I’ve been working as an e bike grocery delivery person for 2 weeks now. The job is pretty chill, we ride groceries to peoples houses on e bike and that’s that. I work at 2 different locations. The First Location i worked at had two types of bikes, I’ll just call the white and black bikes. The Black bikes were a bit too tall for me, I’m about 5’0 and I couldn’t touch the floor while sitting on this bike, it even toppled over while I was on it, my manager marked it as unsafe for me to ride and suggested i try the white bikes. These ones fit me much better, I could touch the floor and was able to properly control the bike. Now don’t get me wrong, I know how to ride a bike very well, it’s just the black bikes had something stopping the seat from being adjusted. And I’m quite short.
At the second location I work at, they only had the black bikes available. This was an issue for me because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to ride those bikes, but I had a whole week of shifts at this store! I let the supervisor of this store know instantly and he told me to try them out in front of him and so I did, I almost fell over he had to catch the bike from me. I literally could not put my foot on the ground to stop the bike from swaying to the side and crashing me to the ground. He said that it’s okay, I can just pick the orders when they come and hand them off to the riders, and that they will have to organise one of the bikes from the other store to be brought here for me to use. He also mentioned that there are 3 different sizes of the bikes and i agreed that i felt that when testing them all at the other store.
So I continued the week at that store just picking orders and doing some basic store errands like cleaning the shelves and moving stock to the front and so on. I get an email from the rostering manager saying she’s heard I have issues with the bikes at this store and asks me to explain the situation, which I do. I explain that this store only has black bikes which are too tall for me and the other store I was working at had plenty of the white bikes and they were fine for me to ride and that I had no trouble completing orders at the other stores. She then told me that all the bikes are the same size and asked me if I could use the kick stand for the black bikes instead if my foot can’t reach the floor???? I told her that’s literally not possible the bikes are too tall for me to even get on comfortably let alone kick out the stand? Also the bikes are literally not the same sizes otherwise I wouldn’t have this problem? She didn’t really respond to my email after that & then my last 2 shifts were at the store where I was able to ride bikes.
I noticed I wasn’t on the next weeks roster so I emailed her asking if there was an issue or why that was. She literally responded with “you haven't been allocated shifts as we have allocated shifts only to the riders who can actually ride our bikes as that's the expectation of the role. If there's any shift openings for you to work as a picker, I'll let you know”. That made my blood boil because she wasn’t even listening to what I had said in the email, I never said I couldn’t ride the bikes altogether, just that there was a specific type of bike that I could ride. I explained to her that it was only that one store I couldn’t ride at because it only had big bikes and I had no trouble completing orders at the first store. I was smashing orders out at the first one! She then responded “I had feedback provided that you weren't able to ride the bikes while you were at any of our stores, and again, the bikes are all of the same size across our business. Again, I'll keep you posted if any shifts open up where we can have you working“ like what do you even mean??? Again the bikes are LITERALLY DIFFERENT SIZES. I know this because I’m the one who fucking rides them! At this point I’m really pissed so I send her a thorough email explaining everything I’ve already told her, the specifics of why I can’t ride one type of model of bikes they have and the ones I can ride! For fucks sake I can ride more bikes than I can’t! There are 2 that I can ride and 1 that I can’t how does this make sense. She literally just responded. “Ok No worries I’ll let you know if we have shifts for you but at this stage, we’re full”. So now I’ve got no job, left completely high and dry. It was my first job in a while since being laid off from my last job and I was really good at it, my supervisor even told me I was a quick and efficient worker & I was finally getting the ball rolling with money and bills and shit and for them to just pull that shit??? I have no future shifts? I hate this fucking company.