The job where I tried to take one of my coworker’s pretzels and she slapped my hand.
The job where the light in the bathroom went out one day and still hadn’t been replaced when I quit six months later.
The job where each department had to write and perform a Halloween skit for company management.
The job where a coworker reverse-engineered a scent sensitivity so that whenever she had a headache, she’d walk around sniffing people’s hair and clothes until she smelled something she could blame.
The job where that same coworker developed an undiagnosable light sensitivity and began wearing sunglasses in the office.
The job where I had to ask my boss to tell the chairman of the board to stop playing with my hair when he visited.
The job where instead of firing employees she didn’t like, my manager would move their cubicle every three months until they quit. (We gave people red swingline staplers at their going-away parties.)
The job where I knew it was time to go when she moved my cubicle to a spot directly under the air conditioning vent.
The job where my director would look at my lunch and say, “Wow, are you going to eat all of that?”
The job where I showed up for my second summer and my manager hadn’t mentioned beforehand that she was eight months pregnant, didn’t mention it all week, then finally said, “So did you notice that I’m about to have a baby or what?”
The job where I was trained for less than an hour on how the phones worked before the receptionist went on vacation for the rest of the summer.
The job where I spent the next three months saying, “Well, if it was important, they’ll call back” whenever I tried to transfer a call.
The job where our office was next to the event room and kitchen, and I saved a year’s-worth of lunch money by eating leftover hors d’oeuvres and, occasionally, leftover rack of lamb.
The job where my manager and an employee who were dating broke up and I was tasked with relaying messages between them like a poorly paid child of divorce.
The job where a middle-aged white woman explained what “the down-low” was to me to illustrate how much she knew about black men.
The job(s) where my boss called me “Lynette” the entire time I worked there.
The job where the office had mice.
The job where the office had flying ants.
The job where a rat died in the walls.
The job where I knew it was a rat because there were more rats.
The job where a coworker accidentally grabbed my boob during a team-building event.
The job where the real team-building occurred over tequila shots long after the event had ended.
The job where I have literally just this moment realized the waiter at the restaurant next door was flirting with me every time he came to visit. Eighteen years too late.
The job where a third assistant manager told another assistant manager she was too good to be hanging out with non-managers.
The job where a co-working was too scared of the parking garage to go in it alone, but was fine leaving her escorts (also usually women) to fend for themselves.
The job where I tried to take one of my coworker’s pretzels and she slapped my hand.
TH is a redhead?! No wonder I always thought there was something off about his dead-brown color nowadays … So much hotter
Noup. Blonde and curly 🙂
I don’t know how to post a picture 🙁
tbh, if you try to take other people’s food without asking, you deserve what you get.
Yeah, I’ve never understood this. Or coworkers who look at your plate and ask for a bite. Were they raised to believe that if they saw something, they got to have it? This is just so foreign to the culture I was raised in that I’m baffled when it happens.
I’m more of the sort that would be perfectly happy to share, so long as I am asked first. Just grabbing at it is just unspeakably rude though.
I’m ok with sharing if the person asking is a coworker I’m friendly with. But asking a person you barely know for some of their food, when you don’t know them well enough to know if they’re ok with that, that bothers me.
Like, what if that’s all the food the person will get to eat that day? Or in my case, with my food allergies, there’s nothing I can eat unless I bring it with me, so if I get hungry later after sharing I can’t just go down to the vending machine to get food, and that makes me not want to share (plus my food tends to be expensive). And when you ask a person you barely know for their food, you force them to either share or explain personal information to you (even if that personal information is “I don’t like sharing food”).
I’ve probably put more thought into this than most people ever will, and I think most people don’t mind sharing food if asked. I’m just weird about it.
It was in the middle of a table. I didn’t realize it wasn’t an office snack. She reached across the table to smack my hand.
Oh, that’s different. I’m with you on this one.
Agreed.
I see! I had been envisioning her eating a bag of pretzels at her desk or something.
Or people (STRANGERS!) who see you walking by with a box of cookies or a tray of coffees and ask “Where’s mine?” That always makes me snappy.
Oooh, a fun one: the job where I sat at the very back of a long and empty showroom filled with electric fireplaces on either side, which I would turn on every day, so I felt like a really powerful and well-heated queen when people had to approach me.
New career goal!
Oh hey, my job’s like that too! Except that our showroom has lots of displays right in the center, so it’s like Baby’s First Labyrinth finding us past all of the gas fireplaces.
