MVWJ at an ice cream chain was a mixed bag; I liked most of the people I worked with, and on many nights we could have work efficiently together and leave confident that we’d done a good job. But If S (manager) or L (wannabe manager) came in the next morning, they would find something, even just a smudge on the glass, to blow out of proportion and claim we left a mess. Both of them fed on drama and would often complain about someone to a coworker only to turn around to the person they complained about and say they were doing great and complain about someone else. Every few weeks they would find someone else to target, and while I knew they were probably just blowing off steam, every time it came around to me it made me anxious.

We worked in a small area so it was common to touch someone gently on the shoulder so they’d know you were there and not back into you, but B would often wrap his hand around girls’ waists and hips as he moved past. He would come up behind me and “hug” me from behind, pressing into me and conveniently getting his hands right under my chest. Whenever I closed with him he would try to get me to lay down with him in the back of his car and talk about sex with our respective significant others. Talking was actually most of what he did, and he would often follow me around the store to brag about how awesome he was while I tried to get everything spotless so S and L wouldn’t freak out.

One girl, H, who always worked very hard and was my favorite person to work with, had a boyfriend that called and came in more and more often to make a scene and shout or throw things. Everyone complained about him, but none of us talked to her about it. One night, the guy tried to kill H and she was severely wounded. I felt awful for not speaking up about the warning signs. The next shift I worked, the prick I worked with had the balls to roll his eyes and go on for quite some time about how she “should’ve known better” and that she was stupid, though he had also never said anything to her about the crazy boyfriend.

I landed a very part time job that worked around my schedule at the store, but S found out and started complaining that I was being sneaky. Having had enough of the drama, I found an on-campus job to start in the fall and finished out the summer. On my last shift S smiled and told me to come back and visit, but I’ll never know whether she meant it or if she started badmouthing me the second I walked out the door.

Decades ago, when I was in college, I worked for a lady named L. She had a reputation for being a hard ass with a bad temper, but I thought I could handle it. I did shipping and invoices and clerical duties. I once took a horrible ass-chewing from her because I entered one piece of data wrong. I tried explaining to her that I used one of our software programs before invoices were printed to check all of my entries, but that didn’t matter, I wasn’t supposed to “make ANY mistakes WHATSOEVER.” She would throw paperwork on my desk and tell me she could not believe I had messed that up, that I had better fix it and fix it NOW, and actually stomp her little fat foot. She dragged me into the conference room once and chewed on me for 30 minutes for a mistake that, I found out later, she had made entering customer requirements.

She had the habit of standing behind me while I worked, making me a nervous wreck, watching my every move. One afternoon she grabbed my shoulder, gave me a shake, pointed her chubby finger at my screen and said “See! See that, you almost put the amount in the wrong field!!!” Her boss happened to walk in that time (she would never go overboard on the scolding if someone else was around) and he told me I was late for my lunch, to go ahead and go. Bless him, he could tell I was about to lose it and that L was out of line. I talked to our HR director about that incident the next day. He said he pitied me, that L was famous for her short temper, and did I know that she had fired the last two folks that had had my position? Nope, sure didn’t. He offered to place me in a different job, but it would be a significant cut in pay and I  couldn’t afford it.

She was a horrible racist. I heard her make many nasty comments about the Black and Hispanic workers at our plant, one directed toward a friend of mine that worked in our warehouse. He dared to mess  up one our trucking invoices, she wasn’t shocked, she said she was surprised he could read and write English, and she didn’t know why they bothered hiring “those people.” Early that next year, L was given a promotion at one of our sister facilities in another state. Less than six months after she sold her house and made her hen-pecked husband move 400 miles away from their families, she was shit canned. I heard from my counterpart at that plant that she was overheard telling one co-worker that another co-worker was a “stupid n-word.” She was terminated immediately, she wasn’t even allowed to go back to her desk, she was escorted to her car. This was just before Christmas that year, I told my now husband that he didn’t have to get me a gift, that that was the best present EVER.

I had just graduated university and was looking for my first real job. A friend suggested I apply for a job at a local flooring store as an office worker, as her Dad knew the owners. I should have known right away that this wasn’t a good idea, but I really wanted to get started on my career. I applied and interviewed for the position and was thrilled when they offered me the job. The name of the store was so embarrassing I wouldn’t even tell people where I worked.

