After college, I saw an ad for a sports marketing position. When I went in, I was told that the interview would actually be a full day of work. I was introduced to the sales team I’d be working with and we all got into someone’s car and started to drive to a strip mall in the suburbs. The job ended up consisting of trying to sell coupons for the local baseball team to workers in retail stores and restaurants. We were told to ignore “no solicitation” signs. Between stops at strip malls, I sat in the backseat of the car with the “sales trainer.” At one point, he asked if he could lean on me and put his head in my lap! After putting in a long degrading day, I was told that I had gotten the job. My parents begged me not to go back, but I did. The next day, we headed out and our trainer announced that he didn’t feel like selling that day and we were going to go to the movies instead. As if this wasn’t awkward enough, he whispered to me that he needed to go behind the movie theater and get high beforehand. Much to my parents’ happiness, that was my last day.
I thought I’d share My Very Worst Job ever with you, since I haven’t ever met anyone with a worse story than this one. I found myself looking for work last year, after the economy had tanked. Unemployment in my part of the country had jumped, so when I finally got an interview with a local hotel chain, I was pretty excited. I was hired right away, and asked to start the next day.
My first indication that this would not work out occurred at about 10 a.m. on my first day, when a homeless man, reeking of alcohol, stumbled up to the desk and asked for a room. Since he couldn’t afford one we sent him away, but a few minutes later the janitor came in to tell us he’d found him in the bushes outside – with a hooker. That’s when I realized who the parade
of slutty women paying monthly rates in cash were.
Later on I was shown the emergency procedures book, which included policies in case of drug raids, suicide attempts, rapes, assaults, hostage situations, and bomb threats. I was told that I likely wouldn’t need to use most of them, but last week there was that guy who overdosed, and on Thursday there was a major assault in the lobby, and some guy died in his room a few weeks back.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, I then found a note about a spate of car robberies happening in the parking lot. I basically spent the rest of the shift watching my own car through the front window. I quit over the phone that night and never came back, not even to pick up my paycheck.
Fortunately, I haven’t had anything nearly as bad since. I moved to Australia a few months later, and wound up in a couple of great jobs. Since I’ve been back in Canada the job market has really picked up again, so I’m hopeful that I will never, ever need to work in the kind of hotel that caters mostly to prostitutes, drug addicts, and one room that was either about illegal labourers or human trafficking – I left before I found out which one.
When I was 24, I got a job at a dog grooming salon as a receptionist/dog grooming student. It was a small business, just the two owners (who were in their late 20s) and I. Everything was normal for the first few days, but by the end of the first week, it felt like I was babysitting instead of working. They’d say they were going to pass out fliers around the neighborhood but instead they’d end up sitting in the break room, smoking and talking which, of course, meant hardly any customers. And even when they had customers, they’d still spend most of the day hanging out in the break room. Then when 2 o’clock rolled around, they’d do a spit n’shine on the dog, call the owner and say they had an “emergency” and then take the rest of the day off.
Even worse, starting the second week, I would get to work, wait 10 minutes (they lived a couple blocks away), call them and ask where they were at and they’d say, “Oh, we decided not to come in today.” Since I took public transportation at the time, it was a major pain to get there. I asked them to let me know when they were taking the day off, but I guess it was too much trouble. I stayed there for three months since I didn’t want to leave without a backup job and never even got paid. Last I heard, the salon closed down four months after I left. Suprised it lasted that long.
During the summer of my sophmore year of college, I decided to pick up a second job to have more money for the upcoming semester. During my search I found out that a local Japanese/sushi restaurant was hiring. It seemed like the perfect fit for me, since I was studying Japanese and I figured I could practice with the owners. I placed the call and was told to come in the following day for an interview. I showed up early only to find no one else at the restaurant. After waiting 10 minutes past our meeting time, a girl (the daughter of the owner) about my age pulled up. We went into the restaurant and she quickly interviewed me, just mainly asking about my history as a server. I told her my experience and the reason I was interested in working for them. She said it was great and I could start the next day.
When I arrived the next day, an old Korean woman, who turned out to be the owner, was the only other person in the building. I learned quickly she neither spoke nor understood English. This and the fact I never filled out an application or tax forms should have been enough for me to realize something wasn’t right. It turned out that not a single person involved knew anything of Japan. The owners were Korean and just liked sushi, the cooks were Mexican and the servers (other than myself) were Chinese, but hardly spoke any English. The owner would yell at us in Korean to do things and I ended up running in circles until the daughter came over and yelled at me.
On top of that, the way they handled our cash tips was sketchy. After each table, we had to take the cash tips up to the old woman at the register where at the end of the night she would divide them evenly between us all. Even though it was my first night, I had been taking on more tables than the other two waitresses, who were just talking to each other. The last straw for me was when I got a call from the daughter asking me to come in one night for work on a night I had specifically told her I was working my other job. Her response? ”Make up something to tell them; tell them you’re sick.” Yeah. Right. Lie to the restaurant I’d worked at for four years. I told her I would see what I could do and never called her back. To this day I avoid that restaurant like the plague.
