When I was 17, I started working at a popular card store. The pay wasn’t great but it was enough to live off of and the people I worked with were fantastic.

In short, I loved the job. I worked full time and would always go above and beyond to prove that I was loyal and to advance within the company. I was there for a few years and would often take on “acting manager” roles when my manager was unavailable or when other stores in the area needed a hand.

Our district manager, however, was a total bitch and everyone would refer to her as “Dragon Lady” when she wasn’t around. She never had anything nice to say and was constantly passing judgment, not just on the condition of the store but also on us personally. (She would often tell my manager that she needed to lose weight etc.)

One of the stores had an incredibly high turnover rate as it was a clearance store and hard to manage. I was sent there temporarily until they could find a new manager and a solid staff. I was there for about four months and they had no luck hiring anyone on to fill the position. Thinking this was my chance to prove my worth, I applied for the position as I was already managing the place anyway. Over the next few months, the Dragon Lady hired me a less that prominent staff (two part-time single moms on welfare with scheduling issues, a pregnant diabetic who loved to call in tired and a 16-year-old kid who enjoyed skimming the tills). She was constantly observing my every move and had zero positive feedback. It was not long before none of my staff were showing up to work and I was working around the clock. I very seldom took any breaks and would often come in three hours early and stay long after closing to finish up paperwork and do any cleaning or organizing that needed to get done (keep in mind that I was on a salary and was not allowed to bank my overtime).

Christmas came around and my youngest cousin was sadly diagnosed with leukemia. I told my boss quite proudly that I was planning to shave my head in support of my family. To my complete disgust, she replied by telling me to buy a wig because she didn’t think I could work there if I was bald. Though offended greatly I brushed it off and continued putting everything I had into the store. I even worked the holidays with bronchial pneumonia. I went on working like this until April when I finally decided to takes a week of vacation. Everything seemed fine, I had an assistant from another location and my staff assured me that everything would be taken care of.

On my first day off, I got a call from mall security informing that my store wasn’t yet open. It was noon. Reluctantly I went in to find that the who was supposed to open the store had locked her keys inside the day before. I didn’t hear anything for the remainder of the week and assumed that everything was okay. When I returned the following week I came in the find the store in the most disgusting state I’ve ever seen. Food and garbage littered the aisles and the cash desk was covered in paperwork and left behind items. Nothing had been done while I was away and there was $100 missing from my float.

I finally had enough. I stood at that cash desk and scanned over the store in complete silence. The girl who was working with me at the time just stared at me and looked concerned. The anger in my face must have been apparent because when I turned to her she moved back a bit. I pulled my keys out of my pocket and took them off my lanyard. She asked what I was doing and I looked at her and said “Did you guys do anything while I was gone?” She responded with a resounding, “No, not really. Sorry about that…”

I slammed my keys down on the counter and collected my things. I explained to her that I was tired of living at the store for next to no money and this was the last straw. She looked genuinely sad and agreed. I received a call later that day from Dragon Lady who said nothing to me except: “I knew you couldn’t do it. Hard work just isn’t in some people’s blood I guess.” I laughed and hung up.

I recently went for coffee with my old manager from when I first started working there. I guess Dragon Lady’s husband left her and took their kids because she spends more time howling about and hounding her “stupid staff” than she did paying attention her family. Love and compassion just isn’t in some people’s blood I guess.

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.

During the summer of 2007, I was fresh out of high school, and was excited to finally become an adult, and enter the working world. Fortunately for me, during high school I had taken quiet a few business management classes, which allowed me to apply for positions in an office situation. I thought that I was doing the smart thing, as people often times told me of their horror stories about working at fast food places, or grocery stores, but how wrong I was.

In July, I finally ended up getting my office job. It was for a shipping company, and I would be a data entry clerk. The job essentially had me taking bills which were scanned into our system, and then I would have to input those bills into our software, but more on that later. My first warning came when I began my training, and I should have realized right then and there that this was the wrong environment for me. When I walked into the building, and walked towards our training room I realized that I was the only male on the floor. There were rows of cubicles filled with middle aged woman.

