I applied to the doctor’s office when I saw it on my university’s job listing website. The description said it had part-time hours during school and full-time hours during the summer. It was perfect. I applied and was offered the job.

I was eager to start full-time because I needed the money for my bills. I started “full-time” only to find out that meant under 30 hours a week. I was struggling financially and had to take on another job, at an old job 2 hours away at my hometown, in which I worked 24 hours over the weekend. Apparently the doctor didn’t understand my need for extra hours because even though I told him multiple times I was going home to work he would always ask, “Are you going home this weekend to see your family?”

It would have been more beneficial for me to just live with my family, but I had signed a lease on an apartment with a roommate thinking I would be able to live in my college town. Plus, I felt bad for quitting somewhere so quickly.

As I worked over the summer I got more and more responsibility from the supervisor who I was taking over for. Soon I was in charge of processing insurance claims, running payments and all other general office work.

When school started I went back to my six hours a week. I soon took on a second babysitting job in the evenings and weekends to keep up, no longer did I have time to drive home every weekend. Strangely enough, every time I started going in for the 2 hours at the end of the day I had the exact same amount of work I had every day during the summer. I had no idea what my supervisor was doing all day, but it wasn’t her job.

I should mention that this office was extremely strict. No gum, no cell phones and not even any food was allowed. Of course, my supervisor got to do all these things because she was the doctor’s wife. Minus the paycheck there was no incentive to working there such as a free lunch or cookies for a birthday or something special.

But then my co-worker told me there was a Christmas bonus. I was so excited when Christmas came around and I really needed the money. I opened up my check to find $25. Not what I was expecting, but I decided it was better than nothing and tried to be happy about it. A couple hours later a women called that occasionally referred patients to our business, “Oh I just wanted to call and tell the doctor thank you for the gift card. That was so kind. I really wasn’t expecting it. Please tell him thank you for me!” Surely no one would be that excited for a gift card under $25.

A week later I couldn’t take it any longer and asked my co-worker, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want, but I’m just curious what you got for your bonus.”

“$267, you?”

I could barely get the words out to tell her how much I got. She tried to make me feel better by saying it was probably a percentage thing. Sure she was “full-time” all the time, but I had worked full-time all summer, came in whenever I could, and worked full-time every break I got at school.

Around that time I got offered a really great internship. I worked the two hours Monday, Wednesday and Thursdays at the doctor’s office and the internship was going to be all day Monday and Wednesday. I was so happy to have an excuse to quit and told them that I was no longer going to be able to work because of the days I was having to do the internship.

My supervisor’s response, “You don’t work there Thursdays? Well you can just come in then.”

Somehow my attempt to quit did not work.

I didn’t have as much work as I did before my internship, but I still had 2+ days of work every time I would come in. Finally since I am graduating I was able to tell them I wouldn’t be working once I finished school because I was going to find a full-time job in my field. I told them about three months in advance.

Two weeks ago I had a giant group presentation that we had been working on all semester that went into my work time. I told my supervisor I would be late, but I would come in as soon as it was over. She texted me the day before saying it had been slow all week and that I wouldn’t need to come in.

The next week she told me the same thing. I again was grateful since it was finals week. When she sent that text I couldn’t help but thinking my last day was coming up, but couldn’t remember the exact week. Apparently it was that week. When I told her thanks for letting my have the day off she responded, “That was ur last day right? Thank u for all ur hard work.” Guess I’m not even getting a going away card.

I had just graduated university and was looking for my first real job. A friend suggested I apply for a job at a local flooring store as an office worker, as her Dad knew the owners. I should have known right away that this wasn’t a good idea, but I really wanted to get started on my career. I applied and interviewed for the position and was thrilled when they offered me the job. The name of the store was so embarrassing I wouldn’t even tell people where I worked.

The shift started at a different time everyday ( I got all the bad shifts) which wasn’t ideal but beggars can’t be choosers so I sucked it up. Their daughter was about to have a baby and they needed someone to cover for her and then stay on afterwards. They asked me to promise that I would stay for at least one year, which I had no problem doing.

Right away the dynamics of the office seemed odd. It was made clear that they were family and I was an outsider.  The daughter (A) and her husband (B) worked there as did the mother (owner), I will call her P and her ex-husband’s new wife, T. She had bought her ex-husband (F) out of the company. Despite this F continued to come in all the time and acted like he owned the company, fine who was I to say anything. He was a local politician but was a shady character, the type of guy that just gives you the creeps. He used the staff to put up his campaign signs.

I got along with B really well and even got him free tickets for him and his son to see his favourite band. I liked everyone and things were fine for a while, although I did little office work and did a lot of cleaning, sales and other things.