The job where a colleague whom I had met maybe one other time for six minutes said, “Can I ask you something?” and when I said yes, he inquired, “Your nose… does it always sweat like that?”
whaaaat
Ohhhhhh ye gods
After just one encounter with one of those type dudes (and it is so often a dude), the answer to “Can I ask you something?” is always “Well, it depends.”
I go with “No, you can’t.”
Try it. It’s very satisfying.
I worked in a Halloween skit place, too.
Also, the job where the place was owned by Scientologists and they worked their creepy lingo into performance appraisals so now I know what being “hatted” means.
In my house, it means putting a bra on your head (followed by declaring “hat!”). What’s it mean to Scientologists?
Hopefully the exact same thing.
Basically, if you’ve been “hatted” on an issue, you’ve been coached. The whole thing was bizarre. People would go on “vacation” to Clearwater for a week and not come back for a month.
That sounds really disturbing, omg. I mean I feel that way about Scientology in general but wow.
(But the mental image of Very Serious Scientologists ceremonially donning bra-hats after being coached is kinda hilarious.)
You had to have worked at the same place. I refuse to believe there is more than one Halloween skit place.
We didn’t HAVE to do a skit. We were ACTIVELY ENCOURAGED to dress in a theme for our division/unit to be judged by upper management. Skits only enhanced scoring.
I see your Halloween skit places and raise you a Christmas (Yes, Christmas, definitely not holiday!) skit place.
At my former job, they made all the new hires put on a Christmas (not holiday) skit for everyone else. We were instructed to make fun of the partners (most of us had worked with them for all of 2 months at that point), if any of them took offense . . . it would be bad.
My partner’s workplace does a Christmas pantomime.
How the hell is there more than one of THOSE, too?
I called in sick with a (would-have-been-genuine-if-I’d-had-to-go-through-with-this-nonsense) “stress migraine” the day we were supposed to dress up in actual elf costumes. I feel no remorse.
I worked at an independence day skit place 🙁 Instead of skits, we could also write team poems and recite them.
Oh, this is a fun topic.
The job where my boss asked me to organize his slides, including, it turned out, very graphic slides of his wife giving birth.
The job where, after a change in management, they fired all the midlevel employees and made them reapply for their jobs. Some of them had worked there for 25 years. Upper level and lower level employees got to keep their jobs without reapplying.
The job where the male supervisor liked to sit backwards on his chair while addressing a group of twenty women, most of whom considered themselves proactive feminists. Just in case we might have otherwise forgotten about his balls, I guess.
The job where my supervisor threatened to “shoot myself in the head with a Colt .45” if I took vacation at a time he had already approved. (Not a congenial, jokey supervisor either, but a weird paranoid guy).
Holy shit that last one. Did you go?
Yes I did go. It was very important to me, and I just figured, “His weirdness is not my problem.”
A corollary to the first one: the internship where I was tasked to organize my boss’s receipts, including the one for a fleshlight from a sex shop, dated February 14.
You got me with the touching slideshow of childbirth! SO GOOD
I so want to know what kind of workplace, and what kind of slideshow, the first one was.
It was my college work-study job, and the slide show was supposed to be about environmental disasters (oil spills, etc). The birth slides were just mixed up in there…there I was sitting in the dark clicking through pictures of seals and oil tankers and then “Whoa!”
I guess it’s good the professor asked SOMEONE to organize the slides before he showed them to the class.
My second child’s birth certainly *felt* like an environmental disaster. Wouldn’t want someone seeing the slides by accident, though; that’s not a nice kind of surprise.
OOoooops. I’m not sure there’s any job where you’d expect to have to organize slides of your boss’ wife’s childbirth (maybe a midwifery center??), but yeah, that’d be quite something to come across in the midst of making a presentation on the environment.
The job where, two days into my training on the phone, the owner of the company told me that if I didn’t recognize his voice on the phone by then I could find myself a new job.
The job where I went to my manager’s wedding shower, she leaned in for a “thanks for the gift hug,” but she leaned in at such a weird angle that I thought she was going for the “kiss on the cheek” thing, but she wasn’t. (I thought it was weird but she was my boss so I went with it and was horrified for the rest of the party.)
The job where the boss fired a group of people every three months just to remind people that they could be fired at any time. (These are all the same terrible job.)
