The year was 2004. My daughter was two, we had just moved to a new town and we were living with my (now ex) inlaws. I was desperate for a job. After suffering through a succession of temp work that lasted only a few days, I was hooked up with a gig via my mother-in-law as a secretary to an attorney who had a private practice in the next town north. I nearly cried with joy when I was hired.
My elation was short-lived. My boss, a woman who bore a striking resemblance to Miss Piggy, was an absolute imbecile. How she managed to graduate from law school remains a mystery to this day, and she never seemed to have any clients.
Furthermore, Miss Piggy, Esq. chain smoked. In her office. All day long. I tried to open the windows and turn the fans out to ventilate, but every time I did, Miss Piggy would scream from her desk, “Close those goddamn windows! I don’t pay to heat the outdoors!” So I would have to languish for eight hours in the cloud of fetid, putrid air that emanated from the five packs of Virginia Slims she sucked down. It was so bad that I had to shower and change immediately after getting home each night. Everything article of clothing I owned smelled like Joe Camel took a dump all over it.
Then, Miss Piggy started shorting me on pay. It was a little at first, a few dollars over the course of a couple of weeks, and then it started to grow. I documented every single penny she did not pay me. However, when I attempted to broach the issue with her, she would make excuses that she was too busy to discuss it with me, right before returning to her hundredth game of computer Solitaire.
I busted my ass for this woman. I cleaned her office from top to bottom, organized all of her files, created a database of her alleged “clients” (none of which ever called or came in), hauled out garbage and scrubbed the toilet. Meanwhile, Miss Piggy would sit in her office with her son’s girlfriend, who was inexplicably there every single day, and talk about how black men like to sleep with lots of women and have “tons of baby-mamas.” That’s a direct quote.
The final blow came at Christmas time. My parents were flying in from Alaska to spend the holiday with me, and I asked Miss Piggy if I could take off Christmas eve and the day after Christmas. Her response? “I have a practice to run, you know, and that’s not going to work for me. You’re fired.” End of discussion. End of job. I felt like I had hit the lottery.
Shortly after that, I sent Miss Piggy a letter, demanding all of the back pay she owed me and informing her that if she didn’t compensate me, I would be seeing her again in court. My mother-in-law, a probation officer, bumped into her at court one day, and Miss Piggy handed her check for the money I was owed. “I guess K finally got what she wanted,” she said to my MIL.
She was a crazy bitch. No wonder Kermit was always so hesitant in the Muppet movies.
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 just quit MVWJ today. After a long job search in this crappy economy, I took a job at a really cool-looking little restaurant that sold comfort food. The staff all seemed really nice, but a lot of the customers were a different story. Since it was a cheap place it attracted cheap people, and despite providing great service I would usually get crappy tips (or, on five occasions in one month, no tip at all). Also, I noticed that the manager, a fat bearded hipster type who thought he was ultra cool, would nit pick every little thing I did. He expected me to pick up the food the very second it came out and would scream for me to get the food, even if I was taking a table’s order.
One of the owners was even worse, criticizing everything I did even though I worked very hard, always cleaning tables, picking up dirty napkins as customers ate, etc. One night, many people were ordering beer and of course I ID’d people who looked to be on the young side. A couple who looked to be in their mid twenties came in and ordered beer. I didn’t ID them, and the owner was there. He asked if I ID’d them specifically and I told him I did not, so he ordered me to ID them after giving me a lengthy lecture, even though I had been ID’ing all night. Turns out they were both 25.
Another time, the owner held a meeting that I had to go to on my day off (unpaid, of course). One of the issues he addressed was that he wanted every server working at least four days a week. When I told him I could only work three because I had to look for a second job to supplement the measly money I made, he replied, “Then go because we don’t want people just passing though.” Meanwhile, the manager who did scheduling (and always seemed nice) kind of hushed him and continued to give me three days a week.
The last straw was when the manager gave me a shift working until three in the morning, then a morning shift the very next day. I sent her a very nice, polite email telling her that I was sorry for the little notice but that I would not be working there anymore. I thanked her for giving me the job. When I got a reply back, I expected it to be a nice email. Instead, she wrote, “Thanks for the notice. I do hope you’re more professional at your next job.” To which I responded, “I am as professional as I am treated.” Way to be appreciated for busting my behind for so little money.
I applied for MVWJ at a certain heated sandwich fast-food chain the summer before I was going away to college. I should have known better than to take the job when the fat greasy manager said he’d hire me even though I didn’t have any experience and “didn’t know anything.” It was close enough for me to ride my bike to work though and I wanted the extra money for school, so I showed up 20 minutes early on my first day only to get yelled at for 20 minutes about being hours late. My manager wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise though, literally not stopping long enough for me to tell him my shift didn’t start at 9am like he insisted it did. He insisted that I was supposed to be there early enough to open up the store, even though it was my first day. Confused I decided to just go with it and did my best at working.
I didn’t know any of the sandwiches, but he insisted I should have memorized them by now, and he kept putting me on the line so that when people asked me for a certain number or named sandwich I’d have to look up at the menu and try and read all the ingredients and then do my best. There was literally no training; no one had shown me how to properly make these sandwiches at all. They also didn’t show me how to remove the sandwiches from the toaster, so I was burning my hands on these hot sandwiches for three days before a coworker noticed I was doing it wrong and showed me how to do it right.
