Catching Heat

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.