Store owner Karen wants to speak with my manager, instantly regrets her decision.

This happened about 13 years ago. I was a field service engineer for a national retail chain.

Basically, I was the IT guy who drove around in a company vehicle, servicing the

computer's networks and other stores. The way the company was organized, there were corporate

employees, and then there were retail employees. Being a corporate employee, I received corporate

stock as a small part of my salary. And my starting pay was 3 times the rate of any store manager.

Because I was always putting out fires, I often found myself in awkward positions of dealing

with store managers who honestly thought that they were the store owners. And that I was just

the hired help. This was truly ironic as I actually did own a very small piece of the corporation

where the average store manager did not. One day, I got orders to replace a server in a store

not too far from my house. I worked out of my house but kept parts in the truck and also the

back room of another store nearby. So I show up to the store wherever the server needed to be replaced.

It was my second stop of three scheduled for that day. I walk in the store wearing my very

obvious corporate uniform and name tag with the logo. The store owner, a retail manager,

instantly demands to know what the hell I am doing in her store. I get this all the time,

nothing new. I calmly explain that my boss wants me to upgrade one of the store's servers,

hardware replacement. I even show her where it is that I will be working. I explain that it will

take about an hour and that the POS registers might go offline for about five minutes. She isn't

happy but she reluctantly allows me into the room where the server is and I start working. When I'm

just about done, the POS registers go down as I am switching them to the new server, which is not

fully hooked up yet. It was at this point when I realized I had forgotten to bring in a couple of

cables that I need to finish hooking up the new server into the store network. So I run out of

...