MVWJ was a couple years ago at a florist. I love flowers and thought it would be an enjoyable job. It would have been were it not for The Office From Hell. The designers all attended church together. One of their husband was the pastor there and she was opposed to wearing any lower garment other than skirts as a religious conviction. Another’s husband was a deejay at the local Christian radio station, which they always listened to at work too. This would’ve been fine, except for the fact that I am an atheist and that wasn’t fine with them. The owner was like Ms. Swan, from MADtv, complete with insane clothes and incredibly rude, inappropriate comments. She would show up in her bedazzled jeans with gold and purple sequins and say things in a mocking tone.
Rachel, who hated Ms. Swan and totally lacked the social skills to acquire a job, was my supervisor, but fortunately for her she was leftover from when her sister’s rich husband had owned the place, and was therefore the only person there who could run it; even Ms. Swan could not. Rachel looked like Mariah Carey if she grew a beard, shaved it and covered the five o’clock shadow with creepy pancake makeup. What’s worse was that Rachel had the monopoly on the place and she knew it.
I spent six months kissing Rachel’s enormous ass and trying to read her mind. I would do something as she had previously instructed me to, only to be called stupid when she found out what I’d done. Bringing up the fact that I was following her directions would result in her explaining that I “should’ve known this was different” or denying she’d said it to begin with. I was terrified of screwing up, but when I did (always in a very minor way) Rachel would make sure I understood how stupid I was for it. In reality, I was very skilled at my job based on what the owner and other employees would tell me, but I always felt utterly inept and incompetent based on the abuse of my supervisor and spent my time at that job falling into bed at night and crying to my fiancé because the emotional stress was so much.
I mentioned before that I am an atheist, but I have no stickers on my car, no shirts, nothing displaying this information. I do nothing to advertise it, but of course, that wasn’t good enough for Rachel and the other ladies. Where I attended church and more importantly, would I attend church with them, became major focuses of our conversations. Gay people who came in ordering flowers for their partners were openly sneered at and declared “disgusting” by the employees (I’m also bisexual). African Americans who came in were made fun of as soon as they left the building. As the only one not partaking in their hate fest, I obviously didn’t fit in. Besides all of this (or maybe alongside it) was the fact that Rachel was almost definitely a painfully repressed 35 year old virgin and hated the fact that I had a love life. She would tell me how “cute” my fiancé was every opportunity she got, and even said at one point that she needed one of him for Christmas. This was not normal girl-to-girl flattery, but Single White Female-esque weirdness.
She would also call me at home every day I was off to ask about things she could’ve figured out or things that I had left notes about. This was a passive-aggressive move that started after I’d called her at home quite a few times, because she’d freak out if I made any decision without asking first. One day, after months of explaining to me that we could use the internet whenever we wanted, I was on NPR’s website while Rachel was on FOX News. Within hours, it was being explained to me that the “internet was for home.” My employment ended when I asked Rachel for a certain day off, to which she agreed. Weeks passed and when the day arrived I was about to begin my daughter’s birthday party when she called to inform me that it was a busy day and they’d have to cut me down to one day a week. I told them no thank you.
MVWJ was actually kind of pathetic, but thankfully short. I was 17, had absolutely zero job experience, and needed money. There was a small, trendy coffee shop in our neighborhood that had bounced from owner to owner for the past decade. I went in to interview with the latest owner, who seemed like a nice, professional guy. However, he would not be running the café. He’d bought the café so his wife, who spoke poor English, would have something to do. I spent most of my “training” helping a few of their friends lug huge refrigeration units and scraping the scum from the floor with a butterknife. It was on this day that the couple decided I would be paid national minimum wage, which was actually over two dollars less than state minimum wage. Joy. They paid me with straight cash and told me to come back the next day. I was their single employee, as they thought it was too much money to hire even one more person.
