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.

Talk about a Jekyll and Hyde situation. About a year ago I interviewed for a job at a vegetarian cafe on the theatre side of town. I’m an actress and this seemed like a good sign. Let me add that my job was to work the counter and take orders, and either E or R were acting as managers, baristas, and servers. This was the justification for not sharing tips with me (but we’ll get to that.)

Both of my bosses were actors as well, we’ll call them R and E. R was the best boss ever. She was laid back, funny, and genuinely seemed proud of her restaurant and loved her customers. E was a whole other story. The first day she seemed a little cool, but I chalked it up to personality. Then her true crazy shone through. She told me on the first day that I should feel free to bring a book, “since it can get a little slow here sometimes.” Then a week in, when the place is dead, she furiously snapped at me, “I know it’s quiet, but there’s always little things do to. I don’t want you just sitting there reading!”

One day I’d be in trouble for leaving the register to make drinks, the next day I’d be in trouble for not pitching in to help out (because she was too busy surfing Facebook or taking naps in her office) and I mean IN TROUBLE. She would scream at me in front of customers. And on the days where she was “working” in the office and I handled everything for hours at a time, do you think she shared tips? Nope. Also, I would catch her glaring at me out of the corner of my eye, like I had my hand in the register or my finger up my nose. I have no idea why she mistrusted me completely.

One day when an obviously difficult customer complained about an order that we “messed up” and I know for a fact I triple-checked, E hauled me into the kitchen to chew me out (which is rare, since she usually tore into me in front of the uncomfortable customers!) I told her that I was entirely in the right and E said,  ”Well, you’re not focused and I need you to pull it together. You went to acting school, right? Why don’t you do one of those focusing exercises they taught you, okay?” In the most condescending tone I’ve ever heard.

Sadly that wasn’t the final straw. The final straw was arriving to work to find the other cashier in tears. Apparently E had been taking a nap. This cashier had previously been in trouble for waking E up instead of taking a message. So today she had taken a message instead. When E woke up and found out she’d missed a call from a guy she’d been “waiting to hear from all day!” she screamed at this poor girl that she could “easily be replaced!”

I decided to quit before I could be replaced, and never looked back!

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.

I’d been working a week at this sports bar when I was asked to attend a compulsory staff meeting that had been scheduled for AFTER hours on a Tuesday night. By after hours, I mean 12:30AM. On a Tuesday. When I wasn’t even scheduled to work that night. Oh, and it was unpaid. I had lectures the next morning and politely asked if it would be possible to have the meeting before the bar opened rather than after it had closed. I was told it was scheduled for that time because it was a “social” meeting, whatever the hell that is. I have worked in many bars in my time and at no point have I ever been asked to attend a compulsory, unpaid staff meeting scheduled for after closing time. I did not attend and received a written warning.

During my second week, a regular customer came in that I had not seen before. The other staff on told me his nickname was “Eminem” because he was quite strange and used to mutter weirdly and would make even weirder hand gestures. It took me three seconds to work out the poor guy wasn’t weird or crazy, and the “weird” hand gestures were in fact sign language. The guy was deaf and none of them had realised this, choosing instead to mock him openly for quite a long time. A week later the entire staff got written warnings because someone forgot to turn the dishwasher off one night. I never went back for another shift.

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.

Before I begin, I am fully aware that most service industry jobs are not the greatest, but this experience was pretty bad. I’ve worked in the service industry for a while so that’s why I totally disagree with people who tell me that my experience is something I should expect in this industry.

I had been working sales for about a year, which I enjoyed, but my hours were cut and had bills to pay. I decided to go back into the service industry because you usually make money right then and there. I got hired on at a fairly popular sports restaurant and since a friend of mine had worked there 2 years before, I expected it to not be that bad. From day one, I had a feeling I would not be very happy because it took about two hours to get out of there after being cut. Honestly, after they tell you that you can go you had about two hours of side duties to finish–and one of the side duties was cleaning the bathrooms. Two hours of being paid $2.13 an hour did not really mesh well with me. (Corporate took shortcuts, so the servers were the ones doing all the extra work) If the washer left we had to wash the dishes. I really did not like that dirty water would spray in my face and all over me and I still had to serve food. If that wasn’t bad enough, the girls I worked with were extremely catty and rude. Since I was the new girl, they refused to help me out, and I was always stuck doing whatever side work they didn’t do. That’s how this place worked.

I should add that the customers weren’t really that bad. I had very few issues with them, except the occasional big group of people who think they are the only people there. There was one funny moment while I was cleaning the bathroom, though. There were two girls in the restroom and they were both practicing to sing “Happy Birthday” to their friend. Yes, PRACTICING to sing “Happy Birthday”. They were in there for about 45 minutes singing over and over. Like one girl had to go a certain pitch and the other had to get this other pitch juuuust right. Not sure if they expected to be “discovered” at this place or what.

