When I was 17, I started working at a popular card store. The pay wasn’t great but it was enough to live off of and the people I worked with were fantastic.
In short, I loved the job. I worked full time and would always go above and beyond to prove that I was loyal and to advance within the company. I was there for a few years and would often take on “acting manager” roles when my manager was unavailable or when other stores in the area needed a hand.
Our district manager, however, was a total bitch and everyone would refer to her as “Dragon Lady” when she wasn’t around. She never had anything nice to say and was constantly passing judgment, not just on the condition of the store but also on us personally. (She would often tell my manager that she needed to lose weight etc.)
One of the stores had an incredibly high turnover rate as it was a clearance store and hard to manage. I was sent there temporarily until they could find a new manager and a solid staff. I was there for about four months and they had no luck hiring anyone on to fill the position. Thinking this was my chance to prove my worth, I applied for the position as I was already managing the place anyway. Over the next few months, the Dragon Lady hired me a less that prominent staff (two part-time single moms on welfare with scheduling issues, a pregnant diabetic who loved to call in tired and a 16-year-old kid who enjoyed skimming the tills). She was constantly observing my every move and had zero positive feedback. It was not long before none of my staff were showing up to work and I was working around the clock. I very seldom took any breaks and would often come in three hours early and stay long after closing to finish up paperwork and do any cleaning or organizing that needed to get done (keep in mind that I was on a salary and was not allowed to bank my overtime).
Christmas came around and my youngest cousin was sadly diagnosed with leukemia. I told my boss quite proudly that I was planning to shave my head in support of my family. To my complete disgust, she replied by telling me to buy a wig because she didn’t think I could work there if I was bald. Though offended greatly I brushed it off and continued putting everything I had into the store. I even worked the holidays with bronchial pneumonia. I went on working like this until April when I finally decided to takes a week of vacation. Everything seemed fine, I had an assistant from another location and my staff assured me that everything would be taken care of.
On my first day off, I got a call from mall security informing that my store wasn’t yet open. It was noon. Reluctantly I went in to find that the who was supposed to open the store had locked her keys inside the day before. I didn’t hear anything for the remainder of the week and assumed that everything was okay. When I returned the following week I came in the find the store in the most disgusting state I’ve ever seen. Food and garbage littered the aisles and the cash desk was covered in paperwork and left behind items. Nothing had been done while I was away and there was $100 missing from my float.
I finally had enough. I stood at that cash desk and scanned over the store in complete silence. The girl who was working with me at the time just stared at me and looked concerned. The anger in my face must have been apparent because when I turned to her she moved back a bit. I pulled my keys out of my pocket and took them off my lanyard. She asked what I was doing and I looked at her and said “Did you guys do anything while I was gone?” She responded with a resounding, “No, not really. Sorry about that…”
I slammed my keys down on the counter and collected my things. I explained to her that I was tired of living at the store for next to no money and this was the last straw. She looked genuinely sad and agreed. I received a call later that day from Dragon Lady who said nothing to me except: “I knew you couldn’t do it. Hard work just isn’t in some people’s blood I guess.” I laughed and hung up.
I recently went for coffee with my old manager from when I first started working there. I guess Dragon Lady’s husband left her and took their kids because she spends more time howling about and hounding her “stupid staff” than she did paying attention her family. Love and compassion just isn’t in some people’s blood I guess.
I graduated high school and got a job at a family-owned video store. The owner was a nurse who opened the store about six months before, and she seemed to like me at first because I had aspirations of becoming a nurse, too. I thought I had it made, but soon I realized that this woman had no business running her own store. Despite this being a new business, the owner was absent, apparently just expecting teenage kids to do the grunt work and have money roll right in.
I was trained by two co-workers, given conflicting information, would get confused, try my best, then be reprimanded by for doing the wrong thing. Instead of quietly taking me off to the side (remember she was hardly present), the owner would write a note and clip it to my time card, so all the employees could read them as they clocked in. The other employees never seemed to get reprimanded, though.