The worst part of the job was not cleaning out the rotting mayo bins or being laughed at by my manager and co-workers because I was going to college. The worst part was standing on the line and listening to the manager flirt with this one particular woman — a nurse who worked in a practice near our store — every time she came in. He sounded like a creepy stalker, saying, “Oh I saw you at the store the other day” or “I saw you at the baseball game,” and he somehow never picked up on her constantly telling him that she had a boyfriend with a disgusted look on her face.
After about a month of being constantly yelled at for not knowing the rules or how to do things and being late when I never was, I finally got fed up and yelled back. Turns out that he had been getting me confused for ANOTHER girl he’d hired at the same time and actually shown the training videos to and you know, trained! She worked a different shift than me and even to the very end he insisted that I was the one that was supposed to know how to open and close up shop and do everything despite never having been trained. I finally got fed up with him being a complete power-tripping asshole who acted like being the manager of a pathetic sandwich store was the most awesome thing ever and lied, saying that college started a month before it actually did. Not like he’d know the difference.
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.
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 unemployed and about to start a job search when a broke my foot. The cast came off after 10 weeks, I then spent another week relearning to walk. By this point I was destitute and had to find a job pronto. I answered an ad for a restaurant hostess, though I had no previous experience. I limped to the restaurant at 4:00pm, as instructed. The bartender instructed me to fill out an application; I was told to wait until the manager had a chance to meet me. I had lots of time to take in the surroundings—an ostentatiously-fancy joint named after the European chef (whose name I had no idea how to pronounce), an ornate display case near the door hawking signed copies of the chef’s autobiography. The manager finally breezed into the bar after 45 minutes. He looked at me and my application, said little, then darted away. I stood near the entry waiting for him to reappear, wondering if I’d been excused. The phone at the hostess station began to ring, by the forth ring the manager abruptly stuck his head through a doorway and gestured toward the phone, implying I should answer it. Then he disappeared.
I did my best, under the circumstances— I accepted a reservation for the following evening, writing the name in the reservation book, though I’d no idea if there’d actually be a table available or any idea how one determined this. The phone continued to ring, I continued to answer, mispronouncing the restaurant’s name with a different variant each time. More reservations, idle queries about a menu I knew nothing about, requests to speak to numerous people who presumably worked there. I was able to figure out how to put calls on hold, but was lost when determining how to transfer calls or to where they should be transferred. I accidentally disconnected the manager’s South American girlfriend twice within 10 minutes—when I asked “who may I say is calling?” the third time, she unleashed her fury in an ear-piercing Brazilian accent. I kept expecting somebody to relieve me of the constantly ringing phone. What sort of established three-star New York restaurant gives an untrained 24 year old stranger total dominion over their reservation book and incoming calls? Maybe I’d been hired, but nobody remembered to tell me?
The manager was no where to be found, and everyone else was too busy to assist me, rolling their eyes or glaring whenever I asked a question. Before I knew it, several hours had passed. Finally, around 10:00pm, the manager reappeared and told me I could leave. I was exhausted, unsteady on my barely-healed foot and frazzled after several hours of unprepared hostessing. I bolted without confirming that I’d been hired—freedom! No more ringing phone, no more screeching Brazilian battle-ax, no more standing, no more nauseating post-modern decor. I limped home exhausted but happy that I’d at least found a job. Apparently. The next day I phoned to see when they wanted me to come back. The short answer was “never.” Outraged that I’d answered their phone for five hours as some sort of unspecified audition, I limped back the next day and demanded payment for my time. The disdainful manager at first tried to give me the brush-off, but finally gave me a few twenties to get rid of me. I spent the $60 on a comfortable pair of cheap shoes, and continued my job search.
After crashing my father’s car, I needed to find a job to pay him back for the insurance deductible. I had gotten a flyer from someone advertising for a job that paid $12 an hour. For someone who was 16 at the time, this seemed like a pretty good deal. I called the number on the flyer and was informed that it would be for a telemarketing job, soliciting donations for a police organization. I got an interview and was subsequently hired. My first day on the job, I found out that I would not be making $12 per hour until I had worked 40 hours. They required me to work at least 20 hours a week. I was concerned that this would be a little too much for me, being a junior in high school. I brought this concern to the manager, who told me to drop some classes so that I could work more. Looking back, this was a very blatant red flag, but since it was my first job, I just shrugged it off and thought he was crazy.
I received just about the worst training ever. I was trained by two different guys who told me to do completely opposite things (“Ask them how they’re doing, you gotta build your rapport with them” and “Don’t ask them how they’re doing, if they’re having a bad day, they’ll tell you about it”). I was told to really push them to give the organization money. It truly made me feel like a terrible person to listen to people sing the blues about how broke they were and still try to press money out of them. I heard it all. Seemingly, everyone had just lost their jobs or had a family member who had recently died or had cancer. On my sixth day, I showed up, only to find out that I had been suspended for not meeting the quota for donations. Needless to say, I was not very happy about going in to work (I lived on the other side of town and had no car) only to have to go right back home. The next day, I showed up, only to find out that I was being fired. On Labor Day. When the buses were not running.
A couple months later, they called me and offered me my job back. I told them I would never set foot in that place again.
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.
