MVWJ was at a day care in the basement of a residence the summer after my freshman year of college. My boss, K, was infrequently down there with us (there were three of us looking after 13 children under the age of three), but had specific ideas about the way things ought to be done. For instance, we were forced to take our lunches at the exact times dictated, regardless of whether we were in the middle of something. At lunch time, food had to be prepared, kids needed to be fed and cleaned, diapers changed, beds made and everyone laid down for naps while no one was left unattended. Noon was when the first girl was supposed to take her lunch break and I was supposed to leave at 12:30pm, leaving the third girl essentially on her own during the busiest time of day. K viewed overtime as stealing her money and I was chastised for leaving half an hour late, though I was sorely needed.
K had a highly impractical schedule for each day. If she found us off-schedule, she lectured us. Of course, if she was with the kids, she deviated more than anyone, putting fussy kids down for naps because she didn’t want to listen to them cry. Two of the kids in our care were K’s children, who were by far the worst behaved. K became upset if she came downstairs and found her unruly son in time out, even though he often hit other children and called teachers names. He had been kicked out of several preschools and she left him with us when she got tired of dealing with him. At one point she told us we weren’t allowed to put him down for naps because he no longer needed them, leaving him up to pester us on our time off and the only chance we had to accomplish the huge cleaning tasks she left for us, which included bleaching toys and polishing the stairs of her home.
Worst of all, she was stingy. Halfway through the summer, she took to locking up the supply closet, where the cleaning materials and trash bags were stored, to prevent waste. She claimed to have lost the key, but she “found” it pretty quickly when she needed something. She bought the cheapest materials for the day care, but had nice things in her home upstairs. She eliminated morning snack time, saying the kids didn’t need to be fed between breakfast at 7:30am and lunch at noon, because she didn’t want to pay for food. We took to sneaking them snacks, because if we didn’t, they would completely break down around 10am. K also shorted our checks. She attributed it to the computer system she used “rounding” on our times, but often it was too big an error for that explanation. At any attempt to discuss it, she became belligerent and self-righteous. If pressed, she would print off the hours record and show it to you, then take it away with her, leaving you no chance to examine it closely.
I loved the children and the girls I worked with, but it was a toxic work environment. In my three months, five families left the center and four employees quit, not counting myself. I left at the end of the summer to return to school and I would never go back.
I was eight months pregnant in November of 2007, so I was quite huge. I work at a job that requires you to be on the phone all day long and we were approaching our busy season. You get two, 15 minute breaks and one hour long lunch and of course if you need to use the restroom during those off times you can take a personal break. With me being the size of a small whale and having a bowling ball sitting on my bladder all day long I had to use the restroom a little more often than normal. Go figure. My manager knew that I took mini personal breaks to go use the restroom and I would quickly go back to my desk. But towards the end of November my manager’s boss sent me a message stating I was taking way to many personal breaks and that from now on I can only take my two, 15 minute breaks and my one hour lunch break. I explained to him that I take the personal breaks to go and use the restroom due to the fact that I have a child using my bladder as his personal drum set.
He said that wasn’t a good excuse and I can wait to use the restroom only during my set breaks and lunch. I couldn’t believe this! He then said if I had an issue with this I could take it up with my manager or go to HR about this issue, so I took it up with HR. My HR manager called me in and I explained to her what he had said and showed her the conversation. She then said she would talk to my manager and get back to me. Next day she called me back in her office and explained I am not doing anything wrong and to continue to use as many personal breaks as needed. Funny thing is after our busy season was over he got fired! And I was told that he was chewed out by my HR manager for what he had said to me. Sad thing? I’m still here.
I was 16 and I needed money for social stuff, so I decided to search for a job. One of my Dad’s clients who ran a cafe said he had a job opening and I should come down. I was prepared for an interview, but they said as long as I could be polite and work hard I had the job. I thought this was golden so jumped at the opportunity. They said they didn’t contract any staff so we wouldn’t be taxed and they gave me okay money, better than some of my friends. But went downhill from there. They got this guy to train me, who was nice, but hopeless, so I had to make up stuff along the go. Everyone there seemed to have a stick up their arse and no matter how hard I tried to be social and friendly, I rarely had conversation back (except when one of the boys who worked there decided to tell me about how he and his friend “use each other” for sex). After about five months, someone nice started work and I noticed that her equally social nature seemed to make every other person there her friend. Slightly miffed about why I wasn’t treated the same, I thought, it is only a job and I can get through it.