They used an archaic system to store their business contacts and expected me to instantly grasp the way they filed, even though it made no logical sense, not alphabetical.

Then right before A had her baby I broke my ankle. I called to say I had to go to the hospital but that I would come in after I had my cast on, so I would be about an hour late. She told me to stay home and call the next day. They continued to tell me to stay home even though I said I could work because I had a walking cast. I came in to see them and brought A some really nice baby presents. P sent me home and said she would call me.

Eventually, after much begging on my part (I needed the money and I was ok to work) P allowed me to come back to work, but got angry if I made even the smallest mistake even though they didn’t have the time to properly train me. Then one day out of the blue P fired me, said it just wasn’t working out. Other then the occasional small mistake I had done nothing really wrong, was always dressed really well, on time and polite. I was confused as to why but then I figured it out. They had hired me only until the daughter could come back to work. She would now work under the table (while collecting maternity leave) and bring the baby to work everyday; she had been doing this a few days a week while I was still there.

I guess they wanted to see if it would work with the baby there and I was the back up plan. I had never been fired in my life. Getting fired from this place was the best thing that happened to me, I got offered a government job the next week for over double the pay. I figured I was better off anyways, since the whole dynamic of the place was odd. F and T even lived in the store for a while.

My Very Worst Job was at a copier company when I was 20. My boyfriend and I were a bit poor back then, so I didn’t have much in the way of proper business attire. As such, I showed up for the interview in a sundress. The two brothers who owned the place barely asked me anything and then hired me on the spot.

I was the office manager, answering phones, taking complaints from customers (of which there were several) and trying to appease them, typing, filing, interacting with the techs and doing their accounts payable and receivable. I was also forced to call the customers and harass them when their payments were late.

The accounts almost never balanced. And we’re not talking a few dollars here and there; they would be missing thousands at a time. Thinking I might be making a mistake at first, I would check and double check my work, but the results were always the same. Luckily I had no actual access to the money itself so no one could blame me, but I was still afraid of the wrath of the younger brother (who we’ll get to in a bit).

Much of the time, I was left completely alone. The techs would be out in the field, and the two brothers were out doing god knows what. They were rather lazy and didn’t seem to understand how to run a business. When the older of the two did come in (which was more often than the younger) he would tell me stories about stealing his wife’s credit card and racking up charges on it at brothels in Vegas where he would sleep with other women. When I expressed my disgust, he acted like he couldn’t understand what was wrong with that. Once he brought in a porn CD and sat there watching it right in front of me on my own computer. At one point he asked me why I never wore sundresses to the office anymore and admitted it was the reason they hired me.

The younger brother was even worse. He was a total pig regarding women as well, and an a-hole besides. He made it clear that I wasn’t allowed to do anything at all in the office besides my exact work (not even Solitaire or something to pass the time), despite the fact that on most days I would finish my job duties in an hour or two and have no one to even talk to. Whenever his fiancé would call, he would yell all sorts of rude things at her and cuss her out and tell her to stop bothering him. When he hung up, he would call her names and make fun of her.

Despite the fact that he was almost never in the office, when he DID make it in, he would strut around like he was God’s gift to the world and try his best to be intimidating. He liked to stand right behind me and stare over my shoulder as I worked (and criticize and nitpick whenever he could). He would get into rages and yell all the time and put me down. He also made a way bigger deal about the accounts receivable discrepancy than his brother. All while sniffing continually as if he had a perpetually runny nose.

Things got so bad that I would cry every morning when I woke up, just knowing that I had to go back to that place. There was a huge turnover because the techs would get fed up and leave. The younger brother took a liking to one tech, S, who started later than many of the others. S got tons of special treatment, and instead of working, he spent most of his time hanging out with the younger brother doing god knows what away from the office. Eventually, S came in one day when no one else was around and told me what was really going on. It turned out he actually couldn’t stand the younger brother who had been stealing tons of money from the company to support his cocaine habit. That explained the missing money and the constant sniffling.

Right after that, I searched extra hard and found a great job to go to. I gave them only one week’s notice, and they were lucky to have gotten that.

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 graduated high school and got a job at a family-owned video store. The owner was a nurse who opened the store about six months before, and she seemed to like me at first because I had aspirations of becoming a nurse, too. I thought I had it made, but soon I realized that this woman had no business running her own store. Despite this being a new business, the owner was absent, apparently just expecting teenage kids to do the grunt work and have money roll right in.

I was trained by two co-workers, given conflicting information, would get confused, try my best, then be reprimanded by for doing the wrong thing. Instead of quietly taking me off to the side (remember she was hardly present), the owner would write a note and clip it to my time card, so all the employees could read them as they clocked in. The other employees never seemed to get reprimanded, though.

