MVWJ was my childhood newspaper route. My brother (12 years old at the time) decided he and I could share our neighborhood route when I was 8 years old. Being young and naive, it never occurred to me that people would screw me over at every opportunity. The job started out well enough; I delivered the papers to 20 houses each morning before school.

The problems started happening when I had to collect the monthly fees from the customers who didn’t put their subscriptions on their credit cards. People would refuse to answer the door, slam their doors in my face, argue that they didn’t owe what I asked for, and short-changed me constantly. One woman didn’t answer her door for six full months. When I called the newspaper office to complain about her, they said that only the customer could cancel their subscription and I would just have to keep trying. When I finally got in touch with her, she asked me to come to her house at midnight on a school night to collect the money!

For three years, I would come home in tears and beg my parents and my brother to let me quit because customers would scream at me, other kids would tease me, and one time a group of teenage boys spat on me and shoved me in a snow bank while I was trying to collect money from one of their parents’ houses. Another time, a dog bit my leg, and the owner said it was my own fault for “showing fear.”

Maybe the worst part of all? My brother handled the money once we collected it, and only paid me $10/month for my work. I didn’t realize until years later that he was pocketing way more than his fair share.

The landlords were a couple, she managed the kitchen and he managed the bar. They were both hideous alcoholics and it became clear pretty quickly he was violent towards her as well. One night, he threw her down the stairs. Another night he made a mistake in an order that went to kitchen and a huge fight broke out between them in the middle of the restaurant. Eventually she went back into the kitchen and he to the bar. A moment later he stormed back through the restaurant, into the kitchen and hurled two pint glasses at her showering everyone in the kitchen with shards of broken glass, including me. I should have quit that night, I still don’t know why I didn’t.

They hired another couple to work there who eventually ended up moving into the top floor of the building (the landlords lived on the second floor). One night about three months later the couple who moved in packed their bags and left in the middle of the night without a word. It turns out that this had happened twice before to the same landlords when they were at a different place. They couldn’t understand why it kept happening to them.

At the start of my sophomore year of college, my aunt had hired me and my roommate to work at a store she was opening up in the mall in November.  Unfortunately, it was September, and I was out of money.  Since I had to find a way to pay rent and buy groceries, I found a job listing for a haunted house. J was the owner of a laser tag arena and he thought it would be goldmine to convert said arena into a haunted house for the month of October.

My roommate S and I were both desperate for money and decided to go to the orientation for potential employees or “spooks” as J liked to call us. Attending the orientation were about 30 people, all high school or college age. We were all hired on the spot.  The haunted house would be open every day, from 6-closing (basically, whenever J felt like closing). We were to be paid per shift, not per hour, getting paid higher on the weekends. All of our wages were to be paid at the laser tag/pizza party J was throwing on Halloween after our final shift. We were required to show up an hour before the shift started to get into costume, makeup, and take your place. This meant that we were all paid the same amount, regardless of what you did, or how long you were there.

This all might sound like a good idea, in theory, however, there were many haunted houses in the area. I should have been clued in to how horrible this would be on my first tour of the arena…I had attended haunted houses before. This looked more like a spook alley my middle school put on to raise money for a field-trip, not a Haunted House that people were supposed to shell out 10-15 bucks to get into. It was more of a maze of black lit rooms then anything scary. And how could we compete with the man with no legs that chased you on his hands at the Haunted Trails just 20 minutes away? How?

S and I were assigned to be skeletons. We were to hid in the darkness, and jump out at you, with only our white skeleton face and costume showing up in the black light. J had advertised for this heavily at the local colleges, so there was a good line the first night. During my first shift there, I got punched in the stomach. Having never been punched like that  before, I ended up vomiting. Awesome. Since I was required to work the whole shift to get paid for it (J’s words), I stayed my time and got made fun of by my fellow spooks. After a couple of other near misses, I got good at evading punches or scratches or other various things people do when you jump out at them.

Word started to get around town about how much this haunted house sucked. Most people attended the other, more terrifying haunted houses close by.  Because of this, most of my shifts were spent lying or sitting on the floor trying to read my flashcards or talking to whichever spook was close by until someone would shout “someone’s coming!” and we’d all take our places. The weekends were a bit busier, but never the steady flow of people J had envisioned. We would all do the best we could with what we had, but all we had were crappy costumes, bad makeup, and an even worse location. We managed to get a few scares out of some people, but most people were only mildly startled.

