My Very Worst Job was working for a New York architect. I was planning to move to NYC with my best friend and needed a well paying job to pay the rent so I was pretty much willing to take anything. When I went in for the interview the office was beautiful and I met with the office manager who seemed really nice. She said the position would be assisting the owner/head partner of the firm, but she did warn me that he could sometimes be difficult and that would be the toughest part of the job. Having worked for difficult people in the past I thought it wouldn’t be a problem. I started a few weeks later and the girl who trained me hinted at the fact that he was impossible to work for, comparing him to Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada. After working there for a few months I soon realized that even the people who hired him hated him because he was such an asshole. I am pretty sure his wife hated him too considering she lived on the complete opposite side of the country from him.
He was an angry old man and always screamed at people in the office calling them a “f-ing moron” in front of the entire staff. He lived off of cigarettes and cappuccinos (yes he smoked in the office and yes this was only a couple years ago). One time he demanded that I find the phone number of one of the wealthiest men in the world. It didn’t help that he couldn’t really remember his name. He was in a rage when I told him I couldn’t find it, he suggested calling 411 (thanks for the tip but he wasn’t listed). He said, “Fine, I’ll have one of the architects do it!” And of course they weren’t able to find it either. After dealing with his crazy requests, wild mood swings (one day I came back from lunch and the office was vibrating with crazy music and he was rocking out) and his general lack of respect for everyone I decided to put in my notice. I stayed for nine months, the girl before me lasted six and the two before her only lasted three months each.
After I made up a lie about “going back to grad school” I gave him six weeks’ notice and he told me I was unethical. When I started there were 15 employees, by the time I left there were only seven people left, because they either quit or he fired them in one of his rages. After I left I heard from one of my friends that my old boss had recently been on an international business trip and got into a physical fight with the client he was visiting. By the way he was in his 70s. Thank god I got out of there.
As a junior in high school I got my first job working after school at a dry cleaner’s. I did everything but run the big machine that did the actual dry cleaning: took in clothes to be cleaned, returned clean clothes, handled money, ordered/tracked supplies and kept the shop clean. Doesn’t sound bad, right? Not so fast. The owner and his wife had two kids: a boy of 10 who was the Golden Child and a girl of about 17 who had a severe developmental disability. The owner would leave to go see his girlfriend while the dry cleaning machine ran, leaving me to face the angry customers who wanted to know why their dry cleaning wasn’t ready, because they expected one-hour service all the time. I swear, most of these people only had one suit and and they had it cleaned daily.
So eventually the wife would show up with the kids in tow, asking me where the owner was, and then yelled at me because I always said I didn’t know. So she’d say she was going across the street for lunch, take Golden Boy with her, and leave her daughter in the shop for me to babysit while people yelled at me about their ugly suits not being ready. And the daughter was curious and into everything, and since I never did any babysitting I had no clue what to do. Later they hired the mother of my childhood nemesis as the day-shift clerk, which was just grand, especially since she stopped working as soon as I got in (15 minutes early) and BS’d with customers or the owner/s if they were in, leaving me to jump on the work that was there, although I wasn’t allowed to put those extra 15 minutes on my time sheet.
The sad part of all this was that I kept that job until I left for college because I was an uptight kid who thought that if I quit without a good reason like leaving for college, it would follow me around forever and employers would be saying, “Oh, you only stayed at your first job for a year. You give up easily, don’t you?” Fortunately college straightened me out.
In 2005, got a job as a graphic designer for a well known print company in my area. I even bought a baby gift for the designer I would be temporarily replacing while she was on maternity leave. My work day ran from 5:45 AM to supposedly 4:00PM, but often I went home at 6:00PM or later. I was Designer, Secretary, Printer/Copy Person, Press Film Developer, Front Desk Clerk, Press Order Taker, Janitor, and cut/folded/scored paper products like business cards and brochures as well. I made $10 an hour and got a half an hour lunch break. This is actually not the bad part. My boss was the bad part. Never mind the numbing job of deleting of 200+ porn spam messages in the email inbox each day, never mind that we did not recycle anything, never mind that my boss was often called on by the town for dumping developing chemicals down the drain (well, actually do mind that).
We still made film and plates in 2005. The shop ran Mac OS 9 on candy colored iMacs and “beige boxes” from the late 90s. They used gigantic file folders because everything was on film and paper. This was all livable though. The horrible part of this job was my boorish boss. He had an air of superiority about him, but was very cheap. So, when he brought us a new computer it was actually a beige box with Mac OSX 10.1 running on it (by third party software), proudly declaring, “This isn’t supposed to run on these but I got this software – so it does!” I’m afraid I actually laughed. Abashed, he later bought a Mac Mini and a software set. Unfortunately I had already given my notice by that time. All because of old computers, you ask?
Oh no. Because of the extremist talk show he played at high volume. Because of loud rude phone calls: “Wait, this is American Express, right? THEN I WANT TO SPEAK TO AN AMERICAN.” He would later walk around the shop gloating to everyone about his wit. The last straw, however, was Hurricane Katrina. He said, “Nothing but the dregs of society live there. We should just leave all the blacks to drown and then build up a good city.” He was completely, dead serious. It’s 2010 and I still have nightmares about this job.
Right after college I worked two really awesome seasonal jobs, but there was about three months of down time between them so I had to start working at a temp agency. Most of the assignments were fine, except one time they sent me out to this company that makes food supplements. I guess they had a huge batch that came out with the wrong dosage so they needed somebody to pop the pills out of those plastic containers with the foil on the back. I only spent two days doing this and it was absolutely miserable. The worst part of the whole thing is that the pills were sensitive to light, so I had to do this MVWJ in the dark.
I was excited when I got a waitress job in the restaurant of this small family-run inn. During the interview, the owner waxed poetic about being able to go swimming and kayaking on my breaks. It was soon clear there would be no swimming or kayaking—busy days meant no breaks at all. I was thrown in with no training, and overworked to the point where I once cried because my feet hurt so much.
My day started with clearing the thick layers of bugs off the patio tables. As family, the other waitresses showed up when they felt like it. As an outsider, I would have to pull double shifts with no notice, while being sniped at for not working fast or hard enough. The customers weren’t great either. One night I had to take back a ‘gimlet’ because (again, no training) I had put in cocktail pickles instead of cocktail onions. The place had its quirks. I was once reprimanded for vacuuming while the air conditioning was on, which blew all the fuses in the whole place. The owner kept her stinking, disgusting, dying dog in the restaurant, whose barf was my problem, apparently.
I’ll never work for a family business again.
