MVWJ was a subset of one of my best jobs which was in a professional office setting. I had to train a new kid to do my job before I could move on to my next assignment within the company. I looked forward to getting him off to a good start, but what a waste it turned out to be. This guy, who was in his mid-twenties, was a major loser. He left his job as a high school math teacher because the students made fun of him. I should have taken that as a sign. When I explained something to him, he didn’t write anything down (even when I handed him a pen) and would come back a few days later so I could explain it again. Meanwhile, he’d sit at his desk and do absolutely nothing. He often overslept and missed important meetings.
His first major assignment was to create some important documentation. He put off the task for as long as possible, did a terrible job, then took the next day off to go to the department golf tournament. While I rewrote the documentation, he got wasted and passed out on the golf course with a boner. On a personal level, this guy repeatedly told annoying stories and was incapable of living in the real world. He put his paycheck into an account from which his mother would pay his bills. He feebly bemoaned when he ran out of plastic dishware at home. He once proudly confided that he didn’t own an iron; I pretended I hadn’t already figured that out. The icing on the cake was his apartment was flea-ridden and he got fleas which he passed on to me. Shortly after I’d moved on, management asked him to leave the company.
In the autumn of 2008, after a summer of bartending and working in a newsagent, I finally managed to get a job at an archaeology company in the UK. I was thrilled as I hadn’t been out doing fieldwork for a whole year and I couldn’t wait to get back into it. However, things quickly went downhill when I met L, my site supervisor. Due to the recession the company didn’t have the money to hire people with the proper experience to run a site, so L was just a slightly more experienced digger than me yet she had been made an “acting supervisor” due to the amount of time she’d been at the company. L seemed to be under the impression that her job title was “queen of everything.”
She was on a constant power trip and had to be in control of everything. She frequently shouted at the new diggers for writing measurements in centimetres rather than metres, as if the graphics team who would work with the plans didn’t know how to convert between the two. One extremely cold November morning, my friend H and I were having a chat inside the site hut and trying to psych ourselves up to brave the weather outside. At this point, a good supervisor would have said, “Come on guys, I know the weather sucks but we’ve got a deadline, and you’ll warm up once you get digging”. L’s tactic was to scream as us, “IF YOU’VE GOT YOUR BOOTS AND WATERPROOFS ON, THEN GET THE HELL OUTSIDE AND DO YOUR JOB!” I found myself wondering if I was actually still in primary school.
H had it worse than me, though. One day, she was writing up some notes inside because it was too windy outside to keep the papers together on her clipboard. L sent her outside. The very next day, L saw H chasing several sheets of notes across site, which predictably had blown away in the strong winds. L marched over shouting, “WHY ON EARTH ARE YOU DOING YOUR RECORDING OUT HERE, IT’S CLEARLY TOO WINDY!” In the end, there was a specialist job going at HQ, which I applied for. I didn’t get it, but I did end up spending a lot more time inside as I had skills which were useful in post-excavation.
I was enjoying this job now, not only was I away from L but I was actually using the stuff I’d learned in my MA. I actually turned down a job at another company who I had previously worked for, and really liked, because we were told in October that we would have work at least until March. The head of the environmental division of the company kept telling me how great it was to have me around and to be able to do certain analysis in-house, until the end of November, when all 15 of the new staff who were hired were laid off because there was suddenly, mysteriously, no work for us. I was happy to go back to my dead-end bar job.
One summer during college, I interned at a very small corporate travel agency. It was a one-woman operation, and the owner (who was just trying to get her business off the ground) had hired two (female) college interns to man the desks during the hours when she was not in the “office.” “Office” is in quotation marks because the space consisted of one tiny, windowless room with two ancient computers and a telephone, located in the basement of a restaurant/lounge whose owner my boss “knew.” “Knew” in quotation marks because it wasn’t altogether clear how rent was being paid, other than a strong suggestion that it did not involve cash and probably involved some hanky-panky.
I didn’t meet the landlord until a few weeks into the summer. He was a tall, strikingly handsome man with a wedding ring who showed me pictures of his gorgeous wife and two adorable daughters. He came by a few times looking for my boss, but she usually wasn’t there when I was. On his third or fourth visit to our little basement room, he started cordially asking questions about my life:
“Where did you go to high school?”
