I applied to the doctor’s office when I saw it on my university’s job listing website. The description said it had part-time hours during school and full-time hours during the summer. It was perfect. I applied and was offered the job.

I was eager to start full-time because I needed the money for my bills. I started “full-time” only to find out that meant under 30 hours a week. I was struggling financially and had to take on another job, at an old job 2 hours away at my hometown, in which I worked 24 hours over the weekend. Apparently the doctor didn’t understand my need for extra hours because even though I told him multiple times I was going home to work he would always ask, “Are you going home this weekend to see your family?”

It would have been more beneficial for me to just live with my family, but I had signed a lease on an apartment with a roommate thinking I would be able to live in my college town. Plus, I felt bad for quitting somewhere so quickly.

As I worked over the summer I got more and more responsibility from the supervisor who I was taking over for. Soon I was in charge of processing insurance claims, running payments and all other general office work.

When school started I went back to my six hours a week. I soon took on a second babysitting job in the evenings and weekends to keep up, no longer did I have time to drive home every weekend. Strangely enough, every time I started going in for the 2 hours at the end of the day I had the exact same amount of work I had every day during the summer. I had no idea what my supervisor was doing all day, but it wasn’t her job.

I should mention that this office was extremely strict. No gum, no cell phones and not even any food was allowed. Of course, my supervisor got to do all these things because she was the doctor’s wife. Minus the paycheck there was no incentive to working there such as a free lunch or cookies for a birthday or something special.

But then my co-worker told me there was a Christmas bonus. I was so excited when Christmas came around and I really needed the money. I opened up my check to find $25. Not what I was expecting, but I decided it was better than nothing and tried to be happy about it. A couple hours later a women called that occasionally referred patients to our business, “Oh I just wanted to call and tell the doctor thank you for the gift card. That was so kind. I really wasn’t expecting it. Please tell him thank you for me!” Surely no one would be that excited for a gift card under $25.

A week later I couldn’t take it any longer and asked my co-worker, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want, but I’m just curious what you got for your bonus.”

“$267, you?”

I could barely get the words out to tell her how much I got. She tried to make me feel better by saying it was probably a percentage thing. Sure she was “full-time” all the time, but I had worked full-time all summer, came in whenever I could, and worked full-time every break I got at school.

Around that time I got offered a really great internship. I worked the two hours Monday, Wednesday and Thursdays at the doctor’s office and the internship was going to be all day Monday and Wednesday. I was so happy to have an excuse to quit and told them that I was no longer going to be able to work because of the days I was having to do the internship.

My supervisor’s response, “You don’t work there Thursdays? Well you can just come in then.”

Somehow my attempt to quit did not work.

I didn’t have as much work as I did before my internship, but I still had 2+ days of work every time I would come in. Finally since I am graduating I was able to tell them I wouldn’t be working once I finished school because I was going to find a full-time job in my field. I told them about three months in advance.

Two weeks ago I had a giant group presentation that we had been working on all semester that went into my work time. I told my supervisor I would be late, but I would come in as soon as it was over. She texted me the day before saying it had been slow all week and that I wouldn’t need to come in.

The next week she told me the same thing. I again was grateful since it was finals week. When she sent that text I couldn’t help but thinking my last day was coming up, but couldn’t remember the exact week. Apparently it was that week. When I told her thanks for letting my have the day off she responded, “That was ur last day right? Thank u for all ur hard work.” Guess I’m not even getting a going away card.

I am currently working in MVWJ as a transportation dispatcher, which is basically getting our cabs to pick up train crews to go from point A to point B. The job itself wouldn’t be that bad if it weren’t for the company and the people who run it. It’s owned by a local guy who owns a good portion of business here in town. None of us ever know what we’re going to walk into on a daily basis. Our head supervisor is a former Marine, who if you dare get sick, you’re scheduled on your next day off, usually without warning. We are required to do what they call “highlight” early or late, which means we either have to come in four hours early or stay four hours late. I am on first shift, which means if I highlight early, it means getting up at 2am to see if I am needed at 3am (I live across the street so I don’t need to call any earlier) and there’s no guarantee that you have to go in early.

You rarely know if you will have to stay late until you’re already making other plans, after they’ve told you all day you weren’t needed. Nothing’s worse than when they decide to tell you as your putting your headset up and walking out the door. They’ve been known to chase people down in the parking lot to get them back in to stay! If you have a day that you can’t stay or come in, you’re written up, and they don’t care why. Most of us are parents and some of us have had massive health problems, but even when you’re contagious, you’re expected to be there. The supervisors are also some of the most ridiculous people that I have ever met in my life! One supervisor in particular will virtually scream at you from across the room for something you supposedly did wrong. He has been sent home for his behavior, but won’t ever get fired. I’ve been sexually harassed, insulted, screamed at, threatened, you name it.