The owner was also  a bible-thumper, insisting on buying religious videos that no one was interested in renting. This was back in 2000, and our customers had to fight over three VHS copies of Gladiator. Business wasn’t good. This was also when DVDs started getting popular, but she refused to get any, thinking they were a fad. I found out all of the inventory was bought from an out-of-business video store, and that there were boxes of porn videos hidden in the storage room. Considering how many times I was asked if there was a “back room,” I know a ton of money would have been made. Due to her religious ways, she refused to make a back room up to rent them out, and thought I was seriously evil for suggesting it. Why someone with a stripper for a daughter and a teenage son dating a twenty-something, married woman was so self-righteous and judgmental of me, a reasonably good kid, I have no idea.

This son of hers worked at the store from time to time. One evening we were working together, I was stuck with cleaning duty. He took it upon himself to eat Taco Bell before his shift, then have explosive diarrhea all over the seat of the break room toilet that he didn’t clean up. I still think he did it on purpose. Another boy around our age worked there, and would invite his friends to the store to hang out for hours and sexually harass me. One slow night, I made a rubber band ball the size of a baseball, which he grabbed from me and threw across the store, embedding it into a particle board door. He begged me to lie and say a couple of kids ran in and did it, but I couldn’t keep the lie up for long and squealed to the owner. He blamed me, saying it was all my fault because I was the one who made the ball. She went along with him, saying that since I was older (by a few months, I believe), I should have set a better example. I was docked $100 in pay to cover the cost of another door, and I heard through one of the girls who worked there with us that they got the replacement door for $50.

I annoyed the owner mostly because I was constantly off on my till every night. I tried my hardest to cooperate with their dinosaur of a cash register, and why the other ones never seemed to get in trouble for their tills being off, I’ll never know. The owner would ask me really increasingly condescending questions in front of the other employees from “Do you need your eyes re-examined?” to “Did you take special classes in school?” She must have forgot that I graduated a year early. She would tell me multiple times that someone like me would struggle throughout a nursing career due to my stupidity.

It was no surprise to me that I was fired after six months for incompetence, but I was not sad at all. The business failed three months later, she had to go back to her old doctor’s office job that she hated under a huge mountain of debt, and I’ve been a successful nurse for the past eight years with an advanced degree, which I couldn’t have accomplished if I truly was as stupid as she tried to convince me.

MVWJ was as a server in a restaurant that sold soup, salads, sandwiches, and espresso. All of which were overpriced. A husband and wife team, who claimed to be very religious, owned the joint. They always looked down on all the staff for not being the same religion as they were. In the dining room, they would play three CDs on repeat all day. Those CDs were Kenny G’s Greatest Hits, Whale Songs (noises whales use to communicate), and Ocean Sounds (seagull noises).

Whenever the owners came in, they would make a total wreck of the place as they had no business or restaurant experience. They would have their four kids do their homework in the kitchen and bar, and complain about crazy things like the soup ladles being too big or employees not cutting the sandwiches “the right way.” They never came in without their kids and would scream at them and make them cry. One of their kids they had just adopted from Romania and he spoke almost no English. This was cause for frequent yelling and subsequent crying. I knew a few words of Romanian and would try to calm this kid down and I would get yelled at for that. They didn’t want “the help” speaking to their children.

They only employed two servers for the 50 tables and at noon, the other server would leave no matter what. Most of the time we weren’t that busy, but every Sunday, we had this huge group come in and every table was full. This always happened right after the other server left. It is impossible for one person to wait on 50 tables by themselves. The owners always refused to help at first, then after I put in all the orders, the family would just start taking food out at random to all the wrong tables. Then they would get mad at me for “mixing up the orders.”

I was young, so I was really trying to make this nightmare work for some reason. But I was fired, because one day some of the customers complained to me about the Whale Songs CD being played. Sympathizing with them, I went and relayed this sentiment to the owner (I had never before voiced my dislike of these terrible CDs) and he completely lost it. He screamed that he doesn’t like the CD either, he liked ACDC and Metallica but you couldn’t play those bands in a restaurant! And on and on for about five minutes. Then after he finally calmed down, he said to me, “You know what? This isn’t working. Don’t come back!” He opened the till, cashed out my tips and gave me my hourly wages in cash.

The restaurant was shut down in the next two months. I can’t imagine why.

I had a lot a bad jobs but the worst was working in an office with my bad boss. She had obviously no managerial experience but because she married into the family-run business, she got a high position immediately. I was desperate for a job near my home, which it was, tired of long commutes, so I quickly accepted it.