The most frightening part was when a guy in a Jason mask would chase people with a chainsaw. Since this was all in a relatively small laser tag arena, the chainsaw made the entire place smell of gasoline. Both S and I would dread coming into work, as it was spectacularly boring, but neither of us ever missed an assigned shift. We both needed the money. Finally, October 31st arrived. The last day! And, it being Halloween, we actually had a good amount of people show up. When it was over, the party began. And by party, I mean J making us tear down the haunted house and set up for laser tag. But we at least had pizza. At about 2AM, J sat us all down to talk to us about the last month. He stated that “he didn’t do as well as he thought” and that “I’m gonna have to pay you all in 2 weeks instead of tonight” since he just hadn’t figured out the “numbers” yet. I was pissed. I needed that money to pay rent. After much complaints, he pretty much told us that there was nothing HE could do and we were free to leave.

Two weeks went by, and I hadn’t received a check or even a phone call. So I called him. He said it would be another two weeks. After a week, I called him again to remind him that he needed to pay me in a week. He tried to push it to two more weeks again. I told him that he had one week before I took action. He laughed, and scoffed at what I, a 19-year-old kid could do. He then offered me free laser tag for life in exchange of paying my the $500 he owed me. Um, no. After the week, I called him again. He hung up on me.

I then, along with S, made my way to small claims court and filed a claim. When they served him, he called me up, cursing me out for being a “trouble-maker” and “instigator.” He said I should just accept his free laser tag offer, because neither I nor Stacy were ever going to see a penny from him. I laughed at him and told him that if he didn’t pay the entire amount, plus court fees, in cash or money order, I would see him in court.

Another week went by, and he called me again telling me my money was ready. I don’t know why he had the change of heart, but I went to pick up my money as fast as I could. As S and I were picking up our money, he yelled at me again and told me he never wanted to see my face in his place of business again. Um, no problem, man. No problem.

A year later, he went bankrupt.

I just quit my MVWJ. Admittedly, fast food workers have a stigma of being underpaid and overworked, but this job pushed its staff to their limits.

I used to work for a not-so-popular fast food chain in Australia. In the year that I was there, I would regularly work 9 or 10 hr shifts with no break, seeing as they “couldn’t afford” to give me one. The managers were constantly trying to save on labour, leaving only the barest minimum of staff. Unless it was a Saturday, I often found myself the only person running front counter and drive thru so that meant taking orders, cashing it, bagging the food, making the drinks and serving it — all by myself. Even if there were 10 customers all waiting to be served. And every single order, no matter how big the order was or how long the food took to cook, had to be done under a minute and 30 seconds. If it wasn’t I was screamed at for not being fast enough and called names like “f-ing moron” in front of customers, even if they were kids. We had customers complain to the managers about treating their staff so badly, but all the manager would do is bitch about that customer as soon as they left the store and ignore them. There was a huge turnover of staff — the three managers had all been replaced about four times each in six months and so were all very young and inexperienced.

My first paycheck was only about $15, despite doing 20 something hours. They took $80 out for our uniform, which was just a plain pair of black pants and a red button up shirt, nothing special. We weren’t given payslips so on more than one occasion I found I hadn’t been paid for certain shifts shifts in order to avoid paying me overtime. When our rostered shift was over, we weren’t allowed to leave until the manager had given us a list of things to complete. We couldn’t ask for this list 10 minutes or so before our shift was over, we were only allowed to ask for it after our shift was complete. After we had completed this list, which usually took about 20 minutes to do so, then and only then could we ask permission to leave. We weren’t paid for this overtime either.

I soon discovered the industrial chemicals they used to clean and sanitize everything burned my skin fairly badly. I had huge red patches where it had splashed onto my skin all along my arms and the skin started cracking and flaking off on my fingers after using them. When I was told to keep using them, I begged them to let me not as it hurt so much and showed them my hands. Their response? “There’s some concrete out the back. Take some and harden the fuck up, princess” and told me I’d be written up if I didn’t keep using the chemicals. Unlike most fast food jobs, there was no discounts or anything for working there. We weren’t allowed any percentage off the food or even a free drink. And since the store was located on a rather isolated highway, there wasn’t much options for food. We were also underpaid by about $5 below the legal minimum wage limit.

Best of all, when I finally had enough and found myself a new job, the manager threatened to badmouth me as a reference and not pay me the annual leave/sick leave I had saved up if I quit. I found out later from people who still worked there that she was telling them to badmouth me to my new colleagues in an effort to blackmail me into staying, since they didn’t want me to quit. I’ve been told be many people to sue them since apparently a lot of things they have done are illegal, but I’m not going to. I’m just happy to be out of there.