One day, I came in early, did my work with no break for eight hours straight. That same day I had been teased by the guy who had told me about using his friend for sex. Only paid seven and a half hours and annoyed by him, I snapped at the guy and told him to “stop being such a douche and leave me alone so I can do my work without interuption the next week.” Since I had started the undeserved attack, according to my boss, and they shouldn’t pay me for that day, to which I replied, “I work really hard here and I do my job well whilst he slacks off talking about his sexual activites and I’m getting my pay docked? Really?” They left me alone with my seven and a half hours pay, but he got away scott free.
I worked harder than anyone else there and was often given extra shifts as they knew this. I was always 15 minutes early and never paid for it. But I thought this would build up a good rep. I rarely asked for days off and when I did, it would be for legit reasons. But they always seemed a bit arsey whenever I did saying, “We did this as a favour to your Dad seeing as you had no interview” in front of the other interviewed members of staff (the reason for their cold shoulder is now apparent). I said to my boss politely later that day that I was expecting an interview and that my father should have had nothing to do with my employment and should I have an interview to keep my job. I was told, “Keep your attitude out of the work place or you wont have one.” I liked having the money so I ignored it and stuck at it.
I then asked for two days off as I had important A level exams the following day. They said I might as well take the next few work days off as they were over staffed and come back at the end of my exams. I then returned and was told come back at the end of the month. This continued for two months until I gave up. I’m technically still employed as they never fired me.
It has been a year since, and I finally got a great full time job before my uni course starts. I never go in that cafe anymore and I have given it 1/5 stars on every website I could find (I wasn’t the only one) and often see comments saying, “Where is the tall fellow?” or “What happened to the lovely curly haired boy? He was always so nice and chatty.”
MVWJ was a volunteer experience. I jumped at a chance to assistant direct a play at a small theater. During my interview, the co-producers went on and on about the benefits of being a co-op theater. That meant that if you wanted to be in a play, you had to pay. And it wasn’t a small fee. It was almost $400. That was a red flag to me, but since I wasn’t acting in it, I overlooked those details. It turns out that W, the main man, didn’t care how good the actors were, he just wanted their money. After the first show, I was asked to become a company member, which meant I didn’t have to pay the co-op fee whenever I acted. I accepted because I wanted more experience on my resume, but I soon learned that the rules attached to becoming a company member made it so it was impossible to act in a show. The theater also went through a major renovation while I was there, and we were all expected to help out because he was too cheap to hire a crew.
One night, I was heading for the theater when I got badly rear-ended. When I called to tell him what happened, he just said, “Let me know when you can get here.” The next day I was in so much pain I had to go to the ER. The doctor told me to rest without any strenuous activity. I was supposed to work the show that evening, so I called W and told him about the doctor’s orders. He gave me a sob story about how hard he was working while sick and tired and told me to get my job covered or else. We had 40 company members on the call sheet. I called every single person and the only ones I could contact were either already working that night or had quit a few days before. By the way, turnover at this place was exceedingly high. I called W to tell him and all I got was a guilt trip. I was on painkillers and hung up the phone crying because I thought I let him down for allowing myself to get into a car accident. I almost drove down there in my drugged out haze but fortunately my sister stopped me.
Finally, I got into a show there. I was handed 10 tickets to sell at $20, and if I didn’t, I still had to pay for them. I only knew four people in the town, and it’s hard playing up a rundown black box theater known for it’s rat infestations. Plus, the week before the show opened, 90% of the cast quit. My final straw was when I caught wind that F, a girl training to be the artistic director suddenly quit. It seemed odd because she was very dedicated to the theater. I heard from another girl in the company that she had been working full-time without pay for three months with the promise that she would start getting paid at the beginning of the fourth month. Guess what? Payday came, he told her he didn’t have the money. Mind you, this is a guy who drove to work in a new Mercedes.
A day later I got a call from W where he left me a long voicemail about how he had to fire her (the girl who told me the story) due to “differences,” and how I shouldn’t talk to anyone else in the company about it. Yeah, right. I called my source, and she told me that he had literally just fired her for confronting him about it. A few days later, I sent an email telling them that I couldn’t work there anymore. I claimed I needed to find a second job to help me with bills, which was partially true, but I really just wanted out. I still haven’t heard much about the theatre, but that’s no surprise.
MVWJ was actually an unpaid internship my senior year in college. Due to a misunderstanding between my academic adviser and me, I had to take 21 credits the last semester of my senior year to graduate. One of those three credit courses was an internship through a local communications company owned by a mega-church, where I was to go in for 10 hours a week (about two hours a day after class five times a week).
Initially, I thought this sounded like a great gig–they owned three magazines, three radio stations and had several websites for things like music and Christian news and I would get to interview bands and hang out at concerts. Big mistake.
