Although I was suffering from bronchitis, my crazy boss still insisted I travel to her office for a meeting. Fine, I agreed. Then I headed back to my own office about 4 p.m., feeling worst than ever. When I arrive at my desk, I discover that she was already looking for me and had left numerous messages. I returned her call.
She wanted me to travel back to her office–as sick as I was and as late as it was–to simply help her look for a file. I told her that I was sure that she and her assistant could find her missing file without me. She hung up on me. Moments later, my own assistant comes into my office announcing she has been instructed to go through my files and cabinets to look for said missing file. Suffice it to say she did not find it.
My crazy boss called again and demanded that I return to her office to locate her missing file. I refused. She actually then had the nerve to write me up for insubordination AND someone from her office called to tell me they found the file–in her own assistant’s cubicle.
The year was 2004. My daughter was two, we had just moved to a new town and we were living with my (now ex) inlaws. I was desperate for a job. After suffering through a succession of temp work that lasted only a few days, I was hooked up with a gig via my mother-in-law as a secretary to an attorney who had a private practice in the next town north. I nearly cried with joy when I was hired.
My elation was short-lived. My boss, a woman who bore a striking resemblance to Miss Piggy, was an absolute imbecile. How she managed to graduate from law school remains a mystery to this day, and she never seemed to have any clients.
Furthermore, Miss Piggy, Esq. chain smoked. In her office. All day long. I tried to open the windows and turn the fans out to ventilate, but every time I did, Miss Piggy would scream from her desk, “Close those goddamn windows! I don’t pay to heat the outdoors!” So I would have to languish for eight hours in the cloud of fetid, putrid air that emanated from the five packs of Virginia Slims she sucked down. It was so bad that I had to shower and change immediately after getting home each night. Everything article of clothing I owned smelled like Joe Camel took a dump all over it.
Then, Miss Piggy started shorting me on pay. It was a little at first, a few dollars over the course of a couple of weeks, and then it started to grow. I documented every single penny she did not pay me. However, when I attempted to broach the issue with her, she would make excuses that she was too busy to discuss it with me, right before returning to her hundredth game of computer Solitaire.
I busted my ass for this woman. I cleaned her office from top to bottom, organized all of her files, created a database of her alleged “clients” (none of which ever called or came in), hauled out garbage and scrubbed the toilet. Meanwhile, Miss Piggy would sit in her office with her son’s girlfriend, who was inexplicably there every single day, and talk about how black men like to sleep with lots of women and have “tons of baby-mamas.” That’s a direct quote.
The final blow came at Christmas time. My parents were flying in from Alaska to spend the holiday with me, and I asked Miss Piggy if I could take off Christmas eve and the day after Christmas. Her response? “I have a practice to run, you know, and that’s not going to work for me. You’re fired.” End of discussion. End of job. I felt like I had hit the lottery.
Shortly after that, I sent Miss Piggy a letter, demanding all of the back pay she owed me and informing her that if she didn’t compensate me, I would be seeing her again in court. My mother-in-law, a probation officer, bumped into her at court one day, and Miss Piggy handed her check for the money I was owed. “I guess K finally got what she wanted,” she said to my MIL.
She was a crazy bitch. No wonder Kermit was always so hesitant in the Muppet movies.
After graduating from college with a mechanical engineering degree, I got my very first job at a medium-sized firm as a junior draftsperson. The several interviewers were charming and polite, remarking that all the employees (about 50) had excellent rapport and were “like a family.” Turns out that was code for cliquish and petty. The employees who weren’t related by marriage all had extensive social contact outside of the business so nepotism and preferential treatment were the rule. I was given nonsensical tasks that did not befit my training. I had no gripes with earning my stripes as the new girl, but making coffee and sending faxes while the receptionist screamed at her fiancé in the office or chatted for twenty minutes on the phone about her manicure made no sense to me.
The quality control system was completely broken and every missing document and inspection sheet was blamed on me, even though they’d been lost before I even started the job. Military specifications were ignored, whited out and annotated with no signatures, dates or reference material. Schematics dating back to the seventies were stored in waterlogged boxes that bloomed with black mold and made my asthma attacks near-daily occurrences. HR ( and I use the term loosely) used my drug-test pee for a surreptitious pregnancy test and threatened me with loss of my job if I refused to get an abortion. I was sexually harassed by the head engineer on my day off and was told by HR not to bother complaining because his brother was a cop and no one would believe me. Vacation time could only be taken in one hour increments and couldn’t be used to come in late or stay early, so essentially I just got really long breaks.