My next warning came when we started to begin training. The bills I previously mentioned before? It was all by hand input, meaning that truck drivers were writing down all this information and scanning it to us, and no offense to truck drivers, but their hand writing makes a doctor’s signature look neat. How was I suppose to decrypt their crazy algorithmic hand writing? I dared not ask how ever, and continued with the job, eventually ending my training and getting on the floor.

This is when the hellish nightmare of this job truly began to settle in. There was a strict policy of no talking, no use of head phones, no distractions what so ever. It was kind of like one of those cool montage moments in a movie where you see a code-breaker sitting at a computer trying to decipher some cryptic message, and he has a swat team of other hackers around them, and they only have 60 seconds to decrypt this message. Except it didn’t have any cool music, and code breaking never stopped, after I’d complete one, another would come in right away,

So, we had crippling boredom, followed up by impossible hand writing, and the always awkward feeling I had of being surrounded by middle-aged woman, this was really starting to sound like my own personal hell, but hey at least I was inside a cool comfortable office building with air conditioning, right? Apparently it broke, the day I actually started. So I was stuck there, for eight hours a day in work-dress clothes in the sweat box of an office building.

Eventually I was let go, being told I was just not “It wasn’t the quality of your work, we just felt as though you didn’t fit in and were unhappy,” but that wasn’t the final straw. They ended up blocking me from getting unemployment, telling the office that they had offered me another job, and I had refused.

I was 16 years old, very naive, but extremely motivated and excited to get my first job. It was at a national pizza chain, but the store was new and everything seemed clean. People were mostly hired by word of mouth, so it was me, my three friends who were boys, the cool hiring manager, an assistant manager, approximately five 30-ish guys who all knew each other from high school and some other random girls. As a female, I was to answer phones, with occasional pizza making. Being located in a relatively affluent suburb of a major metropolitan suburb, the complaints were something else. Everything from yelling at me to make their pizza free because 30 minutes had passed (that had never been policy for said chain), yelling at me because their daughter was diabetic and had needed that pizza stat, to yelling at me because someone left a flyer on their door and it was against their exclusive neighborhood’s policy to do so. Yes, yell at a 16-year-old minimum wage employee because you had to pick up a piece of paper that she had nothing to do with.

As bad as the customers could be, what far outshined them in crappiness were the employees. Those 30-somethings? Turns out most of them liked younger girls, including my 16 year old self. I was hit on, told very gross stories (“I like it when my girl gets all sweaty during sex, so we just glide against another”) and mildly groped. I didn’t really worry about it, since one of my friends was usually working with me, though in hindsight I wonder how much I could have collected from a sexual harassment lawsuit (like I said, my first job, pretty naive). The cool manager was moved along to open other stores and the assistant manager took over. His wife and children decided to hangout in the front to keep him company. Cut to me wrangling toddlers away from 350 degree ovens. Every night until he quit (his job ended when one of the delivery drivers became enraged and threw a motorcycle helmet at the crowded pizza prep line. Delivery guy was arrested and I think ended up in a mental hospital for bipolar disorder).

The obese, always sweaty and acne-ridden new manager was on a power trip. I had been working there for six months, always showed up on time and only missed days when I was legitimately sick, but I was constantly yelled at by him for nothing in particular. All of my original friends had quit at this point, but loyalty pays off eventually, right? On a typically slow night I was getting slammed by phone call after phone call and at some point we were 10 pizzas in. Since I couldn’t find my fellow 16-year-old co-worker, I made the executive decision to go ahead and make the pizzas that were over time. The phone rang, but I was so busy I didn’t answer it. Five minutes later, my manager stormed out of the office, neck-vein bulging angry (as usual), to chew me out about not answering the call. Then my female co-worker sheepishly comes out of the manager’s office. Turns out she (a 16-year-old) was giving our thirty-something manager a blow job.

