A few years ago, when I was 20, I got a job working at a popular pizza chain answering the phone, placing orders and occasionally helping make pizzas. I got the job for extra money to help with college. The manager, “Chris,” seemed like a nice, cool guy. He was kinda cute and a little flirty, but I was a very naive 20 year-old, and didn’t think much of it. On my first day of work, a few of the fellow employees, Chris and I decided to head to a bar after work. At the bar, he was really fun and started flirting with me, but since he had a girlfriend, I just figured that he was just a flirty guy. A few weeks went by at work, I got into the routine of the job and became fairly good friends with everyone. I even got a job for one of my best friends. Chris and I would joke around at work, as would everyone else.

It all started falling into the drama category when one night, while everyone was at a bar for a fellow co-workers birthday, Chris started flirting with me and asked me on a date (oh, how I was so naive not to realize it was sexual harassment). I laughed it off, since he was drunk, and told him that I’m sure he is very happy with his girlfriend and he was just being silly. The next day, I pulled up into the parking lot and another car came squeeling to a stop at the spot next to me. I was a little taken aback and as I was grabbing my purse and hat, a woman knocked on my window. I realized it was Chris’s girlfriend, so I rolled it down. She looked like she’d been crying and proceeded to ask me if I was seeing him. I promised her I wasn’t and she asked if he had asked me out or had been hitting on me. I told her, honestly, that he had, but it was only when he had been drinking (how stupid was I?). She calmed down and thanked me for being honest with her.

I went into work and was a bit distraught. I went straight to Chris and told him I had to talk to him. I told him what happened and he just looked at me and said, “And?” I couldn’t believe that he saw there was nothing wrong with the situation. I told him that he needed to let his girlfriend know that he wants to be with her and maybe spend more time with her. He was just blase about it and said she needed to get over it. I emphasized that this made me uncomfortable and he needed to stop flirting with me. He seemed to get upset about this and then decided he was going home. One co-worker saw that I was upset and said, “Hey, I have a story that will make you laugh!” I am quoting this directly (it’s engraved in my mind, since I was shocked from how horrible it was): “My uncle worked at a school for ‘special people’ (he used a different word) and he took a girl into the janitor’s closet and had sex with her. She came out of the closet with her pants around her ankles, crying that her butt hurt.” He then began laughing like it was funny. I just stared at him in horror, excused myself and went outside to cry.

A few weeks went by without incident and I had begun to date a guy in one of my classes. One day he showed up while I was working and brought me a necklace that reminded him of me. I thought it was sweet, as did my best friend. But Chris told me that he didn’t approve of friends visiting employees while at work. Mind you, everyone had friends visiting and since we were attached to a gas station, everyone had people they knew coming in. Chris even said that the necklace looked cheap. I, stupidly, ignored him. About a week later, I got a phone call from work, while enjoying the day with my best friend. Chris said they were short on people and needed me to answer the phones. I told him I only had my shirt with me and had plans later. He said he only needed me to work for an hour and I could use his office to answer phones since I wasn’t dressed for work. My best friend decided to come with me and wait.

So, I went to work. When I got into his office he showed me how his phone worked and then went to make pizzas. Later he returned and suddenly closed the door, so it was just us in his office. He just stared at me and then this wonderful conversation happened:

Him: “So you have plans tonight?”

Me: “Um, yeah”

Him: “With that guy that came by a few weeks ago?”

Me: “No, me and my best friend are having a girls night out.”

Him: “I really don’t appreciate this.”

Me: “Wha-?”

Him: “You need to open your mind before you open your legs!!”

I sat there stunned for a second, then anger took over. I started screaming at him that he had no right to say that to me and that I quit. I took of the work shirt (I had a tank top underneath thankfully) and threw it at him. I stormed out of his office, told my friend that I needed to get the hell out of there. And that was the end of MVWJ. I actually saw Chris just a month ago at a local restaurant. He was there with some of the old fellow employees and they wanted me to come say hi. So, I went by and someone asked me if I was seeing anyone. I told them that I didn’t have time for a relationship. That’s when Chris said, “Oh, looks like she’s still a cold-hearted bitch.”  I didn’t even know what to say except “Go f*** yourself” and left.

I found out last week, that he had gotten fired because he is addicted to meth.

