“Andy” was the manager at a restaurant and he scheduled my interview for 5pm on a Friday night. I came a little early, and rather than asking me any questions, Andy said, “Bus the tables and pour water if the glasses are half empty.” About three hours later, I answered the phone (after a mere hour on the job, I was taking orders, delivering food and fetching esoteric ingrediants from two basements) only to hear “Mary! You’re not dead!” I’d forgotten that my boyfriend thought I was at a job interview. I didn’t come home around one in the morning. Andy and I were the only wait staff. I worked four hours three days a week and then 14 hours a day Friday and Saturday (10 AM – 12 AM); followed by Sunday breakfast from 7AM – 7PM. Andy worked like a madman and he had various sayings to buck me up. When I asked him what to do, he’d say:
Think and act!
Work hard, make money!
Use your common sense!
None of these were relevant to running a restaurant. I had to guess, but we were serving Indian food and most people had no idea if they’d received the right dish or not. Towards the end of every shift, Andy would treat me to water glasses of Popov vodka, while I tended to last few customers, swept, mopped and calculated my tips. Then one day we moved eight tables out of the basement. Instead of stairs, the basement had a platform halfway between the upper and lower levels. Andy stood on the platform and I shoved the tables up to him, then climbed into the restaurant and pulled them up while he pushed. The whole time, he yelled, “The arm! The leg! Use the arm and the leg!”
We argued constantly. I’d burst into the kitchen, “Table four wants garlic naan! Where is it?”
Andy would reply, “I served that naan!”
“To the wrong person!” I’d exclaim.
Then we’d realize that we had to work and resume arguing at the next pause. The cooks and dishwashers found this hilarious. Andy told a table of eight that I’d miscommunicated their request that their food contain no garlic, onions or spice. In an Indian restaurant. He called me over to scold me and I said, “That’s a lie! I quit!”
“No you don’t!” Andy really said this.
“Watch me!” I walked out.
I was newly out of esthetician school, broke and desperate for a job. I had applied at a makeup store, but was patiently awaiting for my references to go through. After a few weeks, I was in dire need of money when a old classmate offered me a job at “popular photography” place. I would be the hair/makeup artist and photographer’s assistant. I agreed and was working the next day. Things were fine until I had to learn the scripts. Everything had a script. I found out the hard way when the regional manager called and everyone ran away from the phone. I answered, still very new to the company, trying to remember my lines. I fumbled with some words and there was a long drawn out sigh.
“What’s you’re name? Listen, it’s ‘thank you for calling *popular photography place* at the *town* mall. My name is R. Are you calling to BOOK your appointment TODAY?’”
I should have known then this would my worst job ever.
Besides the secret shop phone calls and trying to sucker people walking in the mall to get their photo taken, I had the pleasure of calling up past clients to con them into buying more photos. My script was to tell clients that their photo was selected by the president of the company and he wanted to hang their picture the wall (which really wasn’t true). They only had to pay an additional large fee to have their photo reprinted and framed but could keep it after we had it for a month. According to my manager, I wasn’t “excited” enough when I spoke to these clients and was constantly scolded for it.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was after a few months of working there, I finally got to meet my regional manager, R. I had spent the whole morning cleaning as my manager sat at the front desk, terrified. R came stomping in, immediately commenting on how the shop looked. He tore through, complaining on everything — paperwork, the floors, the walls — nothing made him happy. The shit hit the fan when R decided to go through the makeup station drawers. Our first station was not in use because it often got in the photographer’s way during sessions. As a result, we used it as a storage for items we didn’t need. The makeup palette within station one had missing eye shadow. This made R furious! He came around the corner, shaking the palette in my face, screaming, “Are you serious?!”
I tried to explained why but it was no use. As he turned to walk away, the palette he was holding bumped into the wall, causing a blush insert to fall out and break onto the floor. He looked down at the blush, stepped over the mess and walked away. I quietly cleaned up the powder and stayed at the front desk to avoid the wrath of R. Shortly after that, I quit and never went back for my last check.