Anyways, my first week there I was stuck working from 10AM-10PM. Some co-worker disappeared for 30 minutes and came back loaded on some pain killers. She was stumbling all over the place and slurring. She tried to steal someone’s jacket and when the manager told her to show him what she had in her arms, she presented a picture frame, a new toilet bowl brush, to-go boxes, white out, and a bunch of change. She had even gone through our purses. To make matters worse, she destroyed the zipper on my expensive purse. The managers never apologized to me about this or gave me the girl’s information so I could get her to replace the zipper. After all of this, another girl and I were stuck doing that girl’s side duties because it “had to be done”.

I tried to suck this up and continued to work there for three more weeks. The last day I was there, no one informed me that we were out of several things (and no, it was not written on the 86 board or in the computer) and I was not informed that several girls left to go home so I was stuck doing the whole dining room side- usually they tell you when someone leaves, but not that day. For some reason, I was also stuck doing two side duties and I was there until 3AM even though I was not a closer. When I looked at the schedule, they had me working eight days straight. I quit the very next day, with the encouragement of my fiance.

I should add that when I got my last two paychecks, they were both only $100–that’s for two weeks of work and supposed to include credit card tips. Apparently, this place takes out whatever you make in cash from your credit card tips. At least now I am working at a fine dining cocktail bar that is freaking awesome. No more corporate restaurants for me.

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.

MVWJ was right before my current job, which happens to be My Very Best Job. I worked my way up in a barbecue chain restaurant. I started out as a cashier, then a server and was eventually a cook/meat slicer. I loved this job at the beginning. My boyfriend had recently lost his job and since we had two kids to support I threw myself in, working 50 to 60 hour weeks, usually double shifts. In the morning I would serve and then change clothes and be in the kitchen at night. The owner was a family guy, the managers were all younger and pretty cool. Like I said, I loved it. That was before they asked me to become a manager. I was so excited they had asked. I’m the type of person that does my absolute best and was just happy that someone had noticed how far I would go to be a team player. Picking up shifts if we were short, sometimes managing to do two jobs at one time, being the first girl to learn how to run the slicer and being amazingly fast in the hot, smoke-filled kitchen! I started working more and more. Once you become manager you are on salary so I was working 60 to 70 hours a week and barely ever saw my kids. I was committed to this job!

The boss’s son was a big party kid. He had just came home from college and was thrown into being general manager of the store. He would often come to work drunk and or late. One time he even came in and slept on the desk in the office because he was so hung over. He would be late opening the store, hired all his drinking buddies to work there and he stayed in the office his ENTIRE shift. I mean he would literally sit in there and watch the security cameras and call us up front to complain or ask one of the other managers to do something for him. The front end manager was a complete nightmare. She couldn’t write up a server schedule to save her life and we always had to find people to cover shifts because she would give everyone off if they requested it because she couldn’t tell these young college kids no! They all learned that pretty quickly and would suck up to her constantly for better shifts. But, I still loved it. I thought I was doing a really good job, I was always tired, called in on my days off constantly, always worked longer than scheduled, was actually scheduled as a cook most nights to conserve labor costs. I thought I was an appreciated member of the team and loved working hard for the owner.

In the end he fired me for coming into work on time and sick. I didn’t call in at 8am and leave everyone in a bind. He fired me because I spent too much time in the office on this one shift because I felt so sick. Two years of working like man for him, forgoing my family and my kids. I was in shock and wasn’t able to articulate anything when he called me into the office and fired me in front of all the other managers! I just stood there with my mouth open. I still want to find him and hurt him. Fucking ungrateful jackass.

This is my second submission to My Very Worst Job, so I’m not sure the superlative technically applies. Either way, it was a terrible job.

Just before the end of my junior year of high school, I decided to quit my mediocre job at a large retail store in search of greener pastures. I’m a huge film buff, so I was thrilled when I got a job at a nearby multiplex.

My first shift was on the night that Spiderman opened. For those of you that don’t know, Spiderman broke all kinds of records its opening weekend. I walked up to the entrance and was greeted by massive lines of fans that had been waiting for hours. I slipped into the back were a manager handed me a vest, a clip on bowtie, a schedule of when the movies got out, a broom, and a trash can with wheels on the bottom. I was told to pick up the trash in the theaters after all the patrons left and to do it quickly because they needed to get everybody in for the next screening. And that was all the training I got.

That first night was just awful. My co-workers would constantly go missing for hours at a time to smoke pot in the parking lot and leave me to clean massive theaters by myself. Each theater had an insanely long line in front of it that seemed to be ready to riot by the time we finished cleaning.

Somehow, I made it through. I was completely exhausted when I finished and, for some reason, didn’t quit after that night. In fact, I stayed on for nine more months. Each night I would be amazed at the disgusting things people would leave in a theater. Some of the worst things were cups full of chewing tobacco spit, used baby diapers, and cups full of urine (which, by the way, deteriorates the cups so the bottoms are prone to fall out when you pick them up). Once, when I was emptying the trash in a restroom, a single poop fell out of a rolled up paper towel and landed on the ground. Also, you would be surprised at how frequently people throw up at movie theaters.

I tried to take advantage of the free movies but employees were only allowed free passes on weekdays and only during the day. In retrospect, I have no idea why I stayed that long. I had made a few friends, but it was not worth the work. I guess it was pride or something. I eventually quit after I was denied a raise and then found out that they had started paying new hires more than me.

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.