attached to the note. It belonged to my assistant manager. I hadn’t spoken to her since the store closed. Then the manager admitted something else: the Route 30 store had only had two openings after the transfer list was finalized, and both positions had gone to employees who weren’t originally on the list. I asked where my assistant manager was working now. She looked at me and said, “Route 30.”
I didn’t confront her. Instead, I requested copies of every transfer document and submitted a formal complaint. Within two weeks, the company discovered that my assistant manager had made several calls declining transfers on behalf of employees who were never asked. She had then applied for one of the open positions herself. The company offered me a position at Route 30 with back pay for the months I had been unemployed, but I declined because I no longer trusted them. My former coworker accepted the offer instead. The strangest part wasn’t that someone stole my transfer—it was that she had to pretend I said no before she could take the job I was supposed to have.