I started university in 2004 and decided to look for a laidback weekend job to take care of the bills. Since my degree involved a lot of sitting around reading and writing essays, I thought I’d look for a job that didn’t require too much thinking and would get me off my bum. A new juice bar was opening in a shopping mall near my house, managed by a team of husband, wife and brother. They ran a tight ship, trying to ensure that their juice bar was the cleanest, fastest and cheapest to run in this whole mall. There were a few problems with this philosophy: “cleanest” involved having to be seen wiping down surfaces at any time that I wasn’t serving customers or preparing drinks. I would often find myself wiping down sparkling-clean benchtops because “you need to be busy all the time” even when we weren’t. “Fastest” was a problem because I was continuously told that everything I did wasn’t quick enough, despite my genuine efforts.
I found this out from my boss who took me aside to tell me she had been going up one level in the mall where there was a view of this juice bar and was watching us secretly to see what we did without supervision. And that brings us to “cheapest to run.” Some might say that flogging yourself as the highest-quality juice bar in a huge mall means maintaining certain standards, like using fresh fruit and ample amounts of actual ingredients (rather than making a drink out of 3/4 ice), but not my bosses. We were always encouraged to upsell, even to aged pensioners who would be more than happy with the much-cheaper kids-size smoothies (these cups were kept hidden from ordinary customers and left off the price list and could therefore only be ordered by mind-readers).
But the real kick to the junk? I had idly told T., one of my co-workers, in confidence, that I was thinking of looking for a better job. The next day, I got a call from my boss telling me that T. had passed on this sentiment to her. “If your heart’s not in it, it’s probably best that you don’t work for us anymore.” Ok, lady, you’ve got me there – my heart is not in the overpriced juice and smoothie business. A few months later I met up with a colleague (not the one who ratted me out) who told me that T. had been secretly pocketing a sneaky $50 at the end of most business days. A few months later, the store went into liquidation.
I’m still in MVWJ as a kindergarten teacher in a private school. After two months of work, ten staff members have quit – most of this is due to the antics of my boss, A.
A’s grandson, D, is in my class. He is out of control. If attempts are made at discipline (like asking him nicely or using a firm voice to get him to stop hitting another child, for instance), he tells his grandmother his teachers hurt him and she immediately takes it out on us. No questions asked. However, I have seen her roughly handle and verbally abuse other students who are misbehaving. H also does not have to do academic work like everyone else.
Despite that the school is open ten hours a day, A’s rules state that NO child in our class is allowed to take naps or have pacifiers. Teachers have been fired for allowing exhausted students to lay down. D–who has his pacifier in almost the whole day–is exempt from this rule. As you can well imagine, morale is low. In order to curb the gossip about her, A made us all sign an “anti-gossip” pledge which stated we would promise not to talk about her. Of course, this persisted so she once again began a round of firing, which stopped it.
One story stands out to illustrate their insanity. Last week, the students were filmed for a local news segment. Before the event started, A pulled me aside and said, “D needs to be front and center on film because he’s got his Spiderman outfit on!” When I watched the evening news, the camera was directed at Spiderman for a few seconds and the rest of the segment was an interview with A. The other students were completely ignored.
My Very Worst Job was at a cafe/bakery when I was 14. When I got the job, I was told my basic duties would be to serve customers, clear tables, and to do “basic” cleaning.
On my first day, they got me to wash dishes for five hours straight, before sending me home. This happened pretty much every day for my first month, except on occasion I got to clean up grease from around the sink (lucky me), wash the display cabinets, or make breadcrumbs (which meant I ran the risk of cutting off my fingers due to the dodgy food processor). If that wasn’t bad enough, we had no price lists and changed the prices every few days so they were never actually entered in the cash registers, so I ended up just making all the prices, then getting in trouble if I got them wrong. We were also given seven-hour shifts without a break.
One unusually hot day the power went out. I’ll always be a little unclear on the details, but a milk bottle somehow exploded at the bottom of a fridge. Guess who the lucky person was that got to climb into the fridge (it was about chest height) and clean out all the sour milk from this hot, smelly, box of joy? Guess who also had to complete her 6 hour shift covered in sour milk?
My boss also once hit me with a broom for leaning on a machine while cleaning it. Like, actually hit me, across the back of my legs.
You’d think this was enough for me to quit, but apparently not. I was eventually fired for rostering off my birthday. Turned out the boss was a Jehovah’s Witness and didn’t believe in birthdays or in people taking a day off.
