MVWJ was actually kind of pathetic, but thankfully short. I was 17, had absolutely zero job experience, and needed money. There was a small, trendy coffee shop in our neighborhood that had bounced from owner to owner for the past decade. I went in to interview with the latest owner, who seemed like a nice, professional guy. However, he would not be running the café. He’d bought the café so his wife, who spoke poor English, would have something to do. I spent most of my “training” helping a few of their friends lug huge refrigeration units and scraping the scum from the floor with a butterknife. It was on this day that the couple decided I would be paid national minimum wage, which was actually over two dollars less than state minimum wage. Joy. They paid me with straight cash and told me to come back the next day. I was their single employee, as they thought it was too much money to hire even one more person.

I had to arrive at four thirty to get ready for our five a.m. opening rush, which was a total joke. Maybe three people came in before seven thirty, but I was too busy preparing breakfast stuff to complain. The mammoth cleaning effort hadn’t been extended to the cooking/food handling equipment, which looked like they had been bought in the mid-eighties and hadn’t been cleaned since. I got to leave that greasy horror and run the till later that morning, and another problem became apparent. I had gotten very little training at the till, and they hadn’t briefed me on the drink names at all. So an order would consist of me stammering out “uh, hi” and the customer rattling off their drink order, which I would have to get the wife for. She would snap the drink names at me and get them all herself, skulking off to the back as soon as she was done.(I found out later she was watching me on the security video feed)

Enter a new customer, lather, rinse repeat. I eventually got a little better at orders, but then she would storm out and scold me for not including tax in the total. She didn’t know how to either, and so when she took the till to show me she just spent a half hour fiddling with it. After a few hours of stimulating conversation with our resident crazy homeless guy, I got paid for my shift in cash and was told to call in the next day if I could work. I went home and slept for a few hours, decided that the little money I was given really wasn’t worth it, and didn’t call.

The day after that, she called and chewed me out for not wanting to work, passive-aggressively hinting that I was just lazy and wanted to get money for doing nothing. I hung up after being verbally abused for a few minutes and that was the end of it. Six months later their little café experiment went belly up, and they just locked the doors and walked away, leaving all their equipment and the work of a few local artists (who still haven’t gotten their paintings back) inside.

After graduating from college with a mechanical engineering degree, I got my very first job at a medium-sized firm as a junior draftsperson. The several interviewers were charming and polite, remarking that all the employees (about 50) had excellent rapport and were “like a family.” Turns out that was code for cliquish and petty. The employees who weren’t related by marriage all had extensive social contact outside of the business so nepotism and preferential treatment were the rule. I was given nonsensical tasks that did not befit my training. I had no gripes with earning my stripes as the new girl, but making coffee and sending faxes while the receptionist screamed at her fiancé in the office or chatted for twenty minutes on the phone about her manicure made no sense to me.

The quality control system was completely broken and every missing document and inspection sheet was blamed on me, even though they’d been lost before I even started the job. Military specifications were ignored, whited out and annotated with no signatures, dates or reference material. Schematics dating back to the seventies were stored in waterlogged boxes that bloomed with black mold and made my asthma attacks near-daily occurrences. HR ( and I use the term loosely) used my drug-test pee for a surreptitious pregnancy test and threatened me with loss of my job if I refused to get an abortion. I was sexually harassed by the head engineer on my day off and was told by HR not to bother complaining because his brother was a cop and no one would believe me. Vacation time could only be taken in one hour increments and couldn’t be used to come in late or stay early, so essentially I just got really long breaks.

I was an hourly employee and was only paid for forty hours even when I worked upwards of sixty per week. No time and a half, not even straight time. The final straw was when I hurt myself at work. A wooden stair collapsed under me and I fell down a flight of stairs, breaking my arm. After I left the hospital, I was told to come in to the office and was faced by a tribunal of higher-ups, who told me grimly that I should not even think of workers comp or disability pay, because I clearly broke my arm on purpose to get time off, and I would be sued and go to jail if I tried. I told them as politely as I could that I was leaving. Two years later I wound up with a modest settlement and a resulting job offer from an amazing firm that I’m still with, eight years later.

I graduated high school and got a job at a family-owned video store. The owner was a nurse who opened the store about six months before, and she seemed to like me at first because I had aspirations of becoming a nurse, too. I thought I had it made, but soon I realized that this woman had no business running her own store. Despite this being a new business, the owner was absent, apparently just expecting teenage kids to do the grunt work and have money roll right in.

I was trained by two co-workers, given conflicting information, would get confused, try my best, then be reprimanded by for doing the wrong thing. Instead of quietly taking me off to the side (remember she was hardly present), the owner would write a note and clip it to my time card, so all the employees could read them as they clocked in. The other employees never seemed to get reprimanded, though.