The shift started at a different time everyday ( I got all the bad shifts) which wasn’t ideal but beggars can’t be choosers so I sucked it up. Their daughter was about to have a baby and they needed someone to cover for her and then stay on afterwards. They asked me to promise that I would stay for at least one year, which I had no problem doing.

Right away the dynamics of the office seemed odd. It was made clear that they were family and I was an outsider.  The daughter (A) and her husband (B) worked there as did the mother (owner), I will call her P and her ex-husband’s new wife, T. She had bought her ex-husband (F) out of the company. Despite this F continued to come in all the time and acted like he owned the company, fine who was I to say anything. He was a local politician but was a shady character, the type of guy that just gives you the creeps. He used the staff to put up his campaign signs.

I got along with B really well and even got him free tickets for him and his son to see his favourite band. I liked everyone and things were fine for a while, although I did little office work and did a lot of cleaning, sales and other things.

They used an archaic system to store their business contacts and expected me to instantly grasp the way they filed, even though it made no logical sense, not alphabetical.

Then right before A had her baby I broke my ankle. I called to say I had to go to the hospital but that I would come in after I had my cast on, so I would be about an hour late. She told me to stay home and call the next day. They continued to tell me to stay home even though I said I could work because I had a walking cast. I came in to see them and brought A some really nice baby presents. P sent me home and said she would call me.

Eventually, after much begging on my part (I needed the money and I was ok to work) P allowed me to come back to work, but got angry if I made even the smallest mistake even though they didn’t have the time to properly train me. Then one day out of the blue P fired me, said it just wasn’t working out. Other then the occasional small mistake I had done nothing really wrong, was always dressed really well, on time and polite. I was confused as to why but then I figured it out. They had hired me only until the daughter could come back to work. She would now work under the table (while collecting maternity leave) and bring the baby to work everyday; she had been doing this a few days a week while I was still there.

I guess they wanted to see if it would work with the baby there and I was the back up plan. I had never been fired in my life. Getting fired from this place was the best thing that happened to me, I got offered a government job the next week for over double the pay. I figured I was better off anyways, since the whole dynamic of the place was odd. F and T even lived in the store for a while.

MVWJ seemed like it could be MVBJ, but took a sudden turn for the worst. I was hired by a bank as a supervisor in the summer of ’08. My particular branch won quite a few regional outstanding performance awards in ’08 and at the end of the year we received a new regional manager that took a liking to me. By early ’09 I had been promoted to Assistant Manager and when the new regional manager had enough with the current branch manager he got rid of her, leaving me in charge. A few months later I was training to be a full branch manager, all of this happening within the first year that I started working for this bank.

As Branch Manager I was one of the most successful managers in the company’s history right off the bat. I was awarded with free box seats to professional baseball, basketball, and hockey games. I was earning large monthly bonuses, and very excited about possibly moving up farther in the company, but then it all came crashing down.

I had a supervisor, J, who was basically one of the laziest employees I have ever seen. I was at home when my regional manager called me up and told me to go ahead and terminate her employment (entirely his decision to make). Immediately following J’s termination all hell broke loose. Her parents and fiancé would regularly come into the branch and stand at the teller line complaining about the employees and, of course, me. Her father filled out a customer service report rating us “poor” in every category and claiming that one of my employees was intoxicated at work. On one occasion J’s parents refused to leave the branch and I had to call the police in order to get rid of them. On a near daily basis calls were made to our customer service and legal departments that J’s parents were hiring lawyers and planned to sue the bank for discrimination unless they terminated me. Since this is posted as MVWJ you know what happened.

I was brought in two months following J’s termination and my regional manager was nearly in tears as he fired me, promising to give me stellar recommendations if needed in the future. The bank dug up a minor policy I had violated 12 months prior as the reason for the termination, but everyone knew what the real issue was. I consulted a lawyer, but when you are an at-will employee there is really nothing that can be done outside of discrimination (curses to being a white male). Perhaps I got the last laugh though since the day after my termination the complete branch manager rankings came out, and guess who was ranked first for the entire company?

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.