Most retail jobs are shitty, but none are quite as shitty as selling shoes.

The store where I worked was located on the one of the most highly-trafficked, upscale shopping blocks of New York. We sold very expensive, very outlandish men’s and women’s Italian shoes; to a clientele that consisted mostly of European tourists, rude Brighton Beach mafia wives, assorted floozies and rap stars. Since staff was expected to wear the store brand exclusively, this meant that the female contingent had to schlep tall stacks of shoe boxes up and down the steep flight of stairs from the basement stockroom while wearing painful high heels, the lowest of which were three to four inches. We were trained to never return from the stockroom with fewer than three boxes, since even if a customer had requested only one, we were to make at least two “suggestions.” When tall boots were involved, and you were serving more than one customer simultaneously, the height and width of the stacks one was forced to carry was quite spectacular (as were the crashes, when they toppled as one ascended the stairs).

Selling shoes to women is far more aggravating than selling to men, because a startling percentage of females are seriously crazy about their shoe size. Suppose Crazy Female Customer asks to see a shoe, size 8 ½ . She tries it on and then pronounces it too tight. “Ah, I’ll get you a 9…” the salesperson might cheerfully offer. The CFC dismisses this suggestion as vaguely insulting, replying, “No—I’m an 8 ½,” with grave finality. She then repeats this process with a dozen or more additional shoes, perhaps accidentally hitting upon a style that runs so large as to actually fit, in a half-size too small.

My most memorable encounter happened with a male customer, though. He was affluent-looking and approximately 60 years old. It’s necessary to the story to also mention that he was African American. I approached him and asked if he’d like to try on the style he’d been looking at. He gave me a withering look and asked to instead be served by one of my colleagues, whom he asked for by first name– apparently he was a regular customer. I told him that it was her day off, but I’d be happy to assist him. He looked at me with barely disguised contempt, but finally agreed to let me fetch his size. Joy. During the 10 minutes I dealt with him, everything I said was met with an exaggerated withering glance, sometimes even an eye roll and his mouth was contorted as though sucking on a lemon. “What the fuck’s that guy’s problem?” I wondered to myself, as I retrieved another three pair for him from the stockroom. It crossed my mind that the other salesperson who he’d specifically requested happened to be black, whereas I’m white. Since I’d only been friendly and courteous, I was beginning to think that maybe he simply didn’t like white people?

Upon my return from the stockroom, he deigned to speak to me, noting the old Stevie Wonder song playing on the sound system. He said, “I see you’re playing our music.” “Our” music, eh? I took this as confirmation that he was hung up on race. I’d had enough, so I responded dryly that I didn’t see how he had any more claim to the music of Stevie Wonder than me. He gave me another look of scorn, but ultimately bought a pair of shoes and left. The next day, I told my colleague that he’d come in and asked for her, and I referred to him by name since I’d seen his credit card. In retrospect, after she informed me that he was a bigwig at Motown Records, the music comment seemed a little more innocuous than I’d previously thought.

Yes, I’m an idiot.

The irony of my MVWJ was that it was supposed to be my very best job ever. I had been working full time hours at part time status for the past three years and this job was a promotion, with full benefits. The only downside (or so I thought), was the 45 minute commute. The first two weeks at the job went well, it was a different atmosphere than the other location I worked at, but I figured I would adjust eventually. However, after I returned back from a vacation I realized that I had made a terrible mistake in taking the promotion at this location. Luckily, while I was on vacation the same exact position had opened up at my old location and I applied for it, thinking I could keep my promotional status and nix my icky commute. Well, turns out that apparently this was the trigger switch to turn my boss into a backstabbing life sucker. When she found out I was trying to transfer out of the store she unleashed hellfire upon me. After her screaming at me in the office for 20 minutes, citing a ton of policies I was violating, I came back at her with my own policies I had memorized, stating that she couldn’t stop me from any of it. From that day forward my life became a living hell.

She would yell at me every shift I worked with her for the most ridiculous things. In the past three years I’d worked for the company I had never had disciplinary action. In the three weeks following me applying for a transfer I was on a “final disciplinary warning,” which in essence, bars you from transferring. Great. Mission accomplished. I was trapped at the location, literally being abused for two months. More work was shoveled on me and when I couldn’t finish it all, I’d be written up. This pattern continued until I just gave up, stopped trying, came to work miserable and left miserable. One day she and another manager cornered me in the office yelling at me, telling me how much I sucked and overall just verbally abused me to the point of tears. They gave me an ultimatum: I could turn it all around, completely change my leading style (basically, act like the tyrannical bitch she was) and I had 30 days to do so or I could step down to my old position, old location, everything. I came back with the answer that I was not going to change who I was just so she could fire me anyway and that I’d leave. She agreed to transfer me back, I agreed to lose my benefits, my pay raise and my title in exchange for what I thought would be peace of mind.