The owner was also  a bible-thumper, insisting on buying religious videos that no one was interested in renting. This was back in 2000, and our customers had to fight over three VHS copies of Gladiator. Business wasn’t good. This was also when DVDs started getting popular, but she refused to get any, thinking they were a fad. I found out all of the inventory was bought from an out-of-business video store, and that there were boxes of porn videos hidden in the storage room. Considering how many times I was asked if there was a “back room,” I know a ton of money would have been made. Due to her religious ways, she refused to make a back room up to rent them out, and thought I was seriously evil for suggesting it. Why someone with a stripper for a daughter and a teenage son dating a twenty-something, married woman was so self-righteous and judgmental of me, a reasonably good kid, I have no idea.

This son of hers worked at the store from time to time. One evening we were working together, I was stuck with cleaning duty. He took it upon himself to eat Taco Bell before his shift, then have explosive diarrhea all over the seat of the break room toilet that he didn’t clean up. I still think he did it on purpose. Another boy around our age worked there, and would invite his friends to the store to hang out for hours and sexually harass me. One slow night, I made a rubber band ball the size of a baseball, which he grabbed from me and threw across the store, embedding it into a particle board door. He begged me to lie and say a couple of kids ran in and did it, but I couldn’t keep the lie up for long and squealed to the owner. He blamed me, saying it was all my fault because I was the one who made the ball. She went along with him, saying that since I was older (by a few months, I believe), I should have set a better example. I was docked $100 in pay to cover the cost of another door, and I heard through one of the girls who worked there with us that they got the replacement door for $50.

I annoyed the owner mostly because I was constantly off on my till every night. I tried my hardest to cooperate with their dinosaur of a cash register, and why the other ones never seemed to get in trouble for their tills being off, I’ll never know. The owner would ask me really increasingly condescending questions in front of the other employees from “Do you need your eyes re-examined?” to “Did you take special classes in school?” She must have forgot that I graduated a year early. She would tell me multiple times that someone like me would struggle throughout a nursing career due to my stupidity.

It was no surprise to me that I was fired after six months for incompetence, but I was not sad at all. The business failed three months later, she had to go back to her old doctor’s office job that she hated under a huge mountain of debt, and I’ve been a successful nurse for the past eight years with an advanced degree, which I couldn’t have accomplished if I truly was as stupid as she tried to convince me.

During the summer of 2007, I was fresh out of high school, and was excited to finally become an adult, and enter the working world. Fortunately for me, during high school I had taken quiet a few business management classes, which allowed me to apply for positions in an office situation. I thought that I was doing the smart thing, as people often times told me of their horror stories about working at fast food places, or grocery stores, but how wrong I was.

In July, I finally ended up getting my office job. It was for a shipping company, and I would be a data entry clerk. The job essentially had me taking bills which were scanned into our system, and then I would have to input those bills into our software, but more on that later. My first warning came when I began my training, and I should have realized right then and there that this was the wrong environment for me. When I walked into the building, and walked towards our training room I realized that I was the only male on the floor. There were rows of cubicles filled with middle aged woman.

My next warning came when we started to begin training. The bills I previously mentioned before? It was all by hand input, meaning that truck drivers were writing down all this information and scanning it to us, and no offense to truck drivers, but their hand writing makes a doctor’s signature look neat. How was I suppose to decrypt their crazy algorithmic hand writing? I dared not ask how ever, and continued with the job, eventually ending my training and getting on the floor.

This is when the hellish nightmare of this job truly began to settle in. There was a strict policy of no talking, no use of head phones, no distractions what so ever. It was kind of like one of those cool montage moments in a movie where you see a code-breaker sitting at a computer trying to decipher some cryptic message, and he has a swat team of other hackers around them, and they only have 60 seconds to decrypt this message. Except it didn’t have any cool music, and code breaking never stopped, after I’d complete one, another would come in right away,

So, we had crippling boredom, followed up by impossible hand writing, and the always awkward feeling I had of being surrounded by middle-aged woman, this was really starting to sound like my own personal hell, but hey at least I was inside a cool comfortable office building with air conditioning, right? Apparently it broke, the day I actually started. So I was stuck there, for eight hours a day in work-dress clothes in the sweat box of an office building.

Eventually I was let go, being told I was just not “It wasn’t the quality of your work, we just felt as though you didn’t fit in and were unhappy,” but that wasn’t the final straw. They ended up blocking me from getting unemployment, telling the office that they had offered me another job, and I had refused.

