I struggled to get a job in my second year of university and desperately applied to a seedy new adult video store on the bohemian hub street near my apartment. The manager readily took me, saying he’d had no other applicants and he was just as desperate as I was. This should have been a warning, but I needed to make rent.
Here’s what happened: It didn’t matter if I (a girl) went into work wearing a stained sweatshirt and baseball cap or didn’t bother taking a shower… the customer base were all people who had been blackballed from other adult stores in town and were constantly asking me how much I charged (for me, not for the videos) and thinking they could rope me into threesomes with their wives and girlfriends. Children would tire of street hockey and come into the store swinging sticks, knocking down all the teetering shelves of merchandise. I won’t even go into detail what people thought they could get up to around corners where they thought they couldn’t be seen!
The worst was the owner, not the manager. He would reel in drunk from the blues bar around the corner, clean out the till and blow the entire takings and float on booze. Conveniently for him he never remembered this and accused me of stealing. Alarmed, I hastily quit before he could press charges because I had long suspected that the “security” camera was a decoy and I couldn’t prove a thing. I immediately applied to the hip indie video store down the street and begged the owner for a job, telling her what had happened at the adult store, and, luckily, she agreed to hire me.
When I was 16, I got a job working as an office assistant at the new dentist my grandmother went to. At first, it seemed like a great first job. The dentist was young, handsome and seemingly nice and the other ladies that I worked with were great. After about a month or so, things started to go wrong. The dentist would continuously screw up relatively routine procedures (for instance, he would perforate the sinus on every surgical tooth extraction he did) and often did more extensive work than was necessary so the patient would have to pay more. Then his weird mood swings kicked in. He would get into huge screaming fights with his wife on the phone, then mess up a procedure because he was mad. Finally, the office manager quit and since he couldn’t find anyone else to take her place, I got to work 50 hours a week (for six dollars an hour!), processing insurance, being a receptionist, cleaning and actually assisting on procedures. I screwed up the billing the first time I had to do it and accidentally sent out bills to people with insurance pending. This brought a wave of people into the office, many with receipts stating that they had paid in cash and upon investigation, I found out that he had been taking the cash payment out of the computer system and creating phony insurance info.
The final straw came when he made me (remember, I was 16 and untrained) assist on a surgical extraction, holding the thing to suck the blood out of the wound. I quit then and there. His increasingly apparent coke habit, the porn that he had delivered to the office, his rages and the unethical and illegal things he did to peoples’ mouths was just too much. He (surprise) couldn’t find a replacement, so I came back for the last few weeks of the summer for 10 dollars an hour (a lot for a 16 year old) and spent the remaining time running an audit trail to send to the insurance companies. I recently found out he’s still in business, though I can’t imagine why. We did report him to OSHA, the Health Department, the insurance companies, and the IRS (he wasn’t paying our taxes that he took from our paychecks), but apparently they decided he was still okay to operate on people.
My Very Worst Job was working as a salesperson at a small family-owned store. I was excited about the job at first, since the store sold mostly fair trade goods from around the world. The store had a tiny gallery space attached where they featured artists monthly and held yoga classes as well as other events. What I didn’t realize was that despite the fact this was my first sales job, I was going to be running the shop entirely by myself during my shifts. Besides the owners, there was only one other person who worked there and she and I would either do a morning shift or an evening one and trade off halfway through the day. The owners were there very infrequently. Running the store by myself meant I had no break during my shift and if anything went wrong (such as not being able to find a price for an item), I had to try and call the owners (often just getting voicemail) while angry customers waited.
One month, their gallery’s featured artist was upset that there were racks of ugly discounted clothing in front of the gallery windows, blocking the view of her artwork. One of the owners was infuriated by this and exploded into an extremely long lecture directed at me about how the artists are renting the walls, not the gallery and how we can’t let the artists boss us around. We were supposed to receive a 10% commission on any artwork we sold from the gallery. I ended up selling two small paintings priced at $80 each, but they did not want to give me my commission since the paintings were not very expensive. They did end up paying me, but created a new rule that the 10% commission only applied to artwork priced over $100.
They had me sweeping, mopping and vacuuming the floors every day as well as wiping down all surfaces, taking out trash, etc. I didn’t mind helping clean a little now and then, but they basically had me doing a lot of janitor work that was not in my job description, on top of all the normal stuff I was supposed to do. If I didn’t have the time to finish all the cleaning tasks while on my shift, they would be irritated, even if I had made a lot of sales. After a while, they began mentioning that I should be cleaning the toilet in the bathroom as well. They wanted the other salesgirl and I to basically be part of their family and therefore be self-sacrificing and desire to do extra work for free just to benefit the business. One evening, they had an artist reception in the gallery and because of the event they had drinks and snacks set out. The next morning was my shift and the owners had me pick the trampled bits of brownies out of the gallery carpet. This was the last straw and after my shift I gave them my two weeks notice.
While I was in high school, during the summer, I used to work at an amusement park selling the photos they take of people going down a roller coaster. At first I thought it was going to be an easy job, but soon realized that I had to deal with some incredibly rude people. They could fit 32 people on each train and we would get about 32 new people every two minutes. Most would just look at their photos laugh and continue on their way. Then there were the people who would do profane things and find their photo got deleted and would yell at me. On the opposite end, sometimes a profane picture would accidentally get through and we would have someone yell at us for having to see an offensive image. It seemed like usually one out of the 32 would have and issue and I spent huge amount of time being yelled at. This happened everyday, but there have been so many individual ridiculous stories that have happened, there isn’t enough space to list them all.
There was the time when a rabid bat flew into the store and we were able to trap it behind a door, while waiting for Animal Control. Customers would then try to go through the door even after warning them about the bat. There was also the time when a fight was brewing in the line of the roller coaster and basically erupted into 20 huge guys wailing on each other outside my store. Afterward all these mothers yelled at me for not doing anything to stop it and having their kid witness such an event, even though I had called security about five times when I heard a warning about the fight. It was just a very negative place, but I ended up working there the entire summer. I don’t know how I survived it.
A few years ago, my mom worked as an admin for a janitorial company. I met her boss several times, and when he heard I was searching for a job, he offered me a job supervising one of his cleaning crews. Since I had no experience, he told me I would work for a few weeks as one of the crew to get a feel for it. I was told the hours were 6 p.m. to midnight and it would be a breeze!
My first few nights on the job, I went out with a crew to clean four office buildings. Apparently, the new girl always gets the worst assignment — bathrooms. I never knew it was such a nasty job to clean so many bathrooms! I calculated I had scrubbed 85 toilets a night. I also found out that since they get paid hourly, the crew wants to make the most of it — we stopped for food and cigarettes constantly, and one night we went and parked at the local jail so one girl could wave to her boyfriend.
After one week in which I couldn’t get the smell of urine out of my clothes and I never made it home before 4a.m., I finally quit. Not even a supervisor job was worth it anymore!