I got a job at a grocery store in the produce section, but the manager and owner never told me about my duties or what my responsibilities would be. I asked a couple of times, but the answer was “we’ll discuss that on your first day.” So I showed up on my first day ready, excited and motivated. I reported to my department manager, made him aware that I was present and ready to start. I asked my manager if there was anything he’d like me to do or if he needed help with anything. His exact response?
” Whoa whoa whoa kid…you’ve been on the job for about 30 seconds. And you’re already asking questions? I’m not here to babysit you!”
I was a little baffled at this comment, but I just calmly and nicely told him that we should probably go over my duties and responsibilities like we discussed on my interview day so that I wouldn’t have to bug him again. He turned around, red in the face, with both fists closed and screamed at the top of his lungs so everyone in the store could hear.
“IT’S NOT WISE OF YOU TO GIVE ME ATTITUDE WHEN YOU’RE ONLY 30 SECONDS INTO THE JOB!! DON’T PISS ME OFF, YOU DON’T KNOW WHO I AM AND WHAT I CAN DO!!”
Me being 16 and him being in his mid-30’s and slightly better built, I was shaking in my boots. I calmly walked away and went into the owners office to talk about what had happened and to apologize if I did anything wrong (which I knew I didn’t). I was absolutley blown away and disgusted at what the owner hit me back with.
“Oh…so you wanted him to show you your responsibilities eh? Do you want him to hold your hand too? Maybe read you a bedtime story? This is work, not a daycare”.
I thought I was on a prank tv show with hidden cameras. But nope. This was real. I grabbed a broom and straightened things, but that took a whole 10 minutes and I still had more than three and a half hours left to go. I found myself repeating the same things over and over again. Sweep, mop, straighten, repeat. Every time I tried to help a fellow employee, they would say they didn’t have time to train me. I would try to get boxes of fruit from out back to stock the shelves and I would be told I wasn’t allowed back there. I was getting more and more attitude from my manager and my boss. Swearing, cussing, name-calling, you name it. Close to the end of my shift, my manager had another hissy fit on me and called me stupid. I took off my smock, threw it at him, took off my badge, threw that at him too and I told him to fuck off. I then went into the owners office and told him to go fuck himself as well.
My Very Worst Job was working for a lady who worked as rep for a major direct sales cosmetics firm. When I interviewed for this job, I was already working part-time elsewhere but I thought working for this woman on Saturdays at her home office would be great for some extra money. She seemed very enthusiastic and told me I’d be doing lots of things related to her business, inventory, sales calls, etc. I was excited about the opportunity and thought it would be something good to put on my resume related to the administrative field I planned to go into after college. What I didn’t realize is that she also included “light cleaning” in the job description.
This didn’t bother me at first, but it did bother the other girl who was hired to work with me. The first few Saturdays were spent organizing samples and customer information. I thought things were going a long swimmingly until one day this lady asked me to do one more task in addition to watching her young daughter. She first asked the other girl to vacuum the window sills. I kid you not! So the girl got to vacuuming, and was not thrilled about it.
I was then asked to clean the ceiling fan globes in the house. There was a ceiling fan in every single room of this two-story antebellum-style home! I spent the entire afternoon taking down five globes from each fan and washing them in soapy water and putting them back again. The other girl was in a word, pissed. The woman gave us no indication as to when she’d be home, so we were stuck there in the house waiting on her because we couldn’t leave her young daughter by herself. The girl I worked with said she had enough and she wasn’t coming back. I decided although this was all very bizarre, I’d stick it out.
That is until the next Saturday. I got up early, got myself ready and got to the house, only to find that no one was home. No note, no instructions, nothing. I decided then that I too had had enough, and wasn’t wasting any more of my Saturdays on this crazy woman. She eventually emailed me regarding picking up where we left off, but I declined to respond. That may have been unprofessional on my part, but it was hardly as unprofessional as this grown woman’s insane behavior.
My Very Worst Job was at an orthopedic shoe store. My boss was a moron. She had a nasty habit of bouncing almost every paycheck. Actually, not just paychecks. Bill collectors would call us on a daily basis asking for her payments. Every time I asked her why my check bounced, she would just tell me I had to wait until after the weekend. She would bring in smelly food and leave it in our fridge and her husband came in all the time. He usually made sexist jokes and bossed us around. The real kicker was that she constantly complained about the way we sold shoes, but whenever she made a sale, it always ended up being returned by the customer.