My first day, I was told to get the receptionist coffee and to deliver packages to a FedEx office. Not long after, the senior pastor of the church that owned the communications company was going to visit and I was literally given a roll of tape and told to wrap the tape around my hand–sticky side out–and to get down on my hands and knees and use the sticky side of the tape to get lint out of the royal purple carpet.
One of my supervisors was fine, but the other was a pompous bimbo who did nothing but steal articles off other internet websites, slap her name on them and turn them in for publication. How this escaped notice of legit organizations is beyond me. After less than two weeks, I had exhausted all of the writing they had available for me. I was then given tasks such as organizing photos and the supply cabinet and stuffing binders for the church’s next big sermon series. At this point, I was about eight weeks away from a degree in journalism and I felt like all of this was ridiculous.
The best part of the internship came at the end of the semester, when I sat down with my faculty adviser (who was also a professor in three other classes I had taken). The adviser told me my internship supervisor, the pompous bimbo, had written a horrible letter to him complaining about my work ethic, how I never showed up on time and how I brought a bad attitude into the office. She also said I never completed my hours of internship and refused sign off on my class credit.
My professor listened to my side of the story and signed off on my internship hours. Eight years later, I’m an award-winning newspaper reporter and the pompous bimbo never made a career in legitimate journalism. The magazines and websites are also now defunct.
I was 36, and in the middle of a divorce. I loved my job, but needed 9-5 hours, so I took a job at a marketing/inspirational products company. I was to answer phones, ship all incoming orders, take care of office supplies, and I had a $200 per week budget to purchase snacks for the office. In addition, I was to keep the kitchens (there were two) stocked with supplies.
My first clue that something wasn’t right should have been when three people that I met the first day described the boss as “intense.” My first week there he called me in to his office to tell me that he went to the kitchen and there were no spoons in the drawer. He said that he knew they were right in the cabinet, but that would have taken him 2-3 seconds out if his work day. Then he told me that if all 20 people that worked at the company had to get a spoon out of the cabinet, that was potentially a full minute out of the work day that they would not be productive. Intense indeed.
Working hours were 8-5, but most everyone was there by 7 a.m. and worked until at least 7 p.m. at night, because that was expected. Leaving on time was cause for an “uncomfortable conversation” about your attitude. I had a review after six months, and my boss told me several things to work on, but said that overall, she was happy with my performance. Two days later, she noticed that I had placed the label on a shipment a little crooked, and she told me to start looking for another job. I worked there for another month, and then they fired half of the company, including me, ten days before Christmas. The kicker was that they asked me to work the whole day, because we were so busy, and then completely screamed at me for leaving at 5 p.m.
My Very Worst Job was at a funeral home when I was 19. It was during summer at college and I was actually working three jobs at the time: full time days answering phones at a law firm, part time at a department store and on-call at the funeral home. The funeral home was a family owned affair and housed in an older home. The offices and viewing rooms were on the first floor, the basement held the embalming room and other gross functions (the door opened off the kitchen area) and the upstairs was actually an apartment for the director (creepy, no?). They had a full time receptionist/office manager, but they did not want to pay her any overtime, so they had me on call for anytime there was an evening visitation. Someone had to man the phones and direct visitors to the restroom. Also I later found out that part of my duties would be to go into the visitation room (where there would be prepped bodies) and write down details about all the floral arrangements: who sent them and what they were. While I think this is a nice service the funeral home provides to the family, I certainly didn’t want to be the one who did it and it wasn’t in the job description.
I really had no training and wasn’t there very often, so the worst part was when the office manager went on a week long vacation and they asked me to fill in. I had to answer the phones, which wasn’t too bad, but then the director came in and needed me to send a newsletter to all the other locations. I had no idea how to even consider doing this. None of the other employees were helpful, as all of them hated their jobs but also had no clue what the office manager did or how she did it. There was a terrible video I had to watch about selling pre-paid burial plans and caskets and while I know this is a part of life (and death) it was just more than I bargained for. Then the director, who was a jerk and made me feel uncomfortable, took me upstairs to the apartment to show me some stuff that he easily could have brought down to the office. I was so nervous I didn’t comprehend any of it. I managed to muddle through the week, barely. The next time they called me to come in for a visitation, they woke me up from a nap and I mumbled, “I’m sorry, I can’t come in, I have to … do … something … else.” They never called me again.
When I got a job at a swanky fine dining restaurant as a waitress, I was thrilled. Though I only had experience serving at diners and nightclubs and knew nothing about fine dining, I figured they would teach me. During the interview, the manager only asked if I had restaurant experience then hired me. In no way did I indicate that I had fine dining experience. On my first day, there was a meeting before the first shift started to try some of the foods. I had to memorize everything I tried on the spot and what it tasted like. This was exotic food that I had never had before. Then we had to detail the tables, setting out the forks, knives, plates, etc. We had to make sure all 30 tables in the dining room and all of the utensils, plates and glasses were perfectly aligned on the tables. Then came the serving. I witnessed the waiter giving detailed descriptions of all of the exotic foods that he brought out. I was nervous, but figured I would receive adequate training and time to memorize everything.