When I was 16, I got a job working as an office assistant at the new dentist my grandmother went to. At first, it seemed like a great first job. The dentist was young, handsome and seemingly nice and the other ladies that I worked with were great. After about a month or so, things started to go wrong. The dentist would continuously screw up relatively routine procedures (for instance, he would perforate the sinus on every surgical tooth extraction he did) and often did more extensive work than was necessary so the patient would have to pay more. Then his weird mood swings kicked in. He would get into huge screaming fights with his wife on the phone, then mess up a procedure because he was mad. Finally, the office manager quit and since he couldn’t find anyone else to take her place, I got to work 50 hours a week (for six dollars an hour!), processing insurance, being a receptionist, cleaning and actually assisting on procedures. I screwed up the billing the first time I had to do it and accidentally sent out bills to people with insurance pending. This brought a wave of people into the office, many with receipts stating that they had paid in cash and upon investigation, I found out that he had been taking the cash payment out of the computer system and creating phony insurance info.

The final straw came when he made me (remember, I was 16 and untrained) assist on a surgical extraction, holding the thing to suck the blood out of the wound. I quit then and there. His increasingly apparent coke habit, the porn that he had delivered to the office, his rages and the unethical and illegal things he did to peoples’ mouths was just too much. He (surprise) couldn’t find a replacement, so I came back for the last few weeks of the summer for 10 dollars an hour (a lot for a 16 year old) and spent the remaining time running an audit trail to send to the insurance companies. I recently found out he’s still in business, though I can’t imagine why. We did report him to OSHA, the Health Department, the insurance companies, and the IRS (he wasn’t paying our taxes that he took from our paychecks), but apparently they decided he was still okay to operate on people.

Like anyone who works in restaurant service I saw my fair share of insanity. There was the bartender/manager who drank away the profits, the line cooks who popped pills and juggled knives and the fellow waitstaff who stole tips. But at this plastic-plate, greasy-everything joint, the worst of the worst was far and away the customers. On Valentine’s Day, because I was the only single waitress on staff, I got tapped to pull doubles. Alone. After 12 hours of serving crappy food to cheap couples, enduing endless jokes about being dateless and watching several couples break up and storm out, leaving their checks unpaid, I finally took my last table.

At first, the group of 15 obese diners seemed like a godsend. They were polite, calm, orderly and friendly. I muscled up my last smile and gave them the best service I could manage, hoping for a tip big enough to cover the dine-and-dashers. But when the orders started to arrive, it all went to heck. The shrimp-to-catfish ratio on the fry plate was off; the burger buns were too small; the lettuce wasn’t crunchy enough; the Sprite tasted like 7up and it was all my fault. When all was said and done and all 15 lumbered off into the night, I searched the table for my tip. They had left me 37 cents. I ran out after them and saw them laughing and exchanging high-fives as they walked away.

Other tales of greatness include: the puker who, after vomiting onto the table next to him, wiped his mouth and ordered another basket of onion rings; the prostitute who stretched one cup of coffee for four hours while trolling unsuccessfully for dates; the belligerent who arrived at 5pm every Friday for cocktails and was forcibly removed by 6pm, drunk and swinging fists; and my favorite, the flash-n-grabber who would hang his member out of his pants under the table and, when he caught a waitress noticing, would reach up and goose her while she was still immobilized in shock while yelling, “Caught you lookin’!”

I was fired from this job when, after getting food poising from my employee meal, I missed two days of work. The manager actually sent one of the line cooks to my house to retrieve my apron. I told him I had lost it and later ritually burned it along with my left-over order slips.

After college, I saw an ad for a sports marketing position. When I went in, I was told that the interview would actually be a full day of work. I was introduced to the sales team I’d be working with and we all got into someone’s car and started to drive to a strip mall in the suburbs. The job ended up consisting of trying to sell coupons for the local baseball team to workers in retail stores and restaurants. We were told to ignore “no solicitation” signs. Between stops at strip malls, I sat in the backseat of the car with the “sales trainer.”  At one point, he asked if he could lean on me and put his head in my lap! After putting in a long degrading day, I was told that I had gotten the job. My parents begged me not to go back, but I did. The next day, we headed out and our trainer announced that he didn’t feel like selling that day and we were going to go to the movies instead. As if this wasn’t awkward enough, he whispered to me that he needed to go behind the movie theater and get high beforehand. Much to my parents’ happiness, that was my last day.