I had to arrive at four thirty to get ready for our five a.m. opening rush, which was a total joke. Maybe three people came in before seven thirty, but I was too busy preparing breakfast stuff to complain. The mammoth cleaning effort hadn’t been extended to the cooking/food handling equipment, which looked like they had been bought in the mid-eighties and hadn’t been cleaned since. I got to leave that greasy horror and run the till later that morning, and another problem became apparent. I had gotten very little training at the till, and they hadn’t briefed me on the drink names at all. So an order would consist of me stammering out “uh, hi” and the customer rattling off their drink order, which I would have to get the wife for. She would snap the drink names at me and get them all herself, skulking off to the back as soon as she was done.(I found out later she was watching me on the security video feed)
Enter a new customer, lather, rinse repeat. I eventually got a little better at orders, but then she would storm out and scold me for not including tax in the total. She didn’t know how to either, and so when she took the till to show me she just spent a half hour fiddling with it. After a few hours of stimulating conversation with our resident crazy homeless guy, I got paid for my shift in cash and was told to call in the next day if I could work. I went home and slept for a few hours, decided that the little money I was given really wasn’t worth it, and didn’t call.
The day after that, she called and chewed me out for not wanting to work, passive-aggressively hinting that I was just lazy and wanted to get money for doing nothing. I hung up after being verbally abused for a few minutes and that was the end of it. Six months later their little café experiment went belly up, and they just locked the doors and walked away, leaving all their equipment and the work of a few local artists (who still haven’t gotten their paintings back) inside.
Last summer, I got a job at a tanning salon until the semester started. Since I was a bit of a tan-a-holic I was up for the free tanning. I didn’t expect it to be great or horrible. But, I should have realized that things weren’t going to go well when the manager who hired me quit the day before I started.
After the first few days I realized that the assistant manager, M, and the owner were both crazy-ass bitches.
M was extremely rude and bossy–and addicted to pain killers. She would talk about how she didn’t eat anything fattening -”like avocados”- but would always eat candy (“no calories!”) and fat-free chips.
The second day of work I had to get balloons for a little event we were having and since the wind was blowing they got entangled. Of course, that was my fault. M kept saying “oh my god! what did you do?!” and actually pushed me out of the way and smacked my hand while I was trying to untangle them. This girl was only a year below me and I’m in my early 20s.
My fiance would occasionally bring me lunch and one day a manager from a different store was visiting the store. My fiance came in, dropped off my food, and told me bye. We’re not PDA when visiting one another at work. We just think it’s unprofessional. Well, apparently M feels totally different. When my fiance left, she turned to the visiting manager and asked her “Can you believe they are engaged?” The manager just said,”Oh, I didn’t know.” To which M replied, “I know! You wouldn’t be able to tell by how they act.” Then went on and on about how her boyfriend always kisses her when visiting her.
Let me add, that when her boyfriend visited her, they made out outside of the store and inside the store. They would also sit on the couch where she would lay down with her head on his lap–and she would remain there as customers are going in and out.
Now, as for the owner, she was absolutely crazy. From day one, she asked me when I’d like to work and what hours. I told her I prefered evenings but if she needs me for days I will do that (my fiance wouldn’t get off work til 4 a.m. so mornings were a little difficult for me) I also requested that I have Thursdays off (best for errands, doctor appts, etc.)
For the first two weeks, I didn’t have a written schedule. She would call me at 11 p.m. sometimes 1 a.m. and just talk about her problems and tell me how she’d get so coked up that she’d black out. I should have quit right then and there, but I wanted to tan for free and save up some money before classes started.
When I finally got my schedule, she asked me again what days I could work and I told her again that I need Thursdays off and I could work every day other than that. She then had a hissy fit. She asked me why I hadn’t told her this before. I explained to her that I did and she even wrote it down. She then calmed down and said OK. So, I worked every day except Thursday and was the only full-time employee. I worked 8-10 hours a day.
