At the start of my sophomore year of college, my aunt had hired me and my roommate to work at a store she was opening up in the mall in November.  Unfortunately, it was September, and I was out of money.  Since I had to find a way to pay rent and buy groceries, I found a job listing for a haunted house. J was the owner of a laser tag arena and he thought it would be goldmine to convert said arena into a haunted house for the month of October.

My roommate S and I were both desperate for money and decided to go to the orientation for potential employees or “spooks” as J liked to call us. Attending the orientation were about 30 people, all high school or college age. We were all hired on the spot.  The haunted house would be open every day, from 6-closing (basically, whenever J felt like closing). We were to be paid per shift, not per hour, getting paid higher on the weekends. All of our wages were to be paid at the laser tag/pizza party J was throwing on Halloween after our final shift. We were required to show up an hour before the shift started to get into costume, makeup, and take your place. This meant that we were all paid the same amount, regardless of what you did, or how long you were there.

This all might sound like a good idea, in theory, however, there were many haunted houses in the area. I should have been clued in to how horrible this would be on my first tour of the arena…I had attended haunted houses before. This looked more like a spook alley my middle school put on to raise money for a field-trip, not a Haunted House that people were supposed to shell out 10-15 bucks to get into. It was more of a maze of black lit rooms then anything scary. And how could we compete with the man with no legs that chased you on his hands at the Haunted Trails just 20 minutes away? How?

S and I were assigned to be skeletons. We were to hid in the darkness, and jump out at you, with only our white skeleton face and costume showing up in the black light. J had advertised for this heavily at the local colleges, so there was a good line the first night. During my first shift there, I got punched in the stomach. Having never been punched like that  before, I ended up vomiting. Awesome. Since I was required to work the whole shift to get paid for it (J’s words), I stayed my time and got made fun of by my fellow spooks. After a couple of other near misses, I got good at evading punches or scratches or other various things people do when you jump out at them.

Word started to get around town about how much this haunted house sucked. Most people attended the other, more terrifying haunted houses close by.  Because of this, most of my shifts were spent lying or sitting on the floor trying to read my flashcards or talking to whichever spook was close by until someone would shout “someone’s coming!” and we’d all take our places. The weekends were a bit busier, but never the steady flow of people J had envisioned. We would all do the best we could with what we had, but all we had were crappy costumes, bad makeup, and an even worse location. We managed to get a few scares out of some people, but most people were only mildly startled.

The most frightening part was when a guy in a Jason mask would chase people with a chainsaw. Since this was all in a relatively small laser tag arena, the chainsaw made the entire place smell of gasoline. Both S and I would dread coming into work, as it was spectacularly boring, but neither of us ever missed an assigned shift. We both needed the money. Finally, October 31st arrived. The last day! And, it being Halloween, we actually had a good amount of people show up. When it was over, the party began. And by party, I mean J making us tear down the haunted house and set up for laser tag. But we at least had pizza. At about 2AM, J sat us all down to talk to us about the last month. He stated that “he didn’t do as well as he thought” and that “I’m gonna have to pay you all in 2 weeks instead of tonight” since he just hadn’t figured out the “numbers” yet. I was pissed. I needed that money to pay rent. After much complaints, he pretty much told us that there was nothing HE could do and we were free to leave.

Two weeks went by, and I hadn’t received a check or even a phone call. So I called him. He said it would be another two weeks. After a week, I called him again to remind him that he needed to pay me in a week. He tried to push it to two more weeks again. I told him that he had one week before I took action. He laughed, and scoffed at what I, a 19-year-old kid could do. He then offered me free laser tag for life in exchange of paying my the $500 he owed me. Um, no. After the week, I called him again. He hung up on me.

I then, along with S, made my way to small claims court and filed a claim. When they served him, he called me up, cursing me out for being a “trouble-maker” and “instigator.” He said I should just accept his free laser tag offer, because neither I nor Stacy were ever going to see a penny from him. I laughed at him and told him that if he didn’t pay the entire amount, plus court fees, in cash or money order, I would see him in court.

