My Very Worst Job was when I started working at a retail shoe store when I was about 18. I was hired on as a “full time management trainee,” basically meaning that I would work for two weeks, then learn to close the store, do that for a week and then learn to open. I would then become an assistant manager so it sounded like a good gig for me. The day before I was to suppose to learn how to close the store my manager walked out and didnt come back. I came in the next morning waiting for the only other person who could open the store. I waited an hour past when we were supposed to open, but when he got there and let me in, he proceeded to throw up in the bathroom and then left. He didn’t come back, which should have been a sign about this place, but I really needed the money. That day I got yelled at by my district manager for not doing what the manger was suppose to do even though he left (keep in mind I had been there two weeks and still didnt know a lot). We did end up getting a new manager and another assistant manager. I didn’t get my promotion right away. It ended up being six months later and only because the assistant manager got promoted.
Looking back now it wasn’t the greatest idea to take the promotion as it came with a $45 a week increase, but lost out on commission because I had to look after the staff and do all the paperwork being a manager. Along with that, because it was just me and my manager we both had to do what they called “Slam Shifts” twice a week, which would be working 9:00 am to 11:00 pm. Along with these epic shifts I got blamed for anything the staff would do. If they called in I had to find a replacement employee, if we didnt sell enough accessories or beat our sales numbers, it was my fault. Also on top of that, being a manager, I was told that I had to stay in the store on my breaks which meant I didnt get one. If i wanted food i was suppose to get an employee to go get it for me. On those slam shifts I would be deducted a half hour break regardless if I got it or not as well as any other shift I had. My “breaks” would be spent doing paper work when I wasnt getting called out on the sales floor to deal with upset customers. I couldn’t have a sick day, my boss told me, and I quote, “Even if you’re so sick you can’t stand, we’ll put a chair at the front of the store and you can sit there and greet people.” I left the job.
I loved the job, working for a cookie company, itself, but it was the district manager (my direct supervisor) that made it suck. I was hired in to be trained as a manager, which had me working very long shifts (including a 28 hour shift because I had to work my normal shift, train the closer, then train the opener and then work my normal shift). Soon after, our payroll checks started bouncing and it would take weeks sometimes to get paid. April 20 was a big sales day so my supervisor over ordered stock, which is “shipped” to us via the back of her Jeep from five hours away, and when we got it all loaded in the coolers I called her to ask her where to put the stuff that wouldn’t fit and she told me leave it in the floor of the office. Raw cookie dough. So I told her it had eggs in it and I will not be putting it in the office floor.
“It is frozen at -22 degrees, it’ll be fine,” she reasoned. I told her the only place it was going in the office (which by the way was a one bedroom apartment she would stay in when she drove down to our city) would be the fridge, which meant I threw out all of her food out to do so. She got mad and told me to talk to the landlord of the office and see if he could find a place for it. While on the phone I told her the cooler in the truck wasn’t sounding right and didn’t seem to keep temperature, she said I was imagining things and to do as I’m told. A few days later I told her the same thing. By the end of the week it no longer was holding the dough at a safe temperature and I told her I wasn’t going to sell it. She told me my job was to make cookies, I told her I will not poison the customers, especially since the fire department guys were always getting them from us, and that I was closing the truck up.
She told me to sell brownies, which we never did well with. So $5 in brownie sales and five hours later, she called to tell me to go home and asked why I didn’t do it sooner. She was also slurring a lot and doesn’t remember talking to me before about it. She made the closer she hired manager because he didn’t question her authority like I did. I had been bugging her to give me a cutoff date for when the delivery drivers would be laid off so I could let them know. She kept telling me she’d let me know soon and finally told me it was none of my business she would let the other manager know. Three days before the day I assumed the drivers would be let go I found out we’re not working at all during the summer. I called her to ask her how she can give us three days notice and not expect us to be pissed about it and she told me I needed to watch how I spoke to her.
The last day of work I grabbed the register bag and drawer and got in the truck. Once parked I started setting up and noticed there wasn’t any money in the bag. I called her to let her know and said I was going to report it as soon as I was off the phone with her I just wanted to double check what protocol was. She was really calm and said not to worry about it, she’d call the landlord to see what he wants to do about it. I called the drivers and told them not to come and one of them told me he had just got off the phone with her and she told him she wouldn’t be surprised if I took it. I called the cops and also let them know I found a pack of her cigarettes in the truck that morning, which I did, but she supposedly hadn’t been in town for several weeks, also noting how odd it was that the employee checks were missing as well from the hiding spot.
My Very Worst Job was as a receptionist at an animal hospital. The manager used to be a vet tech and obviously didn’t have very much in the ways of training for a manager. She was pretty flaky and didn’t like to answer her messages. To top it all off, she went on maternity leave and somehow got away with not having to get a replacement while she was away.