Well, when the week came for me to transfer, I called in asking for my schedule and my old store had no knowledge of my “transfer.” The best part? My boss was on her honeymoon and unavailable to be contacted. Turns out she had transferred out of the store herself, turned my life into a steaming garbage pile and left me to clean up the mess. As it currently sits, I’m unemployed because of her actions.

My Very Worst Job happened a long time ago. I was still a good summer or two away from mowing lawns for cash, and my Garbage Pail Kids addiction wasn’t satisfied through my measly allowance, so when a friend asked if I’d deliver papers on his afternoon route while he was away for a week I was extremely excited. We went over the paper route for a couple days before he left and when the day arrived I was ready to go.

I must have looked quite the sight: chubby little blond kid with socks pulled up to his knees and shorts that barely went halfway down his thigh, pedaling his bitchin red dirt bike with the plastic grocery bags full of papers up the street. Any mental image of that day, however, should include a very untied right tennis shoe.

A slob? Sure. But that’s not why I mention it. I mention it because shortly into the route I suddenly found that I couldn’t pedal the bike. At all. I also couldn’t move my right foot. The lace had wound tightly up in the pedaling mechanism and not only was making any forward progress impossible, it was making it impossible to get off the bike.

I promptly panicked and fell over. This had a dual effect of breaking the plastic bags the papers were in and bloodied my knees and elbows. Here’s another mental picture: this time the chubby blond kid is bleeding, way-too-short shorts dirty, crying on the ground with one foot tied to a bitchin red dirt bike with papers strewn around him. I somehow managed to get my foot out of the shoe, but couldn’t unwind it at all and the back wheel still wouldn’t turn. I ended up gathering as many papers I could and limped away, dragging the bitchin red dirt bike behind me to a house on the corner where I could call my mom to come get me. She did and we spent the rest of the week delivering out of her car. I’m pretty sure she ended up spending more on gas than I got for delivering.

I worked MVWJ back in 2006, in a call center for a well known pet medication company. The supervisors were intense and the popular season started shortly after I worked there. We had to be like robots, pitching every pop up script that appeared when taking orders. You were expected to be on the phones every second. If you logged in, literally, 30 seconds late you’d get a talking to. If you were in the bathroom “too long” you got a talking to, it was nuts. The higher ups actually had their dogs loose in the building so there were flea bites randomly, which management denied. They kept saying someone had gone through the building and it was clean so we were getting bites from our homes, even employees who didn’t have pets.

Every third Saturday there was an early morning, all-staff mandatory meeting, whether scheduled that day or not. You were not paid for coming, but in trouble if you missed it. They did points for missing days, being late, taking too long for issues, etc. and if you got so many you were fired. Turn over was so high that I’d constantly come in the morning and not be able to key in cause someone quit or was fired and they changed the door code. Then the woman next to me claimed she needed her home office chair for her back so they let her bring it in. That would be fine except she was a smoker and the chair smelled like a 20 year-old ashtray. It was so bad that it made me physically ill and I was a smoker at the time too.

The final straw came after seven months of being there. I have health issues so I was constantly ill and I ended up getting the flu. My boss pulled me aside and told me that I should have used the weekend to get better and gotten rest. I told him I’d spent the whole weekend inside and not out crazy. He then implied I could have managed to completely get over a severe flu in two days so I could have come in healthy on Monday. I pointed out if I could cure a flu in two days with my mind I’d be a millionaire and not working for them. I then packed my entire cubicle and never looked back.

I am currently working My Very Worst Job. I am a 911 dispatcher and though the job isn’t always all that bad, it has its days. I have a list of my top five worst calls, all of which involve someone (who didn’t even have any kind of life threatening emergency to report) cursing me out and calling me every name in the book (dumb bitch seems to be a favorite), sometimes calling back two or three times in the span of three minutes because they didn’t understand why I couldn’t magically teleport an ambulance to their house (and all of which involve me going into the bathroom and crying afterwards). There have been calls where people would yell at me when I asked them their address and phone number even refusing to give it to me because I’m supposed to have computers and whatnot that tell me all that information and they shouldn’t have to tell me too. I’ve even had people call me, on 911 mind you, asking why they’re stuck in traffic, whether a road was open or closed during storms, asking why they hear sirens a couple blocks away, etc.