Despite that, every week she expected me to come in on Thursday. Once she called me saying she needed me at the store because it was raining and she didn’t want to drive in the rain. I told her I wasn’t even in town. Another time she called on a Wednesday and asked one of the girls to ask me to work Thursday. I was picking up a friend who I hadn’t seen in 8 years from the airport who was visiting me for my birthday that day. She then said “What is with you and Thursdays?!” I told her I didn’t think it was a problem since it was my only day off and if it was I would have to find another job. She then backed off.
But not for long. My fiance had bought a “day of luxury” at a really nice spa for my birthday. Of course, it had to be on a Thursday since I had no other day off. At the spa, they asked that I turn off my phone and leave it in the locker. So I did. After 6 wonderful hours of being pampered, I’m dressed and heading back home. Then, I stupidly turn on my phone. I had three missed calls from the crazy owner, as well as two voicemails.
I checked the voicemails and she kept saying that it was important that I call her because one girl who was supposed to work 6 p.m.-9 p.m. called in, so she wanted to me to work it. Unsure what to do, I called my father to ask him if I should go in and he told me to enjoy my day off and calling someone to work three hours is crazy.
The next day at work, she calls wanting to speak to me. She demanded to know why I didn’t answer my phone the day before. I told her that I turned it off. She asked “ALL DAY?!” I told her that yes, all day. It was my day off after all. She then told me how unprofessional I was and that I should always have my phone on and answer it anytime she calls. I told her that on my day off I don’t have to answer her calls. She then hung up on me. I called her right back and told her I was quitting and putting in my two weeks. She just yelled “WHATEVER!” and hung up.
I went inside and told M that I was quitting. M started making fun of me, telling me that she worked even on her days off. I pointed out that I was the only full-time employee and had only one day off. I also told her that she comes in for three hours, leaves for four, then comes back for an hour just to talk with her friends that tan there. That just made her make fun of me to the customers. Every customer that cam in, she would point at me, tell them that I was quitting and how stupid, horrible, etc. that was. She told them that I was screwing them over right when they were at their busiest.
The next day, I called and told them I wasn’t going to finish my two weeks. They yelled at me that I was now banned from that tanning salon and that I am extremely unprofessional. I just laughed at them and hung up.
When I was a senior in high school, I was hired part-time at a grocery store as a cashier. The only training I received was “Um these are roma tomatoes and this is how you type in cash and check.” Everything was fine those few months, but by the time I graduated and new management rolled in it all went to hell. I gladly signed up to get called in and take on 40 hours a week (I had to wait about a year to go to college for financial reasons) but it turned out to be a huge mistake.
I hardly ever had breaks. Even though cashiering isn’t hard physical labor I am still human and I get hungry. I was usually the only person working up front. The other cashier would leave sit in the break room. The front end manager would either join her or eat chips in the office. I could never finish sweeping outside or refill bags because I couldn’t leave the front. I was called in and kept for an extra hour frequently. One of the few times I refused to come in I was screamed at because work is supposed to be a main priority. It was my only day off since I had already worked and extra day that week. The next day I was yelled at again for having so much overtime.
So basically I was yelled at for asking for breaks, not finishing tasks, for not working enough, and working too much!
Also there are so many individual stories I could tell about the horrible customers. Here are two summed up. There was a racist old man on an oxygen tank. He constantly complained about my white mother contributing to the downfall of “class and cleanliness” by marrying my Mexican dad. Another time I was backed up into by a truck while I was loading their groceries. The man sat down and started the truck right away. I unloaded the two carts by myself (only taking two minutes tops) when he decided it was time to leave. I wasn’t given any time to recover after I got back inside. There are also stories, of two drunk men, a nasty old woman, a cracked out woman, pickle lady, and sexual harassment I don’t have space for.
On my last few days of work, the old man pooped his pants (before even getting out of his car). I have sympathy, but it got everywhere! His front seat, the store scooter, and his back and legs. Also I found a large amount of warm hamburger meat stashed in the shelves, a broken jar of salsa (blamed on me), a broken jar of pickles (blamed on me), and an old woman had her leg gashed open by a pizza box.
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.