Now let me elaborate on the customers. We had a woman go in our bathroom (which we weren’t supposed to let customers use) and when she left, my coworkers and I discovered that she had a bad case of explosive diarrhea. It was all over the wall and the toilet. And we had to clean it up. There were people whose feet smelled like death, and even people who didn’t bother to take a pumice stone to their feet (It’s a bit discomforting when you look into a shoe and see flakes of skin sitting in the heel). I especially loathed the older women who came in and insisted that their shoe size was a 6.5 U.S., but when measured, turned out to be more like an 8. They were usually upset at me for saying that their feet were “huge” and would refuse to try on their actual size. I forgot to mention that these women usually had bunions that had to be accomodated with wider shoes, and that further pissed them off.
One day, our boss called a staff meeting and brought donuts for us. She sat down and cried and told us that she had to close the store. Why she brought the donuts? I don’t know. Maybe to soften the blow. None of us were surprised but were more annoyed that she spent six months being behind in payments and managed to buy herself a brand new Mercedes. She told us that she would write us letters of recommendation but never did, and even promised to take us out to lunch “next week or so.” I haven’t seen her in a year. She didn’t even leave us a number for any potential employers of ours to contact her.
I had a one-year government subsidized (grant) job working for a charitable organization that was raising money for a shelter. It was three other women and myself and my job was ostensibly PR and Media relations. Those in charge were wealthy women who had never had jobs in their lives and their attitude was that if you were from the same “community” and had to actually work for a living, instead of having a rich husband and living in a mansion, then you were total garbage and deserved to be treated as such. I was 28 years old, had been looking for a job for quite some time and needed the money. The main problem was that no one seemed to have the slightest idea what I was supposed to do, so I had to come up with all the ideas for publicity, but they would then reject all my ideas. I was told that they would have to take it up with “The Organization,” but nothing ever materialized. I was mostly given really idiotic jobs like putting pictures in a scrapbook and going to the shelter to wait for furniture deliveries. They seemed to think that because I had applied for this job, I was such a moron that I probably didn’t even know the alphabet.
After a while, I just gave up and sat in the other office reading novels. It was obvious that the only reason they wanted me there was for the money I brought into their project (if I quit, they lost part of a subsidy). When they did bitch at me I’d say, “Fine, give me something to do.” One woman who worked there in particular (a volunteer bookkeeper) was a mean, miserable gossip who was always telling me how her taxes supported me and that I sat around and did nothing. Everyone apologized for her because she was a “volunteer” who “was valuable to the community.” After six months I was getting very depressed, drinking every night to get to sleep and had to drag myself out of bed every day for another day of novel-reading and abuse. I was looking for another job, but it was a bad recession and jobs were scarce. One day, the Gossipy Bitch saw me reading a novel and started railing at me about how her taxes paid for me, how I was a freeloader and how I was useless. She was going on and on and finally I had enough. I got up and walked into the bathroom to prevent myself from killing her. Then I called my supervisor at home and told her that I was not coming back after that day. A few months later they made the news with a huge embezzlement scandal involving their national director.
No one has more horror stories than the casual dining chain server. The place I worked had it all: idiot managers, rude customers and a funny wait staff to which I owe my sanity. If my co-workers hadn’t been around to crack a joke at just the right time I probably would have drowned myself in fry grease. It wasn’t unusual for our charming customers to snap fingers, whistle, shake drinks (Lord how I hated the drink shakers), shout, “Hey waitress!” and more. I wont go too deep into the tipping etiquette because it actually makes my blood boil. Let’s just say not everyone tipped 20%.
The first party I ever had told me I did a great job until they got their bill. Then they found all kinds of things to complain about. Large parties get an 18% gratuity added and the woman paying refused it. I told her that gratuity was automatic and her answer was, “But I don’t want to tip you.” She complained to manager who decided not to back me up and gladly took the gratuity off so I received no compensation for all the hard work I put into making these people happy.
After I graduated from college, I moved to a new city and started working for a local television show. This show was run by a husband and wife team, with the wife’s father running payroll and HR-related items, and it was gearing up to go national. I was brought on to be their receptionist and to bring overall organization to the completely unorganized startup group of about 10 or so employees. My direct boss made my life a living hell. It started with slight jabs here and there, which then progressed to full on screaming, yelling and cursing at me for “not doing anything right.” She contradicted herself on a daily basis and I was left to pick up the mess that she created.
I was frequently sent out to get my boss, her husband and her father’s lunches, and would only return to them yelling at me for not answering phones. They essentially wanted me to be in two places at once, which was obviously not an option. They would send me out to buy expensive items for the show without a company credit card, so I had to pay for it on my meager $20K salary, which was reimbursed weeks later. They were really stingy with reimbursing me for my gas mileage as well, since I had to drive all over the place to get them what they wanted. I only worked there for four months before I got another offer at a much better, higher paying job, but the kicker for me was Christmas vacation. We didn’t get one. We had to work Christmas Eve and had to work Christmas Day, while my boss, her hubby and her daddy had a week-long vacay in Florida with the kids. How nice.