I was an hourly employee and was only paid for forty hours even when I worked upwards of sixty per week. No time and a half, not even straight time. The final straw was when I hurt myself at work. A wooden stair collapsed under me and I fell down a flight of stairs, breaking my arm. After I left the hospital, I was told to come in to the office and was faced by a tribunal of higher-ups, who told me grimly that I should not even think of workers comp or disability pay, because I clearly broke my arm on purpose to get time off, and I would be sued and go to jail if I tried. I told them as politely as I could that I was leaving. Two years later I wound up with a modest settlement and a resulting job offer from an amazing firm that I’m still with, eight years later.
I just quit MVWJ today. After a long job search in this crappy economy, I took a job at a really cool-looking little restaurant that sold comfort food. The staff all seemed really nice, but a lot of the customers were a different story. Since it was a cheap place it attracted cheap people, and despite providing great service I would usually get crappy tips (or, on five occasions in one month, no tip at all). Also, I noticed that the manager, a fat bearded hipster type who thought he was ultra cool, would nit pick every little thing I did. He expected me to pick up the food the very second it came out and would scream for me to get the food, even if I was taking a table’s order.
One of the owners was even worse, criticizing everything I did even though I worked very hard, always cleaning tables, picking up dirty napkins as customers ate, etc. One night, many people were ordering beer and of course I ID’d people who looked to be on the young side. A couple who looked to be in their mid twenties came in and ordered beer. I didn’t ID them, and the owner was there. He asked if I ID’d them specifically and I told him I did not, so he ordered me to ID them after giving me a lengthy lecture, even though I had been ID’ing all night. Turns out they were both 25.
Another time, the owner held a meeting that I had to go to on my day off (unpaid, of course). One of the issues he addressed was that he wanted every server working at least four days a week. When I told him I could only work three because I had to look for a second job to supplement the measly money I made, he replied, “Then go because we don’t want people just passing though.” Meanwhile, the manager who did scheduling (and always seemed nice) kind of hushed him and continued to give me three days a week.
The last straw was when the manager gave me a shift working until three in the morning, then a morning shift the very next day. I sent her a very nice, polite email telling her that I was sorry for the little notice but that I would not be working there anymore. I thanked her for giving me the job. When I got a reply back, I expected it to be a nice email. Instead, she wrote, “Thanks for the notice. I do hope you’re more professional at your next job.” To which I responded, “I am as professional as I am treated.” Way to be appreciated for busting my behind for so little money.
I applied for MVWJ at a certain heated sandwich fast-food chain the summer before I was going away to college. I should have known better than to take the job when the fat greasy manager said he’d hire me even though I didn’t have any experience and “didn’t know anything.” It was close enough for me to ride my bike to work though and I wanted the extra money for school, so I showed up 20 minutes early on my first day only to get yelled at for 20 minutes about being hours late. My manager wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise though, literally not stopping long enough for me to tell him my shift didn’t start at 9am like he insisted it did. He insisted that I was supposed to be there early enough to open up the store, even though it was my first day. Confused I decided to just go with it and did my best at working.
I didn’t know any of the sandwiches, but he insisted I should have memorized them by now, and he kept putting me on the line so that when people asked me for a certain number or named sandwich I’d have to look up at the menu and try and read all the ingredients and then do my best. There was literally no training; no one had shown me how to properly make these sandwiches at all. They also didn’t show me how to remove the sandwiches from the toaster, so I was burning my hands on these hot sandwiches for three days before a coworker noticed I was doing it wrong and showed me how to do it right.
The worst part of the job was not cleaning out the rotting mayo bins or being laughed at by my manager and co-workers because I was going to college. The worst part was standing on the line and listening to the manager flirt with this one particular woman — a nurse who worked in a practice near our store — every time she came in. He sounded like a creepy stalker, saying, “Oh I saw you at the store the other day” or “I saw you at the baseball game,” and he somehow never picked up on her constantly telling him that she had a boyfriend with a disgusted look on her face.
After about a month of being constantly yelled at for not knowing the rules or how to do things and being late when I never was, I finally got fed up and yelled back. Turns out that he had been getting me confused for ANOTHER girl he’d hired at the same time and actually shown the training videos to and you know, trained! She worked a different shift than me and even to the very end he insisted that I was the one that was supposed to know how to open and close up shop and do everything despite never having been trained. I finally got fed up with him being a complete power-tripping asshole who acted like being the manager of a pathetic sandwich store was the most awesome thing ever and lied, saying that college started a month before it actually did. Not like he’d know the difference.
