Talk about a Jekyll and Hyde situation. About a year ago I interviewed for a job at a vegetarian cafe on the theatre side of town. I’m an actress and this seemed like a good sign. Let me add that my job was to work the counter and take orders, and either E or R were acting as managers, baristas, and servers. This was the justification for not sharing tips with me (but we’ll get to that.)

Both of my bosses were actors as well, we’ll call them R and E. R was the best boss ever. She was laid back, funny, and genuinely seemed proud of her restaurant and loved her customers. E was a whole other story. The first day she seemed a little cool, but I chalked it up to personality. Then her true crazy shone through. She told me on the first day that I should feel free to bring a book, “since it can get a little slow here sometimes.” Then a week in, when the place is dead, she furiously snapped at me, “I know it’s quiet, but there’s always little things do to. I don’t want you just sitting there reading!”

One day I’d be in trouble for leaving the register to make drinks, the next day I’d be in trouble for not pitching in to help out (because she was too busy surfing Facebook or taking naps in her office) and I mean IN TROUBLE. She would scream at me in front of customers. And on the days where she was “working” in the office and I handled everything for hours at a time, do you think she shared tips? Nope. Also, I would catch her glaring at me out of the corner of my eye, like I had my hand in the register or my finger up my nose. I have no idea why she mistrusted me completely.

One day when an obviously difficult customer complained about an order that we “messed up” and I know for a fact I triple-checked, E hauled me into the kitchen to chew me out (which is rare, since she usually tore into me in front of the uncomfortable customers!) I told her that I was entirely in the right and E said,  ”Well, you’re not focused and I need you to pull it together. You went to acting school, right? Why don’t you do one of those focusing exercises they taught you, okay?” In the most condescending tone I’ve ever heard.

Sadly that wasn’t the final straw. The final straw was arriving to work to find the other cashier in tears. Apparently E had been taking a nap. This cashier had previously been in trouble for waking E up instead of taking a message. So today she had taken a message instead. When E woke up and found out she’d missed a call from a guy she’d been “waiting to hear from all day!” she screamed at this poor girl that she could “easily be replaced!”

I decided to quit before I could be replaced, and never looked back!

MVWJ was actually kind of pathetic, but thankfully short. I was 17, had absolutely zero job experience, and needed money. There was a small, trendy coffee shop in our neighborhood that had bounced from owner to owner for the past decade. I went in to interview with the latest owner, who seemed like a nice, professional guy. However, he would not be running the café. He’d bought the café so his wife, who spoke poor English, would have something to do. I spent most of my “training” helping a few of their friends lug huge refrigeration units and scraping the scum from the floor with a butterknife. It was on this day that the couple decided I would be paid national minimum wage, which was actually over two dollars less than state minimum wage. Joy. They paid me with straight cash and told me to come back the next day. I was their single employee, as they thought it was too much money to hire even one more person.

I had to arrive at four thirty to get ready for our five a.m. opening rush, which was a total joke. Maybe three people came in before seven thirty, but I was too busy preparing breakfast stuff to complain. The mammoth cleaning effort hadn’t been extended to the cooking/food handling equipment, which looked like they had been bought in the mid-eighties and hadn’t been cleaned since. I got to leave that greasy horror and run the till later that morning, and another problem became apparent. I had gotten very little training at the till, and they hadn’t briefed me on the drink names at all. So an order would consist of me stammering out “uh, hi” and the customer rattling off their drink order, which I would have to get the wife for. She would snap the drink names at me and get them all herself, skulking off to the back as soon as she was done.(I found out later she was watching me on the security video feed)

Enter a new customer, lather, rinse repeat. I eventually got a little better at orders, but then she would storm out and scold me for not including tax in the total. She didn’t know how to either, and so when she took the till to show me she just spent a half hour fiddling with it. After a few hours of stimulating conversation with our resident crazy homeless guy, I got paid for my shift in cash and was told to call in the next day if I could work. I went home and slept for a few hours, decided that the little money I was given really wasn’t worth it, and didn’t call.

The day after that, she called and chewed me out for not wanting to work, passive-aggressively hinting that I was just lazy and wanted to get money for doing nothing. I hung up after being verbally abused for a few minutes and that was the end of it. Six months later their little café experiment went belly up, and they just locked the doors and walked away, leaving all their equipment and the work of a few local artists (who still haven’t gotten their paintings back) inside.

I was 16 and I needed money for social stuff, so I decided to search for a job. One of my Dad’s clients who ran a cafe said he had a job opening and I should come down. I was prepared for an interview, but they said as long as I could be polite and work hard I had the job. I thought this was golden so jumped at the opportunity. They said they didn’t contract any staff so we wouldn’t be taxed and they gave me okay money, better than some of my friends. But went downhill from there. They got this guy to train me, who was nice, but hopeless, so I had to make up stuff along the go. Everyone there seemed to have a stick up their arse and no matter how hard I tried to be social and friendly, I rarely had conversation back (except when one of the boys who worked there decided to tell me about how he and his friend “use each other” for sex). After about five months, someone nice started work and I noticed that her equally social nature seemed to make every other person there her friend. Slightly miffed about why I wasn’t treated the same, I thought, it is only a job and I can get through it.

One day, I came in early, did my work with no break for eight hours straight. That same day I had been teased by the guy who had told me about using his friend for sex. Only paid seven and a half hours and annoyed by him, I snapped at the guy and told him to “stop being such a douche and leave me alone so I can do my work without interuption the next week.” Since I had started the undeserved attack, according to my boss, and they shouldn’t pay me for that day, to which I replied, “I work really hard here and I do my job well whilst he slacks off talking about his sexual activites and I’m getting my pay docked? Really?” They left me alone with my seven and a half hours pay, but he got away scott free.

I worked harder than anyone else there and was often given extra shifts as they knew this. I was always 15 minutes early and never paid for it. But I thought this would build up a good rep. I rarely asked for days off and when I did, it would be for legit reasons. But they always seemed a bit arsey whenever I did saying, “We did this as a favour to your Dad seeing as you had no interview” in front of the other interviewed members of staff (the reason for their cold shoulder is now apparent). I said to my boss politely later that day that I was expecting an interview and that my father should have had nothing to do with my employment and should I have an interview to keep my job. I was told, “Keep your attitude out of the work place or you wont have one.” I liked having the money so I ignored it and stuck at it.

I then asked for two days off as I had important A level exams the following day. They said I might as well take the next few work days off as they were over staffed and come back at the end of my exams. I then returned and was told come back at the end of the month. This continued for two months until I gave up. I’m technically still employed as they never fired me.
It has been a year since, and I finally got a great full time job before my uni course starts. I never go in that cafe anymore and I have given it 1/5 stars on every website I could find (I wasn’t the only one) and often see comments saying, “Where is the tall fellow?” or “What happened to the lovely curly haired boy? He was always so nice and chatty.”