MVWJ was actually an unpaid internship my senior year in college. Due to a misunderstanding between my academic adviser and me, I had to take 21 credits the last semester of my senior year to graduate. One of those three credit courses was an internship through a local communications company owned by a mega-church, where I was to go in for 10 hours a week (about two hours a day after class five times a week).
Initially, I thought this sounded like a great gig–they owned three magazines, three radio stations and had several websites for things like music and Christian news and I would get to interview bands and hang out at concerts. Big mistake.
My first day, I was told to get the receptionist coffee and to deliver packages to a FedEx office. Not long after, the senior pastor of the church that owned the communications company was going to visit and I was literally given a roll of tape and told to wrap the tape around my hand–sticky side out–and to get down on my hands and knees and use the sticky side of the tape to get lint out of the royal purple carpet.
One of my supervisors was fine, but the other was a pompous bimbo who did nothing but steal articles off other internet websites, slap her name on them and turn them in for publication. How this escaped notice of legit organizations is beyond me. After less than two weeks, I had exhausted all of the writing they had available for me. I was then given tasks such as organizing photos and the supply cabinet and stuffing binders for the church’s next big sermon series. At this point, I was about eight weeks away from a degree in journalism and I felt like all of this was ridiculous.
The best part of the internship came at the end of the semester, when I sat down with my faculty adviser (who was also a professor in three other classes I had taken). The adviser told me my internship supervisor, the pompous bimbo, had written a horrible letter to him complaining about my work ethic, how I never showed up on time and how I brought a bad attitude into the office. She also said I never completed my hours of internship and refused sign off on my class credit.
My professor listened to my side of the story and signed off on my internship hours. Eight years later, I’m an award-winning newspaper reporter and the pompous bimbo never made a career in legitimate journalism. The magazines and websites are also now defunct.
I was 36, and in the middle of a divorce. I loved my job, but needed 9-5 hours, so I took a job at a marketing/inspirational products company. I was to answer phones, ship all incoming orders, take care of office supplies, and I had a $200 per week budget to purchase snacks for the office. In addition, I was to keep the kitchens (there were two) stocked with supplies.
My first clue that something wasn’t right should have been when three people that I met the first day described the boss as “intense.” My first week there he called me in to his office to tell me that he went to the kitchen and there were no spoons in the drawer. He said that he knew they were right in the cabinet, but that would have taken him 2-3 seconds out if his work day. Then he told me that if all 20 people that worked at the company had to get a spoon out of the cabinet, that was potentially a full minute out of the work day that they would not be productive. Intense indeed.
Working hours were 8-5, but most everyone was there by 7 a.m. and worked until at least 7 p.m. at night, because that was expected. Leaving on time was cause for an “uncomfortable conversation” about your attitude. I had a review after six months, and my boss told me several things to work on, but said that overall, she was happy with my performance. Two days later, she noticed that I had placed the label on a shipment a little crooked, and she told me to start looking for another job. I worked there for another month, and then they fired half of the company, including me, ten days before Christmas. The kicker was that they asked me to work the whole day, because we were so busy, and then completely screamed at me for leaving at 5 p.m.
My Very Worst Job was at a funeral home when I was 19. It was during summer at college and I was actually working three jobs at the time: full time days answering phones at a law firm, part time at a department store and on-call at the funeral home. The funeral home was a family owned affair and housed in an older home. The offices and viewing rooms were on the first floor, the basement held the embalming room and other gross functions (the door opened off the kitchen area) and the upstairs was actually an apartment for the director (creepy, no?). They had a full time receptionist/office manager, but they did not want to pay her any overtime, so they had me on call for anytime there was an evening visitation. Someone had to man the phones and direct visitors to the restroom. Also I later found out that part of my duties would be to go into the visitation room (where there would be prepped bodies) and write down details about all the floral arrangements: who sent them and what they were. While I think this is a nice service the funeral home provides to the family, I certainly didn’t want to be the one who did it and it wasn’t in the job description.
I really had no training and wasn’t there very often, so the worst part was when the office manager went on a week long vacation and they asked me to fill in. I had to answer the phones, which wasn’t too bad, but then the director came in and needed me to send a newsletter to all the other locations. I had no idea how to even consider doing this. None of the other employees were helpful, as all of them hated their jobs but also had no clue what the office manager did or how she did it. There was a terrible video I had to watch about selling pre-paid burial plans and caskets and while I know this is a part of life (and death) it was just more than I bargained for. Then the director, who was a jerk and made me feel uncomfortable, took me upstairs to the apartment to show me some stuff that he easily could have brought down to the office. I was so nervous I didn’t comprehend any of it. I managed to muddle through the week, barely. The next time they called me to come in for a visitation, they woke me up from a nap and I mumbled, “I’m sorry, I can’t come in, I have to … do … something … else.” They never called me again.
When I got a job at a swanky fine dining restaurant as a waitress, I was thrilled. Though I only had experience serving at diners and nightclubs and knew nothing about fine dining, I figured they would teach me. During the interview, the manager only asked if I had restaurant experience then hired me. In no way did I indicate that I had fine dining experience. On my first day, there was a meeting before the first shift started to try some of the foods. I had to memorize everything I tried on the spot and what it tasted like. This was exotic food that I had never had before. Then we had to detail the tables, setting out the forks, knives, plates, etc. We had to make sure all 30 tables in the dining room and all of the utensils, plates and glasses were perfectly aligned on the tables. Then came the serving. I witnessed the waiter giving detailed descriptions of all of the exotic foods that he brought out. I was nervous, but figured I would receive adequate training and time to memorize everything.
They also had an extensive wine list, but I had no wine knowledge at all and did not know how to properly serve a bottle of wine. I trained for three days and stressfully memorized as many menu items as I could, at home and at work. During those three days I ended up working a lot taking orders, refilling water, clearing plates and running drinks. Then I found out I would need to take a test on the food before I could officially work there. I started studying my butt off and preparing. On the fourth day of work I showed up and started detailing the tables. The manager, who made me extremely nervous because of his constant testing (he would say, “Quick, tell me that table number and position” and if I answered wrong would shake his head or yell at me) started asking me where I had worked before. I told him a diner and a nightclub and he finally realized I had no fine dining experience. When I finished detailing the tables, he asked me to serve wine to another waitress (who was pretty snobby) as practice. I tried, but was fumbling and struggling with opening the bottle. I had no idea how to read the wine and year off of the bottle (they had never showed me), but did my best.
The manager just shook his head. “That was atrocious,” he said in front of the other waitress. He continued to belittle me in front of the other waitress, including telling me how I held the wine was even wrong. I started crying and ran to the bathroom to get myself together, then came back out. “So what do you want me to do? The customers here expect the wine to be served correctly. You do not know how to do that,” he said. I finally couldn’t take anymore and told him I would leave. I got my things and ran out of there. The best part? I didn’t get paid a penny for those three days of hard work and humiliation.
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.
