My Very Worst Job was at a copier company when I was 20. My boyfriend and I were a bit poor back then, so I didn’t have much in the way of proper business attire. As such, I showed up for the interview in a sundress. The two brothers who owned the place barely asked me anything and then hired me on the spot.
I was the office manager, answering phones, taking complaints from customers (of which there were several) and trying to appease them, typing, filing, interacting with the techs and doing their accounts payable and receivable. I was also forced to call the customers and harass them when their payments were late.
The accounts almost never balanced. And we’re not talking a few dollars here and there; they would be missing thousands at a time. Thinking I might be making a mistake at first, I would check and double check my work, but the results were always the same. Luckily I had no actual access to the money itself so no one could blame me, but I was still afraid of the wrath of the younger brother (who we’ll get to in a bit).
Much of the time, I was left completely alone. The techs would be out in the field, and the two brothers were out doing god knows what. They were rather lazy and didn’t seem to understand how to run a business. When the older of the two did come in (which was more often than the younger) he would tell me stories about stealing his wife’s credit card and racking up charges on it at brothels in Vegas where he would sleep with other women. When I expressed my disgust, he acted like he couldn’t understand what was wrong with that. Once he brought in a porn CD and sat there watching it right in front of me on my own computer. At one point he asked me why I never wore sundresses to the office anymore and admitted it was the reason they hired me.
The younger brother was even worse. He was a total pig regarding women as well, and an a-hole besides. He made it clear that I wasn’t allowed to do anything at all in the office besides my exact work (not even Solitaire or something to pass the time), despite the fact that on most days I would finish my job duties in an hour or two and have no one to even talk to. Whenever his fiancé would call, he would yell all sorts of rude things at her and cuss her out and tell her to stop bothering him. When he hung up, he would call her names and make fun of her.
Despite the fact that he was almost never in the office, when he DID make it in, he would strut around like he was God’s gift to the world and try his best to be intimidating. He liked to stand right behind me and stare over my shoulder as I worked (and criticize and nitpick whenever he could). He would get into rages and yell all the time and put me down. He also made a way bigger deal about the accounts receivable discrepancy than his brother. All while sniffing continually as if he had a perpetually runny nose.
Things got so bad that I would cry every morning when I woke up, just knowing that I had to go back to that place. There was a huge turnover because the techs would get fed up and leave. The younger brother took a liking to one tech, S, who started later than many of the others. S got tons of special treatment, and instead of working, he spent most of his time hanging out with the younger brother doing god knows what away from the office. Eventually, S came in one day when no one else was around and told me what was really going on. It turned out he actually couldn’t stand the younger brother who had been stealing tons of money from the company to support his cocaine habit. That explained the missing money and the constant sniffling.
Right after that, I searched extra hard and found a great job to go to. I gave them only one week’s notice, and they were lucky to have gotten that.
MVWJ started out as my dream job. I was a teacher at a preschool, working with children aged 2-6. I had a horrible co-worker that we found out later used to tie children up and scream at them, and my boss had let her go. She had been working the closing shift, which was until 6 p.m., and as a result of her being let go, we were stuck without a closer.
Rather than the supervisers and the boss taking turns closing each day of the week, I volunteered to take the position until someone could be found to replace her, even though it was a burden on me as I lived over 30 minutes from my work, which meant I was getting home very late in the evening. I gave the boss four months to find someone.
Fast forward 18 months… She had hired and fired a few different people in that time, all who weren’t qualified to work the closing position, so I was still stuck with it. I was thinking about leaving because my husband got a great job which wouldn’t require us both to work, and when I told my boss about him getting the job, her first question was, “So, are you quitting then?” I didn’t say anything.
Several months later, she was getting ready to take some personal time off. She pulled me aside and said she needed to know right away if I was quitting so she knew if she needed to hire a teacher or not. I was flabbergasted! Wasn’t she supposed to have found someone almost two years ago? I told her, “Yes, I’m leaving, and this is my two weeks notice.”
My replacement started on my last day.
MVWJ was at an after school center. I thought working for a centre aligned to a religious community would be a nicer place to work, but it wasn’t. It was awful. My job was to work two to three hours per day picking kids up from school, feeding them a snack, supervising homework and a clean up. There were 50 children to three staff (legal in my country) and they ran the show. They were allowed to do whatever they wanted. They abused staff, destroyed property and hit and bullied each other — it was complete chaos. They were not allowed to play with whatever they wanted (some just wanted to play chess all afternoon I still don’t understand why this was an issue), they had to play with whatever toys were “programmed,” which they had no interest in at all. So they spent the afternoon throwing toys, food and each other around the large room.
The senior staff member alternated between complaining to the director about me as I attempted to bring some sort of order to this (resulting in her following me around to watch me as I worked. She didn’t bother to restore order, but just stared) and hiding in the kitchen because there were no children in there. The final straw was the Christmas party. It was a hot day (I live in the Southern Hemisphere) and the children were all inside. They were given food to eat and the 12 year olds spent their time taking bites out of their food and throwing it onto the carpet. The senior staff member and the director let them, as I was on clean up and they were leaving an hour before close. I was in the kitchen furiously washing up as hundreds of items were given to me and a volunteer, who was the only one interested in helping with this fiasco at all.