“Where are you in college?”
“When did you lose your virginity?”
Wait, what?
Being a naïve 19-year old, I blushingly turned back to my computer without answering this last question, mumbling that I should get back to work and thinking he would just go away. He did not go away. Instead he started massaging my shoulders, and invited me to help him cheat on his wife. In the years since, I’ve blocked most of his romantic monologue out of my memory, but I will never forget one key phrase: “Once you go Black, you never go back.” Yes, this man actually spoke these words to me out loud. From then on, I switched all my shifts and locked the door from the inside while I was working (in retrospect this was a flimsy defense strategy considering the man owned the place).
I met the other intern at the end of the summer, and we compared notes, piecing together what had been an odd few months for both of us. First of all, the intern, myself, and our boss all looked very, very similar. The guy obviously had a “type” (interestingly, his wife was not this type). He also apparently confused the other intern for me when he met her and tried to pick up where he’d left off (square 1). Secondly, it appears our restauranteur was not very creative with his pickup lines–the going Black and never going back phrase was also used on my intern colleague. Third, our boss had recently gotten serious with her boyfriend and coincidentally, the “lease” on the “office” was running out and the company was going to have to relocate.
Luckily no innocent college interns were seriously harmed in this unhealthy work environment, but man did I learn something about how the professional world operates–and isn’t that was summer internships are all about?
I moved to a larger city after graduating from a small college town. This was when the job market was at the lowest. My degree didn’t guarantee me a career and I basically took any job that called me back and paid a sustainable wage.
My love of animals led me to apply at a local ‘high end’ kennel/grooming center. I applied for the front desk position while my boyfriend at the time applied for the maintenance position in the back. The owner D was a very nice and could forget more about the business than I would ever learn, she had a mobile grooming van for some of our VIP customers so she was in and out most of the day. K was D’s partner in life. K was a different story, she was our daily “Administrator” although she had zero management skills and had an extremely aggressive Type A personality. She was a lawyer who was running for family court judge. If she wasn’t busy promoting herself constantly on her firmly attached bluetooth, she was nitpicking my customer service. I had extensive customer service/secretarial experience and thought myself a good worker.
My boyfriend kept busy in the back with the animals and I answered phones, checked in clients and handled the schedule. I soon realized why they never took down the help wanted sign on the billboard (which was conveniently turned into a giant VOTE FOR K sign). There was a revolving door of employees, young and old. Whenever a customer would walk in they had a look of ”not another one.” After my first day, the other two girls quickly left without notice and it was just me and my boyfriend working from 9a.m. to whenever we were let go. If I didn’t walk out the door, we would be there till 2 a.m. like D was. I was running from the back kennels to the front whenever someone called or came in. Cleaning excrement wasn’t part of my job description but I didn’t mind it, I have pets of my own and genuinely liked caring for these animals.
I was still in the new job honeymoon phase of saving money for an apartment and learning the ins and outs of the animal care business so I didn’t mind that K would monitor us on the 20+ streaming live feed cameras. K and D went on a trip after approximately 8-10 days of my admittedly incomplete training. Instead of their scheduled two days they took four, my boyfriend and I had to cancel the apartment showings that were suppose to be on our day off as we ran the center ourselves, around 20 dogs and 6 cats that needed feedings, medicines, cages cleaned, baths, and exercise in between grooming check ins. While they were gone, I was bit by a male chow when it’s female chow companion went into heat and sent the kennel into a frenzy.
The day after they came back, I flipped the front door sign to “we are assisting our animals, please ring the bell for service” so that the resident groomer could cover for us since she didn’t have any appointments. When we got back from our half hour break in which we signed a lease, K was furious. She screamed that she reviewed the tapes and saw us slacking on the job, that I had sat for 7 minutes without clocking out, not properly doing paperwork, and letting a human client sit in the lounge without my interaction (she wouldn’t believe me that he was chatting on his phone at the time).