Many of the other employees brought their pets to work and put them in the runs in the back. Two of the receptionist had Great Danes and would keep them in the reception office. After one of these receptionists left and the other went on maternity leave, I decided to bring my dog to work. There was a lot of construction going on in my building and it was stressing him out. I was told that my dog couldn’t be in reception even though Great Danes had been. When asked if these rules would be changing after the other receptionist came back, the manager said they would reevaluate the rules when she returned! And then she wrote me up for being “difficult.” A lot of other things happened too but I’m not writing a novel here.
In the end, they fired me because “I didn’t seem happy lately at work.” Why wasn’t I happy? A week to the day of my firing, I had to put down the horse that I’d had for 17 years. So yeah, I wasn’t very happy. And I had asked the other receptionists if they could please do the ‘put to sleep’ forms for customers that week since I didn’t think I would be able to handle it.
I found out later that she told the labour board she had fired me due to not getting along with the manager (i.e. her). Why? Well, my personal opinion is that it was because while she was on maternity leave, I ended up doing a fair bit of her job and she was afraid that I was going to take her job. Which I wasn’t. Zeech.
When I was 17, the summer camp I was working at folded, and I was left without a job for the summer before university. Luckily, my friend Eric had recently quit his job at the fish market and found gainful employment as a clown in a balloon store. He was pretty sure he could get me a job. I liked kids, and figured, what the hell.
I got the job without an interview (warning bell number one), and soon went about learning the trade of a clown, tying balloon animals, doing magic tricks, and so forth. So far so good. It turned out, though, that most of my duties revolved around adults, not children. I only did one kids’ party the whole time I worked there (warning bell number two). The rest of the time, I was a singing delivery clown–you know, the kind that shows up at an office with a bunch of balloons and sings “Happy Birthday” to some cubicle gnome. OK, I thought, surely this won’t be so bad. I don’t consider myself to have a good singing voice, but my boss told me not to worry about that (warning bell number three). Aside from being bad-tempered, he was also the cheapest bastard I’d ever met, and refused to shell out the few extra bucks for clown make-up that didn’t run.
I got shown the car I was supposed to drive–it was an old rustbucket that some previous clown had run into a tree, so the whole front end was accordioned in, and it was missing its sideview mirrors. It was also stuck in second gear. I had to drive the thing in second everywhere I went, including on the highway. The back of the car was always full of balloons, so I could never see out the rearview, and my boss wouldn’t pay for a decent sideview mirror. I took my life in my hands every time I changed lanes (eventually he found an old sideview from a Mack truck or something, and bolted it on the side of the little car…making it impossible to fit into small parking spaces). Also, because it had no reverse gear, I had to park it, get out and do my clown thing, and then when I got back, perform the following ritual: I’d open the driver’s side door, grab the wheel, step on the clutch with my right clown boot, and push off with my left foot, rolling the car backwards until I could hop in, start it, and drive off in second gear (warning bells galore).
A word on clown delivery services: nobody is glad to see you. Businessmen usually order this sort of thing to embarrass their coworkers. I once made a delivery at the end of the day to a high-level government department. It was the hottest summer ever, and my makeup was running down my face in rivulets. I had five o’clock shadow under it, and I was sweating like a bastard in my stupid suit (the car had no A/C, and I couldn’t open the windows because the balloons would blow around and either fly out the window or blind me). I was late, and double parked the clownmobile outside next to a military truck.
I went through security (not easy), and waited awkwardly for the guy to come down from the 18th floor. In the meantime, all my balloons exploded on the stucco ceiling, and so an angry, impatient man was called away from work to receive limp bits of damp rubber on the end of some string from a melting, shaggy clown who sang “Happy Birthday” off-key in the reception area. I didn’t get a tip.
I also made deliveries to people I knew from high school (mortifying), and to a man who was contemplating suicide (depressing and scary). I finally threw in the towel when my boss told me that he was expanding the clientele of the balloon store, and that my new duties would include dressing up as Tarzan for middle-aged ladies’ parties.
I never really forgave my friend Eric for getting me this job.
I worked for a summer as a “gifter” for a Timeshare golf/hotel complex, helping people choose between cheap watches or crappy luggage sets. I also had to pick people for an “exit interview,” which was basically another hard sell. The most common trick–show them the golf course during the summer, but sell them a week in January. In a very snowy part of the country.
One week, a sewage pipe broke in the storage room, so I had to hose off all the “free luggage.” (Yes, people got suitcases that had been previously covered with leaky sewage.) We also had a “chance to win a free car!” Everyone received a key in their mailings, and they got to try it in a lockbox to see if it fit. The mailings very clearly said each key had a 1/25,000 chance of winning. That wasn’t strictly true. The manager kept the winning key locked in his office! At the end of the promotion, he’d mail it out–to an address on the other side of the country, so the recipients wouldn’t come in and accidentally win the car.
The work itself was easy, but I felt like an accessory to duping. Never again!
