The job of Fairfax County RECenter manager appears to attract people who aren’t very smart to start with and proceeds to lower their IQs since its not very challenging. It also attracts people who lack confidence since they want jobs that offer security over achievement. And it appeals to people who want power over others (but don’t want to earn it) since the majority of RECenter employees are young high school students. Given this type of brainless, insecure, power-monger, what do you expect?
Not much. But the current manager at George Washington RECenter, Marcus Barton, has lowered the bar to a new low. Not only does he embody the above qualities, but he exhibits all the symptoms of low self-esteem: dangerously irresponsible, unprofessional, dishonest, lazy, hypocritical, cowardly, surrounds himself with sycophants, and has the attention span of a fruit-fly. He is also homophobic, anti-semitic, misogynistic, and biased against Latinos. He also looks like he’s nine months pregnant (why are all recenter managers fat?), drinks excessively, and, true to the adolescent stage he is stuck in, brags about it to the teenagers he manages.
His management skills are so abysmal that more than a few of his employees--who lack skills and desperately need to hold onto their jobs--would rather quit than continue working for him. He routinely arrived at work an hour late in the morning, but when a new front desk employee was ten minutes late on his first day, the manager told him--with a straight face!--to be on time. He sloughed so much of his paperwork off on the first assistant manager that he eventually got fed up and stepped down, taking a big cut in pay. Why? Because the manager, who lives two counties away, simply didn’t want to drive to the RECenter to process paperwork by the deadlines, so he made the asst. manager do it without compensation even though it wasn’t his job.
The manager’s prejudices have intimidated staff into disguising who they really are. The second asst. manager was forced to hide his homosexuality because of the manager’s homophobia by referring to a non-gender “significant other.” Both asst. managers have been with the Park Authority for 4-5 years, racking up salary increases, but would rather quit than work with the current manager. He can’t distinguish between Mexican, Columbian, and South American immigrants, so lumps them all together, offending Latino employees and patrons alike. A lifeguard who wanted off on the Sabbath during Rosh Hashanah was afraid to tell him (who was clueless about the holy day) that he was Jewish and so had to work that day. And when the manager wondered aloud why he was unable to hire and retain female lifeguards at any of the RECenters where he’d worked, a volunteer gently suggested that it could be the overly male atmosphere, and he found an excuse to fire her the next week, then warned male employees not to talk to feminists like her, thereby perpetuating the tight-lipped Kremlin-like atmosphere of the place instead of mentoring them on tolerance by setting an example.
He engages in a stereotypically masculine management style that is weirdly reminiscent of the 1950s backslapping “good old boy” club by swapping stories with male employees young enough to be his sons about how “wasted” he got over the weekend; relentlessly criticizing female guards to male ones, their co-workers, while never doing the reverse; fostering a subtly hostile atmosphere that encourages impressionable young men to badmouth anyone who is different nearly daily; and shrinking from mentoring them about the hazards of discrimination (including racial and sexual harassment) in the workplace. This male-dominated mindset has insidiously spread, like a testicular cancer, throughout the entire Park Authority, even to higher-ranking employees, who are no more responsible or less chauvinistic, allowing the powers-that-be are able to maintain the status quo that lets them wield power. So if you’re anything other than a straight white male--Latino, African-American, Jewish, gay, feminist--don’t bother applying for a job at GW RECenter or be prepared to hide your real identity and face daily hostility.
Yet the GW RECenter manager is oblivious of how much resentment, disrespect, and hatred he has created among staff who cannot be who they are or say what they think if they want to hold onto their jobs. Instead of creating a workplace where employees are encouraged to work hard and take pride in it, his management style ensures that no one rises above and “shows up” his minimal efforts, which make employees “dumb down” to his level and do less than their best. And they take out their resentment by shaving their hours, sloughing off (watching videos and playing computer games), petty theft, and cutting other corners. And who ultimately pays for the trickle-down effect of his bad management? Patrons, of course. The very people who, day after day, pay to keep it running.
He has further alienated patrons and staff by drastically slashing staff hours in a misguided attempt to put the RECenter in the black (to get promoted) at the expense of patrons by letting bathrooms, saunas, and locker rooms remain filthy with encrusted fecal matter, blood, and food for weeks at a times. His stock response to patron’s complaints--either indifferent or aggressively loud--has intimidated them into silence.
He has turned George Washington RECenter into a worse place to work and use in every respect. In managing by personality instead of policy, he has succeeded in alienating everyone who comes in contact with the facility, many to the point of quitting their jobs and using other RECenters instead (summer camp and class enrollment is way down). He is a liability to the Park Authority and for the good of the county, should be extensively retrained at the least, if not be fired, before someone brings suit against the Park Authority.

Too many words...

I'm sorry about your experience. I'm guessing that you are a former employee and not a former patron. But either way you cannot expect the Park Authority to deal with this situation unless they are informed. The Park Authority and Fairfax County does not condone this kind of behaviour. Would you be willing to inform them? If so, I will post whom you should contact (and it can be done anonymously, although please understand that this makes it much harder to validate and hold a person accountable).

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That shit made my penis soft.

LOL. I actually knew him from back in the day when he worked at Lee District. That is the same old Marcus, he nearly got fired for bangin out a married employee. He is the male version of Scumbag Stacie!

Ditto

Pretend for a minute this is twitter, sum day shit up for us

There's an unknown REcenter called GW. The manager and sauna are shittie.

I refute this, maybe.