MVWJ was not really a bad job at all. In fact, it was a really good a job in a field where I’d trained (journalism). But let it serve as a cautionary tale of how NOT to run a company or treat your employees. I had been job hunting for months. I interviewed for a writer job at an online news site. The future editor interviewed me over the phone from his remote office. I interviewed again at their local office with him (still on the phone at his office as he almost never came to the office in my city) and guy I would be replacing. The job had great benefits and salary. Most of the employees were young and fun to talk to. I would be writing stories for the news service and would be trained to produce programs for the website, usually panel discussions and interviews.

I  trained for a week with my predecessor. He was a bit of a geek, but funny and easy to get along with. The editor who hired me was another story. He had been pleasant and humorous on the phone, but from the day I started, I heard dire warnings about his ‘difficult’ nature and fights with management. “Watch out for Mr L!” “Oh, Mr L is your boss…good luck, you need it!” He was reputed to be even worse in person, but I only had to deal with him over the phone. So I was warned, but not worried. I’m not easily bothered by cranky editor types and not thin skinned about criticism of my work. It’s part of the job. However, the warnings began to make sense very quickly. The Editor was like one of those abusive men who acts really sweet until you get married. As soon as I was hired, he no longer felt the need for any social niceties. Even that isn’t necessarily a deal breaker in a high-stress environment, but he was really rude and insulting, way beyond what was necessary.

If I asked a question about the job, he would insult and berate me, then he’d tell me in the next second not to worry, that I would receive his support through the three month probation. It was rather disorienting. I knew I was a good journalist and got the hang of the routine, even the editor’s ‘difficult’ behaviour. To be fair, he did compliment work that was good, and I thought things were fine, no further problems. I took it all with a grain of salt because, as I said, he was mostly a voice on the phone like Charlie’s Angels. But I felt like my job was in peril every moment because I never knew if/when he’d call me up and berate me. I should point out he was like this with everyone, so I didn’t take it personally and after a few weeks, I didn’t have that feeling of peril.

However, some strange things did happen. Employees were fired from various departments after only working there for brief periods and everyone would be totally surprised and talk about it over lunch. One morning about six weeks after I started working, I was called into HR. The editor was on the speaker phone. He informed me that I was being let go because, as he said, I hadn’t gotten the hang of it. I was stunned, because there had not been any indication. No one had complained or talked to me, there had been no warning at all and it had only been a month. I told him that but he insisted I wasn’t doing a good job. He convinced that I wasn’t going to pull it off, despite the fact that he had not once stepped foot in the office since I’d been there and I’d never even met him. I reminded the editor that he had been impressed by my experience and the writing samples I had supplied with my resume. His response was that, “It just isn’t working out.” Everything he said contradicted everything he’d said in the interview: that I would be trained and that I would get three months probation. I pointed that out to him but his response was good bye and good luck.

I simply went to my office, got my stuff and left without even saying goodbye to anyone. I cried on the way home. I dreaded having to tell my boyfriend, who had been so proud when I got that job. They did save me the trouble. When I got home, he told me he already knew. He had called the office to say hello and the receptionist told that I’d been let go. I am highly critical of my own work and would have admitted if I did a shitty job or had any trouble ‘getting it’ as The Editor so eloquently put it. I tortured myself, wondering how I could have screwed up a great opportunity that I had needed so badly. About a year later, I was at a party and met some former employees. I learned from them that my experience was typical. The editor was notorious for firing people on the spur of the moment and they were surprised I’d even lasted a month. In fact, no one who worked there at the time was still employed only a year later (most were on contract, I should point out). They never hired anyone to replace me. The company ended up in financial trouble and nearly everyone was laid off. It was later bought by another company. The editor continued to work at the new company. Of course, I never got to meet him.

I got hired for MVWJ the summer after I’d taken a year abroad in college. To put things in perspective, I was a good student with lots of research experience and several important fellowships under my belt. When P offered me a position as her research assistant, I was delighted. When I got to the office, however, I was greeted by P’s underling, G, who asked what I’d been told about the job. G laughed in my face when I said I was there as a research assistant. I was set to work, not doing research, but making pointless spreadsheets of random data (phone numbers of inactive members, etc), and re-doing them repeatedly to her exacting and absurd specifications. Everything I did was wrong: deleting spam emails, bringing “stinky” (read: ethnic) food for lunch or using the bathroom during work hours (apparently I was supposed to hold it from 8am to 4pm).

