Back when I was in high school, I would babysit to earn a bit of extra spending money. One Saturday night, I was looking after a little boy I’ll call Trevor. All was going well at first. He seemed like a nice kid and we were having fun playing a board game when he said he had to go to the bathroom. He was in there for about ten minutes and he started yelling my name. I came to the door to ask him what was wrong, and he said he needed help wiping. I was confused, because he was almost six. It seemed pretty old to need help in the bathroom, but he started crying and insisted, so in I went to help him wipe. He went twice more during the night, and both times demanded assistance. When the parents came home, I told them I was concerned about Trevor’s bathroom issues. They both laughed and told me he’d been able to wipe himself since he was three, but had been recently been demanding help in the bathroom as part of a “I don’t wanna grow up” phase. I just stared in shock as they didn’t even apologize for not telling me, and gave me a lousy ten bucks for the whole night. I never babysat for them again.
When I was 16, I got my first job as a concessionist at a movie theatre. I was so excited about the job and the general manager seemed really cool. Seemed being the operative word.
I was gung-ho and bright-eyed going into my first shift, but all that went down the drain when one of my first customers yelled at me because I was having a hard time with my cash register. I was home schooled at the time (sigh) and though I wasn’t incredibly awkward, I had a lot of anxiety when around all my co-workers. Then I realized that my manager wasn’t cool at all. Instead, he was a major douchebag who would yell at any employee he wanted to in front of whoever was around.
He also bragged about his romance with an employee who hadn’t been legal for long. He also noted how he hired most of the girls for their looks and would comment on their bodies to their faces. Four months in, after almost having a nervous breakdown because of all of the drugs (apparently marijuana can be consumed by putting it on your tongue! What you don’t learn from home schooling…), the sexual harassment, and mood swings, I turned in my two-week notice.
Flash forward to a year and a half later, I was a freshman going to community college to get my general ed classes out of the way. I naively thought that because I was older & more mature that I would be able to handle the same job once again. Things were good for a while (primarily because the entire staff from before had been overhauled), but the more I became integrated, the worse it became.
Over the course of the next year and four months, I was hit by a sign that a customer punched at my manager and then bullied into pressing assault charges on this woman because she was black and my manager was racist; was put in a headlock by an usher and had my head stuffed in a trash can; had by butt groped numerous times by other male employees; and was on the receiving end of many confounding mood swings. The final straw came when a co-worker tried to stick a blunt holder up my butt through my pants. I wrote a letter of resignation (which I also mailed to the head office) and didn’t look back.
A few months later I was contacted by H.R. from the head office, saying they were doing an investigation on the operation and were given my number by a co-worker. I told them everything, and the next week the manager was fired.
In the early 1990s, I worked at a computer drafting firm designing tombstones for people and pets. Try to imagine a life where the highlight of your day is designing a tombstone for a cat named “Mama’s Lil’ Pile O’ Shit.” Or designing a marker for a couple who want to be buried with all 12 of their cats, with names and dates of each. Yep, it was My Very Worst Job. The boss routinely accused the staff of stealing business secrets and working against her. She insisted that no one person know how to do a complete job so we could not “sell” her techniques. It took two people to send off a package because if one of us did it by ourselves we could get in trouble for knowing too much. Then she fired me. And this was the best part – it came out that she had planned it almost six months in advance but kept me around to train my replacement. I then learned that the lady who trained me had also been fired this way. About two years later, the guy I trained was fired after he trained his replacement. That was about 10 replacements ago. We’re thinking of starting a 12-step program to recover.
My Very Worst Job was as a prep cook at a dine-in Mexican food chain restaurant. It had just opened in my city. I was in high school and could only work at night, so the 5-10 p.m. shift worked perfectly.
However, when I arrived on the first day I was informed training was during the day and I’d have to miss school. The other new hires and I were also told to work without breaks until we “got our shit together.” My coworkers were even better. One of the other prep cooks told me that I needed to “roll the enchiladas as tight as a virgin’s p***y” and the lead dishwasher advised I quit school because he never finished high school and he was doing just fine without a high school diploma. As naive as I was, I’m pretty sure he was serious. Two line cooks walked out after the head chef threw a metal ladle at them for being slow. I was also told I couldn’t leave until we’d cleaned the entire kitchen even though my shift ended prior to the restaurant closing. This finally happened at 2 a.m., a whole four hours after my shift ended. Of course, this was on a school night.
All this and it was only the end of my second day on the job.
On Day 3 day, I was told I’d be written up if I missed the daytime training, so I walked out.
The best part of this was about six months later, I was contacted by the “new” management of the restaurant and asked if I would consider working for them again.
My Very Worst Job was the best kind of special. My immediate supervisor wanted to be my best friend but at the same time, I should tremble in fear of her. You never knew what to expect when arriving at the office in the mornings. Was she scowling over one of her many cups of coffee, hair in dissaray and papers all over her desk? Or was she twirling around in her chair chirping “HI!” at anyone who wandered by? But she wasn’t the really special part of this happy little family. The vice president was a mysogynistic autocrator who really believed that the office workers were his family. This carried on to the point where his poor assistant would have to set up his lunch for him, including kicking people out of “his” table if the other workers had the temerity to be eating at it. When I say “set up his lunch”, I mean it. His wife would pack about enough food to feed an army into a cooler bag and the assistant would then have to heat up the soup course, the main dish, cut the bread, prepare the salad, wash the fruit and pour the home-made wine.
Naturally, eating out of tupperware was out of the question, so everything would be transfered to plates and bowls before heating up. The kicker to all this was the fact that he had decreed that we all eat lunch together. This wouldn’t be such a huge issue if he also didn’t usually prefer to eat somewhere around 3pm. Our day was from 8am to 5pm and by noon, we were starving. He’d be in his office having a snack, delaying the lunch to almost the end of the day! Heaven help you if you had things to do on your lunch hour that took you out of the office. You announcing that you’re heading out on your lunch hour was met with the same disappointment and incredulity as if you had just suggested that we burn the place to the ground. This was my first job out of school, so I stuck it out through two years of this until I decided enough was enough Needless to say, I took whatever experience I could get and got the heck out of there!