She fired me for leaving the place unattended (it wasn’t) and for admitting a dog in heat, which it wasn’t at the time of check in and the owners did not answer my calls or messages till after their scheduled check out. My boyfriend was also fired for lesser offenses at the same time, while crying and walking to clean out my locker to retrieve my personal items I was accosted by K who proceeded to slam my finger in the locker and cursed at us to leave. I left wondering how I would honor the new lease I signed. I contacted a lawyer when I got home and turns out she didn’t have many friends in the legal system, I think I successfully derailed her running for judge with a pending lawsuit but dropped it when I got another job.
I still love animals, hate that business and I’ve peppered every review site with my story. I occasionally drive by and it looks like there haven’t been very many new or returning customers recently. Their help wanted sign is still displayed ominously.
I had worked my heiny off in college to graduate a full year early. Unfortunately, my GRE score was less than stellar, so I decided to take a semester off to focus on raising my score and applying to graduate school. In the meantime, I looked for temp jobs to save up money and gain experience.
After submitting my resume online, I was called in for an interview at the local branch of a national temp agency. Everyone was very pleasant and encouraging. I took several skills assessments and scored high on all of them. They informed me that most of their positions were located downtown (only ten minutes from my home) and rarely paid less than ten dollars an hour. I was very impressed when they found me a position after less than a week, even though it only paid nine dollars an hour. Unfortunately, that temp job ended and MVW job began.
The temp agency did not call me until 4:30 p.m. and explained that they needed me to fill a position for a mail clerk the next day. It wasn’t until after the office closed that I finally received an email with details about the position. The hours were 7:30-3:30 in an advertising agency an hour from my house. A little disheartened by the early hours and the distance, I showed up for work twenty minutes early at an industrial park nestled in a remote suburb. After waiting for the receptionist to arrive (the temp agency did not tell me who my supervisor was, or what part of the building the business was located in), I got an irate phone call from the temp agency. Apparently the email was wrong, and the job started at 7:00, not 7:30. The mail processing facility was located at the back of the building, and would not open without a key card.
The mail processing facility functioned like a factory, where one worker was assigned a menial task in an assembly line. We had half an hour for lunch, and two ten minute breaks, indicated by a bell that was just louder than the whirring of the equipment. Since I was actually fifteen minutes late by the time I found the main entrance, the supervisor shouted at me. Then she led me through a labyrinth of machines in a warehouse and told me to start working before walking back through the labyrinth. My co-workers seemed to only know about a dozen English words. After about two minutes listening to promotional flyers get fed into a large printer before one of the regular workers shoved a box at me and shouted, “Strip!”
I blinked in bewilderment. “What?”
She grumbled and pushed past me, then showed me how to put a plastic packaging strip on a box of flyers.
And that’s what I did all day. I packaged envelopes together, then organized them on the warehouse floor. There were other tedious tasks involved that I learned in the same manner. Since her English was so poor, I would often make a mistake because I didn’t understand what was going on. Then one of the other workers would shout at me in broken English until I figured out what I’d done wrong.
By the end of the day, there were putrid sweat stains all over my clothes–the warehouse had no air conditioning and the machines generated a lot of heat. As we were packing up to leave, one of the regular workers tried some small talk, explaining how she needed surgery for her “pee pee.”
On the second day, three out of the six temps had quit and been replaced with another girl in her twenties, a teacher with a Masters degree, and an elderly woman with a limp that moaned about being on her feet all day. The temp agency hadn’t told them the dress code, so they all showed up in business casual clothes. Thirty minutes into our shift, the teacher accidentally started a small fire. For some reason, the supervisor shouted at all of us.
By the third day, only three temps remained (the teacher had quit).
Even though I hated the job– I was exhausted by the end of the day and I was tired of the supervisor calling me an idiot– I decided to stick it out for the full three weeks. Then on the fifth day, the supervisor informed all the temps that they were no longer needed. A little relieved, I decided to spend the next week with family.
While I was out of town, the temp agency called me and asked if I had been paid. The company was not paying any of the temps. After the temp agency argued with the company for a few days, I finally received a direct deposit. Noticing that my paycheck was a little smaller than I’d anticipated, I did the math. I’d been paid minimum wage. The temp agency had told me I would be making $8.50.