The owner was also a bible-thumper, insisting on buying religious videos that no one was interested in renting. This was back in 2000, and our customers had to fight over three VHS copies of Gladiator. Business wasn’t good. This was also when DVDs started getting popular, but she refused to get any, thinking they were a fad. I found out all of the inventory was bought from an out-of-business video store, and that there were boxes of porn videos hidden in the storage room. Considering how many times I was asked if there was a “back room,” I know a ton of money would have been made. Due to her religious ways, she refused to make a back room up to rent them out, and thought I was seriously evil for suggesting it. Why someone with a stripper for a daughter and a teenage son dating a twenty-something, married woman was so self-righteous and judgmental of me, a reasonably good kid, I have no idea.
This son of hers worked at the store from time to time. One evening we were working together, I was stuck with cleaning duty. He took it upon himself to eat Taco Bell before his shift, then have explosive diarrhea all over the seat of the break room toilet that he didn’t clean up. I still think he did it on purpose. Another boy around our age worked there, and would invite his friends to the store to hang out for hours and sexually harass me. One slow night, I made a rubber band ball the size of a baseball, which he grabbed from me and threw across the store, embedding it into a particle board door. He begged me to lie and say a couple of kids ran in and did it, but I couldn’t keep the lie up for long and squealed to the owner. He blamed me, saying it was all my fault because I was the one who made the ball. She went along with him, saying that since I was older (by a few months, I believe), I should have set a better example. I was docked $100 in pay to cover the cost of another door, and I heard through one of the girls who worked there with us that they got the replacement door for $50.
I annoyed the owner mostly because I was constantly off on my till every night. I tried my hardest to cooperate with their dinosaur of a cash register, and why the other ones never seemed to get in trouble for their tills being off, I’ll never know. The owner would ask me really increasingly condescending questions in front of the other employees from “Do you need your eyes re-examined?” to “Did you take special classes in school?” She must have forgot that I graduated a year early. She would tell me multiple times that someone like me would struggle throughout a nursing career due to my stupidity.
It was no surprise to me that I was fired after six months for incompetence, but I was not sad at all. The business failed three months later, she had to go back to her old doctor’s office job that she hated under a huge mountain of debt, and I’ve been a successful nurse for the past eight years with an advanced degree, which I couldn’t have accomplished if I truly was as stupid as she tried to convince me.
During the summer of 2007, I was fresh out of high school, and was excited to finally become an adult, and enter the working world. Fortunately for me, during high school I had taken quiet a few business management classes, which allowed me to apply for positions in an office situation. I thought that I was doing the smart thing, as people often times told me of their horror stories about working at fast food places, or grocery stores, but how wrong I was.
In July, I finally ended up getting my office job. It was for a shipping company, and I would be a data entry clerk. The job essentially had me taking bills which were scanned into our system, and then I would have to input those bills into our software, but more on that later. My first warning came when I began my training, and I should have realized right then and there that this was the wrong environment for me. When I walked into the building, and walked towards our training room I realized that I was the only male on the floor. There were rows of cubicles filled with middle aged woman.
My next warning came when we started to begin training. The bills I previously mentioned before? It was all by hand input, meaning that truck drivers were writing down all this information and scanning it to us, and no offense to truck drivers, but their hand writing makes a doctor’s signature look neat. How was I suppose to decrypt their crazy algorithmic hand writing? I dared not ask how ever, and continued with the job, eventually ending my training and getting on the floor.
This is when the hellish nightmare of this job truly began to settle in. There was a strict policy of no talking, no use of head phones, no distractions what so ever. It was kind of like one of those cool montage moments in a movie where you see a code-breaker sitting at a computer trying to decipher some cryptic message, and he has a swat team of other hackers around them, and they only have 60 seconds to decrypt this message. Except it didn’t have any cool music, and code breaking never stopped, after I’d complete one, another would come in right away,
So, we had crippling boredom, followed up by impossible hand writing, and the always awkward feeling I had of being surrounded by middle-aged woman, this was really starting to sound like my own personal hell, but hey at least I was inside a cool comfortable office building with air conditioning, right? Apparently it broke, the day I actually started. So I was stuck there, for eight hours a day in work-dress clothes in the sweat box of an office building.
Eventually I was let go, being told I was just not “It wasn’t the quality of your work, we just felt as though you didn’t fit in and were unhappy,” but that wasn’t the final straw. They ended up blocking me from getting unemployment, telling the office that they had offered me another job, and I had refused.