One of the worst things is the intimidation tactics they use. They will scream at people on the floor, threatening to suspend them for insubordination for things that are just crazy. We work with the big train companies — CSX, Norfolk Southern, Sooline, Amtrak and Union Pacific. UP has their own system that we have to close out and sometimes, if we are unusually busy, we get behind doing this. That’s when the supervisors come out to yell at us for not getting them out fast enough and threatening suspension. I’ve never worked in a place where people are so afraid to come into work. The only reason why we stay is that the money is halfway decent but that’s about it. I guess it’s a bad sign when there are only three or four people out of about 200 to 300 who have been there longer than three or four years. One has been there about 10, but she’s the exception. All I can do is keep looking for something better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the start of my sophomore year of college, my aunt had hired me and my roommate to work at a store she was opening up in the mall in November.  Unfortunately, it was September, and I was out of money.  Since I had to find a way to pay rent and buy groceries, I found a job listing for a haunted house. J was the owner of a laser tag arena and he thought it would be goldmine to convert said arena into a haunted house for the month of October.

My roommate S and I were both desperate for money and decided to go to the orientation for potential employees or “spooks” as J liked to call us. Attending the orientation were about 30 people, all high school or college age. We were all hired on the spot.  The haunted house would be open every day, from 6-closing (basically, whenever J felt like closing). We were to be paid per shift, not per hour, getting paid higher on the weekends. All of our wages were to be paid at the laser tag/pizza party J was throwing on Halloween after our final shift. We were required to show up an hour before the shift started to get into costume, makeup, and take your place. This meant that we were all paid the same amount, regardless of what you did, or how long you were there.

This all might sound like a good idea, in theory, however, there were many haunted houses in the area. I should have been clued in to how horrible this would be on my first tour of the arena…I had attended haunted houses before. This looked more like a spook alley my middle school put on to raise money for a field-trip, not a Haunted House that people were supposed to shell out 10-15 bucks to get into. It was more of a maze of black lit rooms then anything scary. And how could we compete with the man with no legs that chased you on his hands at the Haunted Trails just 20 minutes away? How?

S and I were assigned to be skeletons. We were to hid in the darkness, and jump out at you, with only our white skeleton face and costume showing up in the black light. J had advertised for this heavily at the local colleges, so there was a good line the first night. During my first shift there, I got punched in the stomach. Having never been punched like that  before, I ended up vomiting. Awesome. Since I was required to work the whole shift to get paid for it (J’s words), I stayed my time and got made fun of by my fellow spooks. After a couple of other near misses, I got good at evading punches or scratches or other various things people do when you jump out at them.

Word started to get around town about how much this haunted house sucked. Most people attended the other, more terrifying haunted houses close by.  Because of this, most of my shifts were spent lying or sitting on the floor trying to read my flashcards or talking to whichever spook was close by until someone would shout “someone’s coming!” and we’d all take our places. The weekends were a bit busier, but never the steady flow of people J had envisioned. We would all do the best we could with what we had, but all we had were crappy costumes, bad makeup, and an even worse location. We managed to get a few scares out of some people, but most people were only mildly startled.

The most frightening part was when a guy in a Jason mask would chase people with a chainsaw. Since this was all in a relatively small laser tag arena, the chainsaw made the entire place smell of gasoline. Both S and I would dread coming into work, as it was spectacularly boring, but neither of us ever missed an assigned shift. We both needed the money. Finally, October 31st arrived. The last day! And, it being Halloween, we actually had a good amount of people show up. When it was over, the party began. And by party, I mean J making us tear down the haunted house and set up for laser tag. But we at least had pizza. At about 2AM, J sat us all down to talk to us about the last month. He stated that “he didn’t do as well as he thought” and that “I’m gonna have to pay you all in 2 weeks instead of tonight” since he just hadn’t figured out the “numbers” yet. I was pissed. I needed that money to pay rent. After much complaints, he pretty much told us that there was nothing HE could do and we were free to leave.

Two weeks went by, and I hadn’t received a check or even a phone call. So I called him. He said it would be another two weeks. After a week, I called him again to remind him that he needed to pay me in a week. He tried to push it to two more weeks again. I told him that he had one week before I took action. He laughed, and scoffed at what I, a 19-year-old kid could do. He then offered me free laser tag for life in exchange of paying my the $500 he owed me. Um, no. After the week, I called him again. He hung up on me.

I then, along with S, made my way to small claims court and filed a claim. When they served him, he called me up, cursing me out for being a “trouble-maker” and “instigator.” He said I should just accept his free laser tag offer, because neither I nor Stacy were ever going to see a penny from him. I laughed at him and told him that if he didn’t pay the entire amount, plus court fees, in cash or money order, I would see him in court.

Another week went by, and he called me again telling me my money was ready. I don’t know why he had the change of heart, but I went to pick up my money as fast as I could. As S and I were picking up our money, he yelled at me again and told me he never wanted to see my face in his place of business again. Um, no problem, man. No problem.

A year later, he went bankrupt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nervously, I replied, “I am.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.