When she wasn’t shopping online, she would interrupt my work to rant about “ugly dykes” (I’m queer), force me to read spam emails or pester me about my ethnicity.  She even phoned me on a day I was home sick with the flu to blame me for breaking the office copier (telekinesis, apparently). Then one day, after a holiday weekend, I came to work tan.

She glared at me and said, “I thought you said you were Scottish. You lied.”

Nervously, I replied, “I am.”

“No Scottish person tans like that,” she said.

Just to make her go away, I blurted out that my dad is Native American. G humphed and walked back to her spam emails. Later that day, she told me to move my desk, as she was unhappy about my “fraternizing” with my (white) co-workers, and declared me banned from that afternoon’s office meeting. Through the paper-thin walls, I heard P ranting about how “Indians steal things” and are “lazy” and “uncooperative.”  As much as I wanted to quit, I was stuck there because of a contract with my college. G, however, was done with me. Two weeks from the end of my contract, she fired me on a bogus claim that I had forged my time sheet and had been failing to come in to work. When I presented proof, she complained to P, who sent a series of angry emails to my college, and froze my last month’s pay (for hours I’d already worked). I was almost relieved at this point to be rid of the job, but it took months to sort out the resulting paperwork from her tantrum. And no, I never did get my pay for that last month.

When a friend posted on Facebook that his restaurant desperately needed a server and he had been given permission to hire a friend, I jumped on the opportunity. Now, I should clarify that I am using the word “restaurant” very loosely. The best description I can give for the place I worked is that we served Indian fast food. A chef in another city would make giant batches of basic Indian dishes, freeze them into small and large portion containers and we would store them in a big freezer in the basement. We would bring up a few of each at a time, allow them to defrost in the fridge and then microwave them as they were ordered, adding the appropriate vegetables and spice powder as requested by our customers. Our “kitchen” consisted of six microwaves, a grill for the “naan” (another loose term; think flat, wide hot dog buns), a rice cooker and a deep fryer for samosas and onion bhaji (the only thing we made ourselves). As you can imagine, we had very few repeat customers, except for the potheads who lived behind the restaurant and would wander in at closing and order “whatever that smell is, and five of them!”

Meanwhile, our dining room was decorated nicely, but lit like a McDonald’s, and the manager would often quietly play rap over the sound system. On top of all this, the owner, “D”, set prices that were nearly as high as the authentic, delicious, properly decorated and sufficiently staffed Indian restaurants in the area, and all of these things put together made for a restaurant that was almost always empty. Because of the low customer numbers, a number of things happened at the restaurant that made working there very difficult. For one thing, I worked almost every single shift alone. I would serve tables, “cook” the food, clean the kitchen and dining room and prepare delivery and takeout orders. Every so often, this would mean absolute, hair-tearing chaos for me, when all of a sudden there would be three tables seated, another customer wanting takeout and a delivery man coming in 10 minutes.

However, there were also many times when I would have nothing to do. As I was in university, I was okay with this – I would sit behind the till and do course readings. I always made sure that the book was hidden from sight, so that passersby wouldn’t know that’s what I was doing, but after a few shifts of doing this, I discovered that D would have his friends walk by the restaurant at random and report back to him what we were doing. He made a new rule that we were not allowed to read during our shifts and should be constantly finding work to do. When I showed him that there was actually nothing to do, that every aspect of the restaurant was spotless, he told me to clean things over and over so that I was always working, because he was not paying me to read.

All of this, so far, I could live with. He’s the owner and he was worried about money and the job was usually not that hard, so I was okay. Then, within the space of a few weeks, it became unbearable. First, a new manager was hired. He called a staff meeting and told us that since we worked by ourselves and couldn’t take breaks, we should be allowed to make food for ourselves for free. Within a week, D had threatened to put in security cameras and accused us all of stealing and when we confronted the manager, he said that he didn’t say we should tell the owner about our “free” (stolen) food! Next, I got a call from a girl who had ordered delivery and had found a cooked bee in her curry. I got in trouble for telling her to come in to the store and get a refund. Third (remember how the food was kept in a freezer in the basement?), I forgot to mention that to get to the basement, you had to exit the back of the restaurant, go down a flight of unlit, broken concrete stairs and go into a back room of someone’s apartment to get to that freezer. As the weather turned, the stairs became treacherous, and despite numerous requests for the stairs to be repaired or at least salted, nothing was ever done. Finally, and this was absolutely the last straw, two of my co-workers’ paycheques bounced.