I was 16 years old, very naive, but extremely motivated and excited to get my first job. It was at a national pizza chain, but the store was new and everything seemed clean. People were mostly hired by word of mouth, so it was me, my three friends who were boys, the cool hiring manager, an assistant manager, approximately five 30-ish guys who all knew each other from high school and some other random girls. As a female, I was to answer phones, with occasional pizza making. Being located in a relatively affluent suburb of a major metropolitan suburb, the complaints were something else. Everything from yelling at me to make their pizza free because 30 minutes had passed (that had never been policy for said chain), yelling at me because their daughter was diabetic and had needed that pizza stat, to yelling at me because someone left a flyer on their door and it was against their exclusive neighborhood’s policy to do so. Yes, yell at a 16-year-old minimum wage employee because you had to pick up a piece of paper that she had nothing to do with.

As bad as the customers could be, what far outshined them in crappiness were the employees. Those 30-somethings? Turns out most of them liked younger girls, including my 16 year old self. I was hit on, told very gross stories (“I like it when my girl gets all sweaty during sex, so we just glide against another”) and mildly groped. I didn’t really worry about it, since one of my friends was usually working with me, though in hindsight I wonder how much I could have collected from a sexual harassment lawsuit (like I said, my first job, pretty naive). The cool manager was moved along to open other stores and the assistant manager took over. His wife and children decided to hangout in the front to keep him company. Cut to me wrangling toddlers away from 350 degree ovens. Every night until he quit (his job ended when one of the delivery drivers became enraged and threw a motorcycle helmet at the crowded pizza prep line. Delivery guy was arrested and I think ended up in a mental hospital for bipolar disorder).

The obese, always sweaty and acne-ridden new manager was on a power trip. I had been working there for six months, always showed up on time and only missed days when I was legitimately sick, but I was constantly yelled at by him for nothing in particular. All of my original friends had quit at this point, but loyalty pays off eventually, right? On a typically slow night I was getting slammed by phone call after phone call and at some point we were 10 pizzas in. Since I couldn’t find my fellow 16-year-old co-worker, I made the executive decision to go ahead and make the pizzas that were over time. The phone rang, but I was so busy I didn’t answer it. Five minutes later, my manager stormed out of the office, neck-vein bulging angry (as usual), to chew me out about not answering the call. Then my female co-worker sheepishly comes out of the manager’s office. Turns out she (a 16-year-old) was giving our thirty-something manager a blow job.

I wish I could say I stormed out, but I have too good a work ethic and just quit at the end of the day. Thankfully, every job since then has been exponentially better than the last.

When I was fifteen, I started working at a big chain grocery store as a cashier. I continued to work there until I left for college. When I came back home on my first summer break, I was willing to work at the same store, but wanted something that would pay a little more. There was a job opening in the produce department, preparing items for the salad bar, chopping fruits and vegetables for prepared platters, etc. I was told I’d work about 30 hours a week, which was great and just the right amount of time for a summer job.

What I wasn’t told was that the very particular, very demanding woman training me (Donna) would be taking a three week vacation just days after I started “training.” With very little training to go on, I suddenly found myself at work starting at 5 a.m. six days a week. I was left to manage the department (imagine being 18-years-old and left in charge of seasoned veterans who has been working at this store for 20+ years). I was responsible for checking inventory, accepting deliveries off trucks and having to painstakingly go through truckfulls of pre-prepared food for the salad bar, getting it up and ready before the lunch rush and dealing with insanely demanding customers all day long. I did the best I could to maintain, and thought I did a damn fine job for having so little training.

I had one of my few days off on Donna’s first day back. I came into work the next day, I found a three page long, hand-written, aggressively threatening note outlining everything I did wrong and why I should be ashamed. I went to the store manager’s office and said I could no longer continue to work for Donna. The manager reassigned me to a new department. When Donna heard about this, she found me in the new department, dragged me out by my shirt, and told me we needed to talk. The store manager luckily intercepted her. I took off my work shirt and immediately left the store, never to return.

Proving karma does exist, I recently learned that Donna was fired for embezzling. It was a good feeling.

MVWJ was at a Mediterranean pizza restaurant. I was in high school and tired of always being broke so I applied to almost any job with a “Help Wanted” sign. I met M there and was hired as a waitress from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. weekdays, I didn’t make it to the weekend to figure out my schedule.

My young mind ignored the abundance of red flags that went up. They never threw away any food, no matter how stale. I didn’t see M or the other cook, A, ever wash their hands and the dishes were never properly or thoroughly washed. I didn’t eat there so I didn’t say anything about the hazardous handling of food. Aside from the occasional table in the ghostly restaurant, I took phone delivery orders. People would order strange things not offered on any menu, I’ve ever seen but I would take the order anyway thinking the customer was someone who has ordered from there before. M would scold me in broken English about not knowing the menu, I’d apologize and try again.

I became very irritated at M attempting to reprimand me thing that weren’t related to my job at all. I was scolded for not eating, he said, “How can you sit for hours and no eat?” I thought to myself about the food poisoning I would get if I did so. Another part of my job was to warm up individual slices of pizza, that was served on plain paper plates. The dirt cheap thin plates that couldn’t hold much. I would double up on the plates so they’d be more sturdy. Again, I was bitched at. I quit at the end of my shift, I didn’t go back for my pay.