They also had an extensive wine list, but I had no wine knowledge at all and did not know how to properly serve a bottle of wine. I trained for three days and stressfully memorized as many menu items as I could, at home and at work. During those three days I ended up working a lot taking orders, refilling water, clearing plates and running drinks. Then I found out I would need to take a test on the food before I could officially work there. I started studying my butt off and preparing. On the fourth day of work I showed up and started detailing the tables. The manager, who made me extremely nervous because of his constant testing (he would say, “Quick, tell me that table number and position” and if I answered wrong would shake his head or yell at me) started asking me where I had worked before. I told him a diner and a nightclub and he finally realized I had no fine dining experience. When I finished detailing the tables, he asked me to serve wine to another waitress (who was pretty snobby) as practice. I tried, but was fumbling and struggling with opening the bottle. I had no idea how to read the wine and year off of the bottle (they had never showed me), but did my best.
The manager just shook his head. “That was atrocious,” he said in front of the other waitress. He continued to belittle me in front of the other waitress, including telling me how I held the wine was even wrong. I started crying and ran to the bathroom to get myself together, then came back out. “So what do you want me to do? The customers here expect the wine to be served correctly. You do not know how to do that,” he said. I finally couldn’t take anymore and told him I would leave. I got my things and ran out of there. The best part? I didn’t get paid a penny for those three days of hard work and humiliation.
My Very Worst Job actually started out as my best job. In the summer of 2005, I had just finished my second year of university and I found a job working in a formal wear store. Ours was the main store with about 10 satellite stores and we were the “tuxedo factory,” preparing and shipping out 600 tuxes a week for weddings, grads and proms. My first year in the store was amazing. I loved the production floor manager and my co-workers were a lot of fun. I was a hard worker and I was reliable, so when the summer rush ended, they offered me Saturday work throughout the school year.
But things turned sour when my manager quit. She chose to do so less than a month before the summer rush was to begin and the production floor was left with three employees: T, a seamstress, me and B, a general production worker. B was in his 40s, and had worked there for ages, but had never been given any opportunities for advancement. He told the company that he would quit unless they made him the new floor manager, so he became my boss. From that moment, he turned on me. I think he might have felt like I wouldn’t listen to him, since I had been so close to the old manager. He immediately made a number of unnecessary changes, just for the sake of showing us that he was the boss and he could change things if he wanted to. They made things much less efficient and then he would tell the owner that it was my fault that work had slowed down or if I did things the old way, he would tell the owner that I was undermining him. He also would change things and not tell me, so that he could get me in trouble for not doing things his way.
He hired on a number of summer employees, mostly from the college nearby. They were all grossly incompetent and I found myself re-doing a lot of the work they did, because even after sending a garment back to be fixed, it would come back just as bad, or worse. B then told the owner that my work had slowed way down, and that I obviously hated him and was trying to sabotage him. I got called into a meeting with B and the owner, where they confronted me. I told the owner that the rest of the summer staff were incapable of doing their work and that I felt like I had taken on about four employees’ worth of work on my own, and in light of that, I was actually working incredibly fast. The owner made some fleeting comment about communication between B and I, and left it at that. I confronted B later about the staff and he told me that he had to hire bad workers, because if he hired good workers, they would quit when they were offered something better.
B’s campaign against me finally did see me fired from the job. In August, after four months of this abuse, I was hit by a car on my way to work. My foot was injured and I was unable to work for a few weeks. When I called in to say that I would be able to start working again, the owner came on the phone to say that in light of how things weren’t working out, they’d found someone else to replace me and that “we’d better just call it a day, hmm?” Talk about adding insult to injury.
Although I was suffering from bronchitis, my crazy boss still insisted I travel to her office for a meeting. Fine, I agreed. Then I headed back to my own office about 4 p.m., feeling worst than ever. When I arrive at my desk, I discover that she was already looking for me and had left numerous messages. I returned her call.
She wanted me to travel back to her office–as sick as I was and as late as it was–to simply help her look for a file. I told her that I was sure that she and her assistant could find her missing file without me. She hung up on me. Moments later, my own assistant comes into my office announcing she has been instructed to go through my files and cabinets to look for said missing file. Suffice it to say she did not find it.
My crazy boss called again and demanded that I return to her office to locate her missing file. I refused. She actually then had the nerve to write me up for insubordination AND someone from her office called to tell me they found the file–in her own assistant’s cubicle.