I still remember the letter I wrote to D when I quit. “Due to a combination of incompetent management, safety concerns, unfair employee treatment and pay discrepancies, I will no longer be able to continue working in this establishment. Thank you for the opportunity.” The restaurant went out of business two months later.

MVWJ was at a YMCA working at the pool. I got this job right out of college thinking it would be a great in-between gig. I had been working at pools off and on throughout high school and college, teaching and lifeguarding. The boss hired me and the summer went by with relative ease until my boss decided to give me five days of 5am opening shifts and then quit. Since the pool was way understaffed and the head of the place didn’t have time to find anyone eles this meant I was the sole guard for seven hours. I had to keep a constant eye on the pool to make sure that no one drowned. This meant no eating, drinking, bathroom breaks or being able to have any sort of downtime. I started letting an unqualified co-worker watch the pool for less than 20 minuets so that I could eat and go to the bathroom. Then my boss told me she didn’t think I was working as much as I said I was. I told her I quit because I was so insulted and run down. She quickly backed off and begged me to stay telling me when they found a new manger things would get better.

Like a fool I stayed and soon after I got extremely sick. Since I was the only guard the pool would be closed until the high schoolers got off classes. The members were pissed and I would get constant calls asking if I could come in. Since I was bedridden and the Board of Health wouldn’t let me the answer was no, but they called everyday for two weeks. When I finally got back they had hired a new boss, who had no sympathy for how I had been over worked for months. So he had me work pretty much the exact same way except I got a 15 minute break after four hours of constantly supervising a pool where the deck temperature was 88 degrees. Whenever they could find someone to work with me they were either crazy or never showed up on time. One 40 year-old guy who worked there wouldn’t stop talking about my body. My boss finally talked to him and then he started acting aggressively angry towards me. A few days later he chased a supervisor of mine around threatening to hit him.

Another co-worker of mine who was a 45 year-old mom (I was 22) gave me the biggest overshare of my life. She out of the blue told me she went to an amusement park with two tampons in. Then she told me they got dislodged on the roller coaster and the she had to stand pantsless in a public bathroom while washing her shorts. I dont think my horrified expression went unnoticed, but it didn’t phase her at all. Finally, I decided to go get a lower paying job and regain my sanity and it worked. To this day I can’t believe how they treated me or why I worked there for so long.

My final foray into the world of service was by far the worst. The landlady was a useless, lazy spineless idiot with a similarly useless, lazy spineless lump of a husband (who did not have a job at all, even in the pub). The landlady did no work whatsoever, preferring to hide upstairs despite not scheduling enough staff on because she would “cover it.” We would quite often end up with a bar queue three people deep, the kitchen bell going constantly with food and not a clean glass in sight, while she would be upstairs having her hair dyed. The husband was a really odd guy who never wore shoes even at the rare times he managed to lift a finger behind the bar. He constantly went around in increasingly battered and filthy novelty Homer Simpson slippers and I never saw him wear anything else.

She did absolutely none of the usual back of house things that managers usually do — deliveries, cashing up etc. She had us doing all of it. The only thing she actually controlled was the stock ordering and auditing and would never allow anyone else to be involved in at all. It became clear why she was so militant about that shortly before I quit. She really loved being able to say “on the house” to people and was giving freebies out left, right and centre. Every drop of alcohol that her and the husband drank came from behind the bar and every meal they had came out of the kitchen — breakfast, lunch and dinner. Which, for two people and a young child over a prolonged period of time, racks up to quite a hefty amount of lost stock that hasn’t been paid for.

The brewery who owned the place started to get suspicious. The more pressure put on her by the brewery meant the more pressure she put on us. She used to sit us all down (with her husband, who was not a manager or even a member of staff) and accuse us all of stealing because they were a few bottles of spirits down, or a few pints etc. Every one of these occurrences would end with her saying the missing stock was going to have to be paid for out of the tips. It eventually came out that they were around £12,000 down in stock in total, occurring over about a year, which was why they were so manic when it came to the stock orders and audits. They were trying to cover their own tracks. Trust me when I say, there wasn’t a single staff member there who was stealing a thing. It was all them. A few months after I left the brewery finally saw sense and sacked them. That pair well and truly ran that place into the ground.