I wish I could say I stormed out, but I have too good a work ethic and just quit at the end of the day. Thankfully, every job since then has been exponentially better than the last.

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.

When I was fifteen, I started working at a big chain grocery store as a cashier. I continued to work there until I left for college. When I came back home on my first summer break, I was willing to work at the same store, but wanted something that would pay a little more. There was a job opening in the produce department, preparing items for the salad bar, chopping fruits and vegetables for prepared platters, etc. I was told I’d work about 30 hours a week, which was great and just the right amount of time for a summer job.

What I wasn’t told was that the very particular, very demanding woman training me (Donna) would be taking a three week vacation just days after I started “training.” With very little training to go on, I suddenly found myself at work starting at 5 a.m. six days a week. I was left to manage the department (imagine being 18-years-old and left in charge of seasoned veterans who has been working at this store for 20+ years). I was responsible for checking inventory, accepting deliveries off trucks and having to painstakingly go through truckfulls of pre-prepared food for the salad bar, getting it up and ready before the lunch rush and dealing with insanely demanding customers all day long. I did the best I could to maintain, and thought I did a damn fine job for having so little training.

I had one of my few days off on Donna’s first day back. I came into work the next day, I found a three page long, hand-written, aggressively threatening note outlining everything I did wrong and why I should be ashamed. I went to the store manager’s office and said I could no longer continue to work for Donna. The manager reassigned me to a new department. When Donna heard about this, she found me in the new department, dragged me out by my shirt, and told me we needed to talk. The store manager luckily intercepted her. I took off my work shirt and immediately left the store, never to return.

Proving karma does exist, I recently learned that Donna was fired for embezzling. It was a good feeling.

MVWJ was at a Mediterranean pizza restaurant. I was in high school and tired of always being broke so I applied to almost any job with a “Help Wanted” sign. I met M there and was hired as a waitress from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. weekdays, I didn’t make it to the weekend to figure out my schedule.

My young mind ignored the abundance of red flags that went up. They never threw away any food, no matter how stale. I didn’t see M or the other cook, A, ever wash their hands and the dishes were never properly or thoroughly washed. I didn’t eat there so I didn’t say anything about the hazardous handling of food. Aside from the occasional table in the ghostly restaurant, I took phone delivery orders. People would order strange things not offered on any menu, I’ve ever seen but I would take the order anyway thinking the customer was someone who has ordered from there before. M would scold me in broken English about not knowing the menu, I’d apologize and try again.

I became very irritated at M attempting to reprimand me thing that weren’t related to my job at all. I was scolded for not eating, he said, “How can you sit for hours and no eat?” I thought to myself about the food poisoning I would get if I did so. Another part of my job was to warm up individual slices of pizza, that was served on plain paper plates. The dirt cheap thin plates that couldn’t hold much. I would double up on the plates so they’d be more sturdy. Again, I was bitched at. I quit at the end of my shift, I didn’t go back for my pay.

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.

After college, I saw an ad for a sports marketing position. When I went in, I was told that the interview would actually be a full day of work. I was introduced to the sales team I’d be working with and we all got into someone’s car and started to drive to a strip mall in the suburbs. The job ended up consisting of trying to sell coupons for the local baseball team to workers in retail stores and restaurants. We were told to ignore “no solicitation” signs. Between stops at strip malls, I sat in the backseat of the car with the “sales trainer.”  At one point, he asked if he could lean on me and put his head in my lap! After putting in a long degrading day, I was told that I had gotten the job. My parents begged me not to go back, but I did. The next day, we headed out and our trainer announced that he didn’t feel like selling that day and we were going to go to the movies instead. As if this wasn’t awkward enough, he whispered to me that he needed to go behind the movie theater and get high beforehand. Much to my parents’ happiness, that was my last day.