We will not be updating MVWJ for the foreseeable future. The site will remain up and you’ll still be able to enjoy past posts. Thanks for your stories, comments and support. We hope to see you at My Very Worst Date and My Very Worst Roommate.

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.

I had worked my heiny off in college to graduate a full year early. Unfortunately, my GRE score was less than stellar, so I decided to take a semester off to focus on raising my score and applying to graduate school. In the meantime, I looked for temp jobs to save up money and gain experience.

After submitting my resume online, I was called in for an interview at the local branch of a national temp agency. Everyone was very pleasant and encouraging. I took several skills assessments and scored high on all of them. They informed me that most of their positions were located downtown (only ten minutes from my home) and rarely paid less than ten dollars an hour. I was very impressed when they found me a position after less than a week, even though it only paid nine dollars an hour. Unfortunately, that temp job ended and MVW job began.

The temp agency did not call me until 4:30 p.m. and explained that they needed me to fill a position for a mail clerk the next day. It wasn’t until after the office closed that I finally received an email with details about the position. The hours were 7:30-3:30 in an advertising agency an hour from my house. A little disheartened by the early hours and the distance, I showed up for work twenty minutes early at an industrial park nestled in a remote suburb. After waiting for the receptionist to arrive (the temp agency did not tell me who my supervisor was, or what part of the building the business was located in), I got an irate phone call from the temp agency. Apparently the email was wrong, and the job started at 7:00, not 7:30. The mail processing facility was located at the back of the building, and would not open without a key card.

The mail processing facility functioned like a factory, where one worker was assigned a menial task in an assembly line. We had half an hour for lunch, and two ten minute breaks, indicated by a bell that was just louder than the whirring of the equipment. Since I was actually fifteen minutes late by the time I found the main entrance, the supervisor shouted at me. Then she led me through a labyrinth of machines in a warehouse and told me to start working before walking back through the labyrinth. My co-workers seemed to only know about a dozen English words. After about two minutes listening to promotional flyers get fed into a large printer before one of the regular workers shoved a box at me and shouted, “Strip!”

I blinked in bewilderment. “What?”

She grumbled and pushed past me, then showed me how to put a plastic packaging strip on a box of flyers.

And that’s what I did all day. I packaged envelopes together, then organized them on the warehouse floor. There were other tedious tasks involved that I learned in the same manner. Since her English was so poor, I would often make a mistake because I didn’t understand what was going on. Then one of the other workers would shout at me in broken English until I figured out what I’d done wrong.

By the end of the day, there were putrid sweat stains all over my clothes–the warehouse had no air conditioning and the machines generated a lot of heat. As we were packing up to leave, one of the regular workers tried some small talk, explaining how she needed surgery for her “pee pee.”

On the second day, three out of the six temps had quit and been replaced with another girl in her twenties, a teacher with a Masters degree, and an elderly woman with a limp that moaned about being on her feet all day. The temp agency hadn’t told them the dress code, so they all showed up in business casual clothes. Thirty minutes into our shift, the teacher accidentally started a small fire. For some reason, the supervisor shouted at all of us.

By the third day, only three temps remained (the teacher had quit).

Even though I hated the job– I was exhausted by the end of the day and I was tired of the supervisor calling me an idiot– I decided to stick it out for the full three weeks. Then on the fifth day, the supervisor informed all the temps that they were no longer needed. A little relieved, I decided to spend the next week with family.

While I was out of town, the temp agency called me and asked if I had been paid. The company was not paying any of the temps. After the temp agency argued with the company for a few days, I finally received a direct deposit. Noticing that my paycheck was a little smaller than I’d anticipated, I did the math. I’d been paid minimum wage. The temp agency had told me I would be making $8.50.

MVWJ was a volunteer experience. I jumped at a chance to assistant direct a play at a small theater. During my interview, the co-producers went on and on about the benefits of being a co-op theater. That meant that if you wanted to be in a play, you had to pay. And it wasn’t a small fee. It was almost $400. That was a red flag to me, but since I wasn’t acting in it, I overlooked those details. It turns out that W, the main man, didn’t care how good the actors were, he just wanted their money. After the first show, I was asked to become a company member, which meant I didn’t have to pay the co-op fee whenever I acted. I accepted because I wanted more experience on my resume, but I soon learned that the rules attached to becoming a company member made it so it was impossible to act in a show. The theater also went through a major renovation while I was there, and we were all expected to help out because he was too cheap to hire a crew.