Another week went by, and he called me again telling me my money was ready. I don’t know why he had the change of heart, but I went to pick up my money as fast as I could. As S and I were picking up our money, he yelled at me again and told me he never wanted to see my face in his place of business again. Um, no problem, man. No problem.

A year later, he went bankrupt.

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 had worked my heiny off in college to graduate a full year early. Unfortunately, my GRE score was less than stellar, so I decided to take a semester off to focus on raising my score and applying to graduate school. In the meantime, I looked for temp jobs to save up money and gain experience.

After submitting my resume online, I was called in for an interview at the local branch of a national temp agency. Everyone was very pleasant and encouraging. I took several skills assessments and scored high on all of them. They informed me that most of their positions were located downtown (only ten minutes from my home) and rarely paid less than ten dollars an hour. I was very impressed when they found me a position after less than a week, even though it only paid nine dollars an hour. Unfortunately, that temp job ended and MVW job began.

The temp agency did not call me until 4:30 p.m. and explained that they needed me to fill a position for a mail clerk the next day. It wasn’t until after the office closed that I finally received an email with details about the position. The hours were 7:30-3:30 in an advertising agency an hour from my house. A little disheartened by the early hours and the distance, I showed up for work twenty minutes early at an industrial park nestled in a remote suburb. After waiting for the receptionist to arrive (the temp agency did not tell me who my supervisor was, or what part of the building the business was located in), I got an irate phone call from the temp agency. Apparently the email was wrong, and the job started at 7:00, not 7:30. The mail processing facility was located at the back of the building, and would not open without a key card.

The mail processing facility functioned like a factory, where one worker was assigned a menial task in an assembly line. We had half an hour for lunch, and two ten minute breaks, indicated by a bell that was just louder than the whirring of the equipment. Since I was actually fifteen minutes late by the time I found the main entrance, the supervisor shouted at me. Then she led me through a labyrinth of machines in a warehouse and told me to start working before walking back through the labyrinth. My co-workers seemed to only know about a dozen English words. After about two minutes listening to promotional flyers get fed into a large printer before one of the regular workers shoved a box at me and shouted, “Strip!”

I blinked in bewilderment. “What?”

She grumbled and pushed past me, then showed me how to put a plastic packaging strip on a box of flyers.

And that’s what I did all day. I packaged envelopes together, then organized them on the warehouse floor. There were other tedious tasks involved that I learned in the same manner. Since her English was so poor, I would often make a mistake because I didn’t understand what was going on. Then one of the other workers would shout at me in broken English until I figured out what I’d done wrong.

By the end of the day, there were putrid sweat stains all over my clothes–the warehouse had no air conditioning and the machines generated a lot of heat. As we were packing up to leave, one of the regular workers tried some small talk, explaining how she needed surgery for her “pee pee.”

On the second day, three out of the six temps had quit and been replaced with another girl in her twenties, a teacher with a Masters degree, and an elderly woman with a limp that moaned about being on her feet all day. The temp agency hadn’t told them the dress code, so they all showed up in business casual clothes. Thirty minutes into our shift, the teacher accidentally started a small fire. For some reason, the supervisor shouted at all of us.

By the third day, only three temps remained (the teacher had quit).

Even though I hated the job– I was exhausted by the end of the day and I was tired of the supervisor calling me an idiot– I decided to stick it out for the full three weeks. Then on the fifth day, the supervisor informed all the temps that they were no longer needed. A little relieved, I decided to spend the next week with family.

While I was out of town, the temp agency called me and asked if I had been paid. The company was not paying any of the temps. After the temp agency argued with the company for a few days, I finally received a direct deposit. Noticing that my paycheck was a little smaller than I’d anticipated, I did the math. I’d been paid minimum wage. The temp agency had told me I would be making $8.50.