I think most of my frustration comes from my co-workers though.

In our office, we have four dispatchers, three supervisors and one head supervisor. The supervisors and head supervisor all hold that title, not because they’re particularly good at dispatching and promoted their way up, but because they have field experience, the belief being that if we have experienced field personnel dispatching, then they’ll be better able to understand what’s going on and to augment dispatches accordingly. The problem is, coming into dispatch is a minimum two year commitment and it’s a good way to promote so we never get anyone who sticks around much longer than two years and it can take a year or more just to get a lot of the basics down. That being said, a general sense of incompetence and mediocrity overwhelms our supervisors. In my four years here, I’ve worked for (and helped train) six different supervisors. Because they do the exact same job as the dispatchers with only minor supervisory work, they all come in with the attitude of “I’m new here and don’t know a lot and even though I’m your supervisor, I’m ready and willing to learn from you and treat you as an equal.” That quickly morphs however into “I AM YOUR KING/QUEEN. YOU WILL BOW DOWN TO ME!”

Even though dispatchers are required to type a certain word-per-minute and have a basic understanding of computers, our supervisors have no such requirements. I’ve had supervisors who were so bad with computers, they didn’t even know how to check their email and couldn’t type quickly enough to take down the information during a call, choosing instead to hand write it during the call and enter it into the computer after the caller hung up – causing us to have to call many people back to clarify address information because they didn’t give it correctly or the supervisor wrote it down wrong.

Dealing with the field can be a painful addition to this equation too. I had a firefighter call one time and tell one of my supervisors, C, for about five minutes what a dumb bitch he thought I was and that I needed to cut the attitude because my job was just to answer phones. C thought she was somehow doing me a favor by nodding and going “uh huh…uh huh” during the conversation and not taking it to the head supervisor who, at least, would have thoroughly chewed the firefighter out. After crying for two hours about it, another dispatcher brought this to her attention and then C started crying and getting all wishy washy about it (she was notorious for that). She then got even more upset when she asked me for a hug to “make it better” and I told her no. I told her she didn’t even have any right to be upset about the whole thing, I did, and I certainly wasn’t going to make her feel better about the whole thing.

MVWJ was working at a certain buffet “steakhouse.” I took the job because I heard through the grapevine that some of the servers got really good tips. It was not the cleanest of places and everyone seemed kinda trashy to be honest. On the very first day, I learned that one of the managers was sleeping with a fellow waitress and that was why his wife was always coming by and staring us down. I couldn’t believe how much food would go to waste. People would pile on food just to leave it untouched. I just kept telling myself that I would make awesome tips. Yeah, those awesome tips were about $15 to $30 after eight hours.

There was a sink right next to the dish washing area where you were supposed to be able to wash your hands after dealing with filthy plates. For three weeks it had no soap or paper towels. Yet, we were not allowed to use the restaurants public restroom an we’d get written up if we did. So, one day at work, I got feverish. I remember having what I thought was a mosquito bite on my thigh. Well, I became delirious from the fever and was rushed to the ER where it turned out that I had a staph infection that they had to lance. My mom wound up buying me tons of hand sanitizers to keep on me at all times.

When I got back to work I just kept getting the crappiest customers. One table was filled with a bunch of punks who kept demanding refills even though they had plenty of drinks. They would laugh and thought they were so hilarious and cool. Another time there were four redneck guys with their sons. They were busy teaching them to call us crude names, telling us we had nice butts and tits. My final straw was during Father’s Day. We were extremely busy and I had one table that I thought maybe I’d get a decent tip from. After bringing the guy his steak, his wife wanted something specially made so I went to bring in her order. I had just cleaned off a table, washed my hands and was exiting the dish washing room, rubbing my neck. The guy comes up to me and asked if I cooked the food.

Me: “No, sir. I’m just the server. Is there anything you need?”

Him: “I’m just going to tell you something that you need to know. You should never touch your face or body while cooking food! It’s disgusting.”

Me: “I was rubbing my neck and I do not cook the food.” At this point I pull out my trusty hand sanitizer, “And I use this before and after I touch dirty plates or glasses. For my own health.”

Him: “Well I’m just telling you that it’s disgusting.”

Me: “Uh huh. Thanks.”

Naturally, I received no tip. I was more than happy when I quit.