One night, I was heading for the theater when I got badly rear-ended. When I called to tell him what happened, he just said, “Let me know when you can get here.” The next day I was in so much pain I had to go to the ER. The doctor told me to rest without any strenuous activity. I was supposed to work the show that evening, so I called W and told him about the doctor’s orders. He gave me a sob story about how hard he was working while sick and tired and told me to get my job covered or else. We had 40 company members on the call sheet. I called every single person and the only ones I could contact were either already working that night or had quit a few days before. By the way, turnover at this place was exceedingly high. I called W to tell him and all I got was a guilt trip. I was on painkillers and hung up the phone crying because I thought I let him down for allowing myself to get into a car accident. I almost drove down there in my drugged out haze but fortunately my sister stopped me.

Finally, I got into a show there. I was handed 10 tickets to sell at $20, and if I didn’t, I still had to pay for them. I only knew four people in the town, and it’s hard playing up a rundown black box theater known for it’s rat infestations. Plus, the week before the show opened, 90% of the cast quit. My final straw was when I caught wind that F, a girl training to be the artistic director suddenly quit. It seemed odd because she was very dedicated to the theater. I heard from another girl in the company that she had been working full-time without pay for three months with the promise that she would start getting paid at the beginning of the fourth month. Guess what? Payday came, he told her he didn’t have the money. Mind you, this is a guy who drove to work in a new Mercedes.

A day later I got a call from W where he left me a long voicemail about how he had to fire her (the girl who told me the story) due to “differences,” and how I shouldn’t talk to anyone else in the company about it. Yeah, right. I called my source, and she told me that he had literally just fired her for confronting him about it. A few days later, I sent an email telling them that I couldn’t work there anymore. I claimed I needed to find a second job to help me with bills, which was partially true, but I really just wanted out. I still haven’t heard much about the theatre, but that’s no surprise.

When I was 17, I started working at a popular card store. The pay wasn’t great but it was enough to live off of and the people I worked with were fantastic.

In short, I loved the job. I worked full time and would always go above and beyond to prove that I was loyal and to advance within the company. I was there for a few years and would often take on “acting manager” roles when my manager was unavailable or when other stores in the area needed a hand.

Our district manager, however, was a total bitch and everyone would refer to her as “Dragon Lady” when she wasn’t around. She never had anything nice to say and was constantly passing judgment, not just on the condition of the store but also on us personally. (She would often tell my manager that she needed to lose weight etc.)

One of the stores had an incredibly high turnover rate as it was a clearance store and hard to manage. I was sent there temporarily until they could find a new manager and a solid staff. I was there for about four months and they had no luck hiring anyone on to fill the position. Thinking this was my chance to prove my worth, I applied for the position as I was already managing the place anyway. Over the next few months, the Dragon Lady hired me a less that prominent staff (two part-time single moms on welfare with scheduling issues, a pregnant diabetic who loved to call in tired and a 16-year-old kid who enjoyed skimming the tills). She was constantly observing my every move and had zero positive feedback. It was not long before none of my staff were showing up to work and I was working around the clock. I very seldom took any breaks and would often come in three hours early and stay long after closing to finish up paperwork and do any cleaning or organizing that needed to get done (keep in mind that I was on a salary and was not allowed to bank my overtime).

Christmas came around and my youngest cousin was sadly diagnosed with leukemia. I told my boss quite proudly that I was planning to shave my head in support of my family. To my complete disgust, she replied by telling me to buy a wig because she didn’t think I could work there if I was bald. Though offended greatly I brushed it off and continued putting everything I had into the store. I even worked the holidays with bronchial pneumonia. I went on working like this until April when I finally decided to takes a week of vacation. Everything seemed fine, I had an assistant from another location and my staff assured me that everything would be taken care of.

On my first day off, I got a call from mall security informing that my store wasn’t yet open. It was noon. Reluctantly I went in to find that the who was supposed to open the store had locked her keys inside the day before. I didn’t hear anything for the remainder of the week and assumed that everything was okay. When I returned the following week I came in the find the store in the most disgusting state I’ve ever seen. Food and garbage littered the aisles and the cash desk was covered in paperwork and left behind items. Nothing had been done while I was away and there was $100 missing from my float.

I finally had enough. I stood at that cash desk and scanned over the store in complete silence. The girl who was working with me at the time just stared at me and looked concerned. The anger in my face must have been apparent because when I turned to her she moved back a bit. I pulled my keys out of my pocket and took them off my lanyard. She asked what I was doing and I looked at her and said “Did you guys do anything while I was gone?” She responded with a resounding, “No, not really. Sorry about that…”

I slammed my keys down on the counter and collected my things. I explained to her that I was tired of living at the store for next to no money and this was the last straw. She looked genuinely sad and agreed. I received a call later that day from Dragon Lady who said nothing to me except: “I knew you couldn’t do it. Hard work just isn’t in some people’s blood I guess.” I laughed and hung up.

I recently went for coffee with my old manager from when I first started working there. I guess Dragon Lady’s husband left her and took their kids because she spends more time howling about and hounding her “stupid staff” than she did paying attention her family. Love and compassion just isn’t in some people’s blood I guess.