Right from beginning she was a horrible boss. She took sides and made snide comments, especially of a coworker she would catch looking at porn websites. “E was looking a naked men instead or working. Hehe,” she  jokingly teased at our meetings before the store opened. The rest of us would stare at one another in WTF? fashion. Every morning was a different one, she would either snap or bitch at us randomly, or just start bitching from the get go. When we asked for our paychecks, since they were hardly ever on time, she would throw payroll papers at us and snap, “Well, you do the payroll then!” She would also inform us of her mensturation cycle, how much it hurt and that she was PMSing. Along with detailed accounts of her and her husband’s methods of making a baby through in vitro and others methods, it was all so nauseating. She would also moan and whine about how her husband made her move from Detroit, and how much she misses having girlfriends.

I avoided as much as I could because I needed the money and through lots of turnover, I had seven jobs: Front Desk Clerk, Receptionist, Warehouse Receiver, Trainer of New Employees, New Orientation Presenter, Sales Assistant and Merchandiser. I worked my butt off, and didn’t even have time to finish at the end of the day. She would turn off the light in the office room and when I would protest, she said unexpressively, “You’re still here?! Go home. Now.” Once she watched impassively as one mean girl kicked me on the butt while I was walking down the hall, laughing aloud when I tripped and stumbled.

Finally, I had enough and I told her that I couldn’t do everything. She said, “Well, what do I pay you for then?” I said she was unfair. She looked at me like I just called her the worst thing in the world. Like How Dare You, Peon?

I should’ve quit right then, but I REALLY needed the money. So stupidly I waited until she fired me, which was six months of this hell.

I’m still in MVWJ as a kindergarten teacher in a private school. After two months of work, ten staff members have quit – most of this is due to the antics of my boss, A.

A’s grandson, D, is in my class. He is out of control. If attempts are made at discipline (like asking him nicely or using a firm voice to get him to stop hitting another child, for instance), he tells his grandmother his teachers hurt him and she immediately takes it out on us. No questions asked. However, I have seen her roughly handle and verbally abuse other students who are misbehaving. H also does not have to do academic work like everyone else.

Despite that the school is open ten hours a day, A’s rules state that NO child in our class is allowed to take naps or have pacifiers. Teachers have been fired for allowing exhausted students to lay down. D–who has his pacifier in almost the whole day–is exempt from this rule.  As you can well imagine, morale is low. In order to curb the gossip about her, A made us all sign an “anti-gossip” pledge which stated we would promise not to talk about her. Of course, this persisted so she once again began a round of firing, which stopped it.

One story stands out to illustrate their insanity. Last week, the students were filmed for a local news segment. Before the event started, A pulled me aside and said, “D needs to be front and center on film because he’s got his Spiderman outfit on!” When I watched the evening news, the camera was directed at Spiderman for a few seconds and the rest of the segment was an interview with A. The other students were completely ignored.

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.

My Very Worst Job started after I was laid off from my last job. I had been out of work for about six months and was getting desperate. My best friend told me that the family-owned organic grocery store that she had just been hired at was still looking for people, so I went and handed in my resume. After a quick interview, I was hired, and although they were minorly concerned that I never had any cashier experience before, they told me that they’d spend time training me and I assured them I was a quick learner.

I got into work the next day and was led on a tour by my manager, who had the world’s most rancid breath. I’m pretty sure something crawled in her mouth and died, there was no way a human could smell so disgusting naturally. The other manager liked to stand around and stare at the cashiers and yell anytime he noticed us being idle for a split second or talking and asking each other questions about work.  Thankfully, the rest of the day went by uneventfully.  However, at the end of the next day my manager called me into her office to tell me there was a scheduling conflict and I wouldn’t be working the next day and to expect a phone call from them at the end of the week telling me the time and date of my next shift.

I waited until the end of the week, with no phone call. I finally called them myself to find out was going on, and was told by one of my managers that she didn’t have my schedule on her and I would have to call back in an hour when the other manager was working to find out about my next shift. So, an hour later I called back only to be told that they had over-hired and I was fired. I’m sure the other manager knew I was fired, seeing as it was family-owned, but was just too chicken to tell me herself.

A week later, my best friend, who was still working there, was told a secret by the manager (who had no idea we were best friends, as we thought it best to keep our friendship secret while working there) – he did not fire me because they over-hired, I was fired because “I had no cashier experience and it was unacceptable.” I was completely upfront about my lack of cashier skills in the interview and they told me they had no issues with training me at my first cashier job. The manager also said a slew of negative things about me to my best friend, which was pretty impressive considering I had only worked there and known the manager for two days.

Two weeks after that, my best friend was fired for taking too much time off (five days).  Why did she take so much time off?  To go to her grandmother’s funeral halfway across the country.

Luckily, I’m now working at a great cashier job where I am told that I was the easiest to train cashier they’ve ever had, so I’m still not sure what the cashier skills drama was about.