My Very Worst Job was at a cafe/bakery when I was 14. When I got the job, I was told my basic duties would be to serve customers, clear tables, and to do “basic” cleaning.

On my first day, they got me to wash dishes for five hours straight, before sending me home. This happened pretty much every day for my first month, except on occasion I got to clean up grease from around the sink (lucky me), wash the display cabinets, or make breadcrumbs (which meant I ran the risk of cutting off my fingers due to the dodgy food processor). If that wasn’t bad enough, we had no price lists and changed the prices every few days so they were never actually entered in the cash registers, so I ended up just making all the prices, then getting in trouble if I got them wrong. We were also given seven-hour shifts without a break.

One unusually hot day the power went out. I’ll always be a little unclear on the details, but a milk bottle somehow exploded at the bottom of a fridge. Guess who the lucky person was that got to climb into the fridge (it was about chest height) and clean out all the sour milk from this hot, smelly, box of joy? Guess who also had to complete her 6 hour shift covered in sour milk?

My boss also once hit me with a broom for leaning on a machine while cleaning it. Like, actually hit me, across the back of my legs.

You’d think this was enough for me to quit, but apparently not. I was eventually fired for rostering off my birthday. Turned out the boss was a Jehovah’s Witness and didn’t believe in birthdays or in people taking a day off.

As a junior in high school I got my first job working after school at a dry cleaner’s. I did everything but run the big machine that did the actual dry cleaning: took in clothes to be cleaned, returned clean clothes, handled money, ordered/tracked supplies and kept the shop clean. Doesn’t sound bad, right? Not so fast. The owner and his wife had two kids: a boy of 10 who was the Golden Child and a girl of about 17 who had a severe developmental disability. The owner would leave to go see his girlfriend while the dry cleaning machine ran, leaving me to face the angry customers who wanted to know why their dry cleaning wasn’t ready, because they expected one-hour service all the time. I swear, most of these people only had one suit and and they had it cleaned daily.

So eventually the wife would show up with the kids in tow, asking me where the owner was, and then yelled at me because I always said I didn’t know. So she’d say she was going across the street for lunch, take Golden Boy with her, and leave her daughter in the shop for me to babysit while people yelled at me about their ugly suits not being ready. And the daughter was curious and into everything, and since I never did any babysitting I had no clue what to do. Later they hired the mother of my childhood nemesis as the day-shift clerk, which was just grand, especially since she stopped working as soon as I got in (15 minutes early) and BS’d with customers or the owner/s if they were in, leaving me to jump on the work that was there, although I wasn’t allowed to put those extra 15 minutes on my time sheet.

The sad part of all this was that I kept that job until I left for college because I was an uptight kid who thought that if I quit without a good reason like leaving for college, it would follow me around forever and employers would be saying, “Oh, you only stayed at your first job for a year. You give up easily, don’t you?” Fortunately college straightened me out.

When I was 16, I got a job working as an office assistant at the new dentist my grandmother went to. At first, it seemed like a great first job. The dentist was young, handsome and seemingly nice and the other ladies that I worked with were great. After about a month or so, things started to go wrong. The dentist would continuously screw up relatively routine procedures (for instance, he would perforate the sinus on every surgical tooth extraction he did) and often did more extensive work than was necessary so the patient would have to pay more. Then his weird mood swings kicked in. He would get into huge screaming fights with his wife on the phone, then mess up a procedure because he was mad. Finally, the office manager quit and since he couldn’t find anyone else to take her place, I got to work 50 hours a week (for six dollars an hour!), processing insurance, being a receptionist, cleaning and actually assisting on procedures. I screwed up the billing the first time I had to do it and accidentally sent out bills to people with insurance pending. This brought a wave of people into the office, many with receipts stating that they had paid in cash and upon investigation, I found out that he had been taking the cash payment out of the computer system and creating phony insurance info.

The final straw came when he made me (remember, I was 16 and untrained) assist on a surgical extraction, holding the thing to suck the blood out of the wound. I quit then and there. His increasingly apparent coke habit, the porn that he had delivered to the office, his rages and the unethical and illegal things he did to peoples’ mouths was just too much. He (surprise) couldn’t find a replacement, so I came back for the last few weeks of the summer for 10 dollars an hour (a lot for a 16 year old) and spent the remaining time running an audit trail to send to the insurance companies. I recently found out he’s still in business, though I can’t imagine why. We did report him to OSHA, the Health Department, the insurance companies, and the IRS (he wasn’t paying our taxes that he took from our paychecks), but apparently they decided he was still okay to operate on people.