I was unemployed and about to start a job search when a broke my foot. The cast came off after 10 weeks, I then spent another week relearning to walk. By this point I was destitute and had to find a job pronto. I answered an ad for a restaurant hostess, though I had no previous experience. I limped to the restaurant at 4:00pm, as instructed. The bartender instructed me to fill out an application; I was told to wait until the manager had a chance to meet me. I had lots of time to take in the surroundings—an ostentatiously-fancy joint named after the European chef (whose name I had no idea how to pronounce), an ornate display case near the door hawking signed copies of the chef’s autobiography. The manager finally breezed into the bar after 45 minutes. He looked at me and my application, said little, then darted away. I stood near the entry waiting for him to reappear, wondering if I’d been excused. The phone at the hostess station began to ring, by the forth ring the manager abruptly stuck his head through a doorway and gestured toward the phone, implying I should answer it. Then he disappeared.
I did my best, under the circumstances— I accepted a reservation for the following evening, writing the name in the reservation book, though I’d no idea if there’d actually be a table available or any idea how one determined this. The phone continued to ring, I continued to answer, mispronouncing the restaurant’s name with a different variant each time. More reservations, idle queries about a menu I knew nothing about, requests to speak to numerous people who presumably worked there. I was able to figure out how to put calls on hold, but was lost when determining how to transfer calls or to where they should be transferred. I accidentally disconnected the manager’s South American girlfriend twice within 10 minutes—when I asked “who may I say is calling?” the third time, she unleashed her fury in an ear-piercing Brazilian accent. I kept expecting somebody to relieve me of the constantly ringing phone. What sort of established three-star New York restaurant gives an untrained 24 year old stranger total dominion over their reservation book and incoming calls? Maybe I’d been hired, but nobody remembered to tell me?
The manager was no where to be found, and everyone else was too busy to assist me, rolling their eyes or glaring whenever I asked a question. Before I knew it, several hours had passed. Finally, around 10:00pm, the manager reappeared and told me I could leave. I was exhausted, unsteady on my barely-healed foot and frazzled after several hours of unprepared hostessing. I bolted without confirming that I’d been hired—freedom! No more ringing phone, no more screeching Brazilian battle-ax, no more standing, no more nauseating post-modern decor. I limped home exhausted but happy that I’d at least found a job. Apparently. The next day I phoned to see when they wanted me to come back. The short answer was “never.” Outraged that I’d answered their phone for five hours as some sort of unspecified audition, I limped back the next day and demanded payment for my time. The disdainful manager at first tried to give me the brush-off, but finally gave me a few twenties to get rid of me. I spent the $60 on a comfortable pair of cheap shoes, and continued my job search.
After crashing my father’s car, I needed to find a job to pay him back for the insurance deductible. I had gotten a flyer from someone advertising for a job that paid $12 an hour. For someone who was 16 at the time, this seemed like a pretty good deal. I called the number on the flyer and was informed that it would be for a telemarketing job, soliciting donations for a police organization. I got an interview and was subsequently hired. My first day on the job, I found out that I would not be making $12 per hour until I had worked 40 hours. They required me to work at least 20 hours a week. I was concerned that this would be a little too much for me, being a junior in high school. I brought this concern to the manager, who told me to drop some classes so that I could work more. Looking back, this was a very blatant red flag, but since it was my first job, I just shrugged it off and thought he was crazy.
I received just about the worst training ever. I was trained by two different guys who told me to do completely opposite things (“Ask them how they’re doing, you gotta build your rapport with them” and “Don’t ask them how they’re doing, if they’re having a bad day, they’ll tell you about it”). I was told to really push them to give the organization money. It truly made me feel like a terrible person to listen to people sing the blues about how broke they were and still try to press money out of them. I heard it all. Seemingly, everyone had just lost their jobs or had a family member who had recently died or had cancer. On my sixth day, I showed up, only to find out that I had been suspended for not meeting the quota for donations. Needless to say, I was not very happy about going in to work (I lived on the other side of town and had no car) only to have to go right back home. The next day, I showed up, only to find out that I was being fired. On Labor Day. When the buses were not running.
A couple months later, they called me and offered me my job back. I told them I would never set foot in that place again.