I thought I’d share My Very Worst Job ever with you, since I haven’t ever met anyone with a worse story than this one. I found myself looking for work last year, after the economy had tanked. Unemployment in my part of the country had jumped, so when I finally got an interview with a local hotel chain, I was pretty excited. I was hired right away, and asked to start the next day.

My first indication that this would not work out occurred at about 10 a.m. on my first day, when a homeless man, reeking of alcohol, stumbled up to the desk and asked for a room. Since he couldn’t afford one we sent him away, but a few minutes later the janitor came in to tell us he’d found him in the bushes outside – with a hooker.  That’s when I realized who the parade of slutty women paying monthly rates in cash were.

Later on I was shown the emergency procedures book, which included policies in case of drug raids, suicide attempts, rapes, assaults, hostage situations, and bomb threats. I was told that I likely wouldn’t need to use most of them, but last week there was that guy who overdosed, and on Thursday there was a major assault in the lobby, and some guy died in his room a few weeks back.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, I then found a note about a spate of car robberies happening in the parking lot.  I basically spent the rest of the shift watching my own car through the front window. I quit over the phone that night and never came back, not even to pick up my paycheck.

Fortunately, I haven’t had anything nearly as bad since.  I moved to Australia a few months later, and wound up in a couple of great jobs. Since I’ve been back in Canada the job market has really picked up again, so I’m hopeful that I will never, ever need to work in the kind of hotel that caters mostly to prostitutes, drug addicts, and one room that was either about illegal labourers or human trafficking – I left before I found out which one.

When I was 16, I got my first job as a concessionist at a movie theatre. I was so excited about the job and the general manager seemed really cool. Seemed being the operative word.

I was gung-ho and bright-eyed going into my first shift, but all that went down the drain when one of my first customers yelled at me because I was having a hard time with my cash register. I was home schooled at the time (sigh) and though I wasn’t incredibly awkward, I had a lot of anxiety when around all my co-workers. Then I realized that my manager wasn’t cool at all. Instead, he was a major douchebag who would yell at any employee he wanted to in front of whoever was around.

He also bragged about his romance with an employee who hadn’t been legal for long. He also noted how he hired most of the girls for their looks and would comment on their bodies to their faces. Four months in, after almost having a nervous breakdown because of all of the drugs (apparently marijuana can be consumed by putting it on your tongue! What you don’t learn from home schooling…), the sexual harassment, and mood swings, I turned in my two-week notice.

Flash forward to a year and a half later, I was a freshman going to community college to get my general ed classes out of the way. I naively thought that because I was older & more mature that I would be able to handle the same job once again. Things were good for a while (primarily because the entire staff from before had been overhauled), but the more I became integrated, the worse it became.

Over the course of the next year and four months, I was hit by a sign that a customer punched at my manager and then bullied into pressing assault charges on this woman because she was black and my manager was racist; was put in a headlock by an usher and had my head stuffed in a trash can; had by butt groped numerous times by other male employees; and was on the receiving end of many confounding mood swings. The final straw came when a co-worker tried to stick a blunt holder up my butt through my pants. I wrote a letter of resignation (which I also mailed to the head office) and didn’t look back.

A few months later I was contacted by H.R. from the head office, saying they were doing an investigation on the operation and were given my number by a co-worker. I told them everything, and the next week the manager was fired.

I was a Production Assistant on movies in my early 20s. I was so excited to enter a career in film and was ready for anything. During this time I was asked to do everything from removing stickers from fruit to scoring cocaine for the producer in charge. On one particular afternoon I thought I was going to get fired for sure when I mistakingly served a beef hamburger rather than a veggie patty to a lifelong vegetarian who worked on the film. I was mortified, but honestly had no idea what I was doing as I was here to learn about film rather than work in food service. Working between 12 and 18 hours a day and being under so much pressure and stress, I would make errors here and there and was constantly getting yelled at. One low budget movie in particular was funded by the Mob. The Executive Producer was a roided out guy named Vinnie with a 30-inch neck. I was terrified not only for my job, but for my life. After being threatened to be beat up by a B-list actor I decided this was just not worth it and I got out of movies once and for all.