The director periodically would come into the kitchen to abuse me about the chaos outside and demand that I play with these children. I would quietly apologise to the volunteer who was now doing my job and attempted to do the jobs of the three others while they watched. I spent 60 minutes cleaning a room the size of a half tennis court and later it was just that bad. I unbelievably lasted another couple of weeks when I told off a 12 year old who desperately deserved it after he screamed abuse at me all afternoon and was complained about by a parent. I never went back, never gave notice and officially still work there.
I am currently working My Very Worst Job. I am a 911 dispatcher and though the job isn’t always all that bad, it has its days. I have a list of my top five worst calls, all of which involve someone (who didn’t even have any kind of life threatening emergency to report) cursing me out and calling me every name in the book (dumb bitch seems to be a favorite), sometimes calling back two or three times in the span of three minutes because they didn’t understand why I couldn’t magically teleport an ambulance to their house (and all of which involve me going into the bathroom and crying afterwards). There have been calls where people would yell at me when I asked them their address and phone number even refusing to give it to me because I’m supposed to have computers and whatnot that tell me all that information and they shouldn’t have to tell me too. I’ve even had people call me, on 911 mind you, asking why they’re stuck in traffic, whether a road was open or closed during storms, asking why they hear sirens a couple blocks away, etc.
I think most of my frustration comes from my co-workers though.
In our office, we have four dispatchers, three supervisors and one head supervisor. The supervisors and head supervisor all hold that title, not because they’re particularly good at dispatching and promoted their way up, but because they have field experience, the belief being that if we have experienced field personnel dispatching, then they’ll be better able to understand what’s going on and to augment dispatches accordingly. The problem is, coming into dispatch is a minimum two year commitment and it’s a good way to promote so we never get anyone who sticks around much longer than two years and it can take a year or more just to get a lot of the basics down. That being said, a general sense of incompetence and mediocrity overwhelms our supervisors. In my four years here, I’ve worked for (and helped train) six different supervisors. Because they do the exact same job as the dispatchers with only minor supervisory work, they all come in with the attitude of “I’m new here and don’t know a lot and even though I’m your supervisor, I’m ready and willing to learn from you and treat you as an equal.” That quickly morphs however into “I AM YOUR KING/QUEEN. YOU WILL BOW DOWN TO ME!”
Even though dispatchers are required to type a certain word-per-minute and have a basic understanding of computers, our supervisors have no such requirements. I’ve had supervisors who were so bad with computers, they didn’t even know how to check their email and couldn’t type quickly enough to take down the information during a call, choosing instead to hand write it during the call and enter it into the computer after the caller hung up – causing us to have to call many people back to clarify address information because they didn’t give it correctly or the supervisor wrote it down wrong.
Dealing with the field can be a painful addition to this equation too. I had a firefighter call one time and tell one of my supervisors, C, for about five minutes what a dumb bitch he thought I was and that I needed to cut the attitude because my job was just to answer phones. C thought she was somehow doing me a favor by nodding and going “uh huh…uh huh” during the conversation and not taking it to the head supervisor who, at least, would have thoroughly chewed the firefighter out. After crying for two hours about it, another dispatcher brought this to her attention and then C started crying and getting all wishy washy about it (she was notorious for that). She then got even more upset when she asked me for a hug to “make it better” and I told her no. I told her she didn’t even have any right to be upset about the whole thing, I did, and I certainly wasn’t going to make her feel better about the whole thing.
My junior year of high school, I had MVWJ at a well-known smoothie chain as a smoothie maker and cashier. I worked with a guy, the night manager, who I was distantly acquainted with from my high school, two teenagers from the owner’s church and once or twice with the day manager, Candy. The night manager was a larger kid and he would take home a six-pack of large smoothies at the end of every shift. We were all allowed to make a drink while we were working, but I thought that was a little excessive. He was nice enough at work, but would leave early when he was signed up to close. He wouldn’t acknowledge that we knew each other at school either, even though we worked together three-plus nights a week.
The two kids from the owner’s church were extremely sheltered and would constantly ask me questions about dating, parties, drinking and smoking, etc. It was like explaining to aliens how not to creep out your date or what kissing “was like,” or other stuff that was extremel weird to talk about with people you hardly knew. They were both 17, but weren’t going to be allowed to technically date until after they turned 20.
Part of my job was to clean the juicing machines: orange, carrot and wheatgrass. Orange juicer was the least disgusting to clean, but you had to go in with a tiny brush and clean 75 tiny grinder teeth individually to get all the pulp and rind out, then spray it down into a bucket and make sure it wasn’t sticky. The carrot machine was the same concept, only everything was extremely tiny, so it took FOR-EV-ER. The wheatgrass machine was just disgusting and the grass left this gummy residue all over. Ugh. It would never fail that 10 minutes to close, we would have just finished cleaning the juicers and someone would walk in and order a 36 oz. carrot juice. Who drinks 36 oz. of carrot juice at 9:30 at night?
The owner, who I never met face-to-face, would stop in the store at random times and take money out of the register to dole out to his eight children (he was the member of an evangelical-type religion). So the register was almost always off, however I don’t think anyone ever got in trouble for it. I showed up for work one Saturday morning and there was a sign for employees on the back door (where we came in and the deliveries were made). It basically said: “The store has closed suddenly. Sorry for any inconvenience. Your tax information will be mailed next February to whatever address we have on file.” I still can’t walk into one of these establishments without cringing, although I do still find the drinks delicious. The only lasting benefit is I can now whip up a helluva smoothie at home and I got my full servings of fruit and vegetables each day for six months!
