My Very Worst Job was at an orthopedic shoe store. My boss was a moron. She had a nasty habit of bouncing almost every paycheck. Actually, not just paychecks. Bill collectors would call us on a daily basis asking for her payments. Every time I asked her why my check bounced, she would just tell me I had to wait until after the weekend. She would bring in smelly food and leave it in our fridge and her husband came in all the time. He usually made sexist jokes and bossed us around. The real kicker was that she constantly complained about the way we sold shoes, but whenever she made a sale, it always ended up being returned by the customer.
Now let me elaborate on the customers. We had a woman go in our bathroom (which we weren’t supposed to let customers use) and when she left, my coworkers and I discovered that she had a bad case of explosive diarrhea. It was all over the wall and the toilet. And we had to clean it up. There were people whose feet smelled like death, and even people who didn’t bother to take a pumice stone to their feet (It’s a bit discomforting when you look into a shoe and see flakes of skin sitting in the heel). I especially loathed the older women who came in and insisted that their shoe size was a 6.5 U.S., but when measured, turned out to be more like an 8. They were usually upset at me for saying that their feet were “huge” and would refuse to try on their actual size. I forgot to mention that these women usually had bunions that had to be accomodated with wider shoes, and that further pissed them off.
One day, our boss called a staff meeting and brought donuts for us. She sat down and cried and told us that she had to close the store. Why she brought the donuts? I don’t know. Maybe to soften the blow. None of us were surprised but were more annoyed that she spent six months being behind in payments and managed to buy herself a brand new Mercedes. She told us that she would write us letters of recommendation but never did, and even promised to take us out to lunch “next week or so.” I haven’t seen her in a year. She didn’t even leave us a number for any potential employers of ours to contact her.
I had a one-year government subsidized (grant) job working for a charitable organization that was raising money for a shelter. It was three other women and myself and my job was ostensibly PR and Media relations. Those in charge were wealthy women who had never had jobs in their lives and their attitude was that if you were from the same “community” and had to actually work for a living, instead of having a rich husband and living in a mansion, then you were total garbage and deserved to be treated as such. I was 28 years old, had been looking for a job for quite some time and needed the money. The main problem was that no one seemed to have the slightest idea what I was supposed to do, so I had to come up with all the ideas for publicity, but they would then reject all my ideas. I was told that they would have to take it up with “The Organization,” but nothing ever materialized. I was mostly given really idiotic jobs like putting pictures in a scrapbook and going to the shelter to wait for furniture deliveries. They seemed to think that because I had applied for this job, I was such a moron that I probably didn’t even know the alphabet.
After a while, I just gave up and sat in the other office reading novels. It was obvious that the only reason they wanted me there was for the money I brought into their project (if I quit, they lost part of a subsidy). When they did bitch at me I’d say, “Fine, give me something to do.” One woman who worked there in particular (a volunteer bookkeeper) was a mean, miserable gossip who was always telling me how her taxes supported me and that I sat around and did nothing. Everyone apologized for her because she was a “volunteer” who “was valuable to the community.” After six months I was getting very depressed, drinking every night to get to sleep and had to drag myself out of bed every day for another day of novel-reading and abuse. I was looking for another job, but it was a bad recession and jobs were scarce. One day, the Gossipy Bitch saw me reading a novel and started railing at me about how her taxes paid for me, how I was a freeloader and how I was useless. She was going on and on and finally I had enough. I got up and walked into the bathroom to prevent myself from killing her. Then I called my supervisor at home and told her that I was not coming back after that day. A few months later they made the news with a huge embezzlement scandal involving their national director.
No one has more horror stories than the casual dining chain server. The place I worked had it all: idiot managers, rude customers and a funny wait staff to which I owe my sanity. If my co-workers hadn’t been around to crack a joke at just the right time I probably would have drowned myself in fry grease. It wasn’t unusual for our charming customers to snap fingers, whistle, shake drinks (Lord how I hated the drink shakers), shout, “Hey waitress!” and more. I wont go too deep into the tipping etiquette because it actually makes my blood boil. Let’s just say not everyone tipped 20%.
The first party I ever had told me I did a great job until they got their bill. Then they found all kinds of things to complain about. Large parties get an 18% gratuity added and the woman paying refused it. I told her that gratuity was automatic and her answer was, “But I don’t want to tip you.” She complained to manager who decided not to back me up and gladly took the gratuity off so I received no compensation for all the hard work I put into making these people happy.
After I graduated from college, I moved to a new city and started working for a local television show. This show was run by a husband and wife team, with the wife’s father running payroll and HR-related items, and it was gearing up to go national. I was brought on to be their receptionist and to bring overall organization to the completely unorganized startup group of about 10 or so employees. My direct boss made my life a living hell. It started with slight jabs here and there, which then progressed to full on screaming, yelling and cursing at me for “not doing anything right.” She contradicted herself on a daily basis and I was left to pick up the mess that she created.
I was frequently sent out to get my boss, her husband and her father’s lunches, and would only return to them yelling at me for not answering phones. They essentially wanted me to be in two places at once, which was obviously not an option. They would send me out to buy expensive items for the show without a company credit card, so I had to pay for it on my meager $20K salary, which was reimbursed weeks later. They were really stingy with reimbursing me for my gas mileage as well, since I had to drive all over the place to get them what they wanted. I only worked there for four months before I got another offer at a much better, higher paying job, but the kicker for me was Christmas vacation. We didn’t get one. We had to work Christmas Eve and had to work Christmas Day, while my boss, her hubby and her daddy had a week-long vacay in Florida with the kids. How nice.
My Very Worst Job was as an intern at a big cat sanctuary. Basically, it was a place where people take their tigers when they realize they don’t make good pets. The internship was touted as experience in “animal behavior,” and while it was in the middle of nowhere (in between two towns with populations of 500 and 760 respectively), I thought it would be an interesting experience to work around big cats.
First of all, we worked six days a week starting at around 6 a.m. Every morning we had to prepare around 400 lbs of frozen, raw meat (with bones and organs ground in), saving the blood to mix with medicines the cats required. While we delivered the meat, we also cleaned the cages and picked up poop. After that was done, we spent the rest of the day doing manual labor – painting, weed whacking, etc. My internship was in the middle of the summer in Texas, so you can imagine how much fun that was – especially when the cats didn’t finish their meat and we had to clean out the baked meat with maggots in it. If there was any time for animal behavior education, we were all too exhausted by the end of the day to do anything.
To make matters more fun, my boss didn’t like me for some reason and would critique the clothes I wore outside of work. She also had no idea how to manage people, but we couldn’t complain to anyone because she was engaged to the only person above her.
The best part of the internship, however, was the tiger poop. Apparently if you put predator poop in your garden, it will keep pests away. But obviously people want the tiger poop in a more palatable form, and who better to do this job than interns! So we had to separate the tiger poop, lay it out to dry, then grate it (and dried tiger poop blows everywhere!) and put it into bags. Did I mention the pay was $50 a week?
I quit after two months. My only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner.
