The Tuxedo Shop

My Very Worst Job actually started out as my best job. In the summer of 2005, I had just finished my second year of university and I found a job working in a formal wear store. Ours was the main store with about 10 satellite stores and we were the “tuxedo factory,” preparing and shipping out 600 tuxes a week for weddings, grads and proms. My first year in the store was amazing. I loved the production floor manager and my co-workers were a lot of fun. I was a hard worker and I was reliable, so when the summer rush ended, they offered me Saturday work throughout the school year.

But things turned sour when my manager quit. She chose to do so less than a month before the summer rush was to begin and the production floor was left with three employees: T, a seamstress, me and B, a general production worker. B was in his 40s, and had worked there for ages, but had never been given any opportunities for advancement. He told the company that he would quit unless they made him the new floor manager, so he became my boss. From that moment, he turned on me. I think he might have felt like I wouldn’t listen to him, since I had been so close to the old manager. He immediately made a number of unnecessary changes, just for the sake of showing us that he was the boss and he could change things if he wanted to. They made things much less efficient and then he would tell the owner that it was my fault that work had slowed down or if I did things the old way, he would tell the owner that I was undermining him. He also would change things and not tell me, so that he could get me in trouble for not doing things his way.

He hired on a number of summer employees, mostly from the college nearby. They were all grossly incompetent and I found myself re-doing a lot of the work they did, because even after sending a garment back to be fixed, it would come back just as bad, or worse. B then told the owner that my work had slowed way down, and that I obviously hated him and was trying to sabotage him. I got called into a meeting with B and the owner, where they confronted me. I told the owner that the rest of the summer staff were incapable of doing their work and that I felt like I had taken on about four employees’ worth of work on my own, and in light of that, I was actually working incredibly fast. The owner made some fleeting comment about communication between B and I, and left it at that. I confronted B later about the staff and he told me that he had to hire bad workers, because if he hired good workers, they would quit when they were offered something better.

B’s campaign against me finally did see me fired from the job. In August, after four months of this abuse, I was hit by a car on my way to work. My foot was injured and I was unable to work for a few weeks. When I called in to say that I would be able to start working again, the owner came on the phone to say that in light of how things weren’t working out, they’d found someone else to replace me and that “we’d better just call it a day, hmm?” Talk about adding insult to injury.