Somehow I got the only phone in the building that doesn’t show caller ID, and at least once a month my boss calls me to ask if I can stop into his office and I say “I’m sorry, who is this?” I’ve worked here for three years.
This is fantastic. And it tells me that your boss hasn’t learned that phone etiquette exists for a reason.
The firings! That’s insane! Well, it’s terrible and it’s an idea that wouldn’t make any sense to a mentally healthy or happy person, aaagh.
The job where my manager actually did kiss my on the cheek, at a work meeting.
The job where I keep getting in trouble for not showing up at 7 am when I was hired to start at 8:30.
Everything on The Toast resonates with me. But honestly… just have to say that your username is the truest thing I’ve ever read here. Nicely chosen!
Based on comments from last year on The Bloggess’s twitter feed, I have come to believe that everyone has accidentally grabbed a woman’s boob or will do so at some point in the future.
Alas, I have a few times. (Crowded party when I was doing some excessively emphatic drunk hand gesticulation at an unfortunate level is the most notable that I can remember. Also at least one hug where we both misjudged timing/angles.)
I’m really surprised the hug/boob grab doesn’t happen to people on a regular basis, now that you’ve brought it up.
It Happened To Me. I still remember it with shuddering embarrassment.
It happened to me at a show, once. If you play mosh-pit-bingo, it was the one super-overly-enthusiastic dude that likes to flail about the outskirts but occasionally gets pushed into the humans on the outer edges by his fellow pit-mates. This is when his hand landed literally directly on my left tit. He was _horrified_ and spent the rest of the night _well_ away from where I was standing.
Me? I’m over here going “it happens. If he looked gleeful or even slightly delighted we’d have an issue, but he’s clearly just as upset with himself as I ever could be”. good times.
Yes, I think that makes all the difference in how you take it–how horrified is this person? One of the few times when intent does make a difference to how you interpret someone’s inappropriate actions.
Yep. Usually I am on the “intent means jack” side of this conversation, but in this particular scenario, it’s not like he didn’t _know_ better. He was just drunk and off-balance. He should probably have bought me an apology drink, tho *nods*
I once accidentally grabbed my male supervisor’s crotch.
This was 10 years ago. I was 17 and he 27.
I am still acutely humiliated.
If it makes you feel any better, at least it wasn’t Chris Evans.
Chris Evans is an outlier in the ‘accidentally grabbing intimate areas’ area what with that and the left-boob-laugh-grab
The more I learn about Chris Evans, the more I am convinced he is *actually* Captain America.
This is another thing that, based on the Bloggess’s twitter TL, I think happens to most people at some point. Still horrifying, though, if it happens to you.
Back in high school, my best friend and I were sharing a pull-out couch in a hotel suite. At that time I was a heavy sleeper, but I tossed and turned a lot (still do), and somehow my friend woke up with my hand on her boob.
She’s still one of my best friends and we’ve definitely slept in the same bed since then… but she does like to bring it up occasionally to tease me.
I had a summer job at a stable leading kids around on ponies in a paddock for 10 minutes at a time. The amount of fathers that tried to bribe me with extra money so that they too, could ride the pony….
This hysterical whether you read it straight or dirty.
I was oblivious to the potential dirty-ness of it until I hit post and Ginuwine’s Pony started playing in my head.
Ummmm what? Those poor ponies with grown men trying to ride them. I feel bad getting on a pony and I’m not that big.
But I have one now:
The job where I had to teach 11 year old girls about horse handling and after explaining lunging the campers were supposed to practice lunging each other but they wanted to lunge me instead.
The job where I had a stallion who was too smart for his own good, and he had figured out how to lunge people instead of people lunging him. (He’d stop and spin and keep spinning when you walked around to get to his butt with the whip, and he’d keep it up until you were running in circles around him. Smart fucking horse.)
I love troll horses.
The job in an office under a Dunkin’ Donuts whose coolatta machine exploded one day, sending an avalanche of cold coffee right through our ceiling and onto the marketing department.
The job where salaried employees weren’t paid for overtime but still had to sign in and out every day.
The job that for coffee had that milk that doesn’t have to be refrigerated until it’s opened but really should be after it’s opened, all of it expired over a year ago.
The fellowship where my mentor, the executive director, was fired two weeks in and I spent the remaining six months shadowing people who really didn’t want me there as they navigated the subsequent PR nightmare and transition but were too polite to say so.
The job where I got to be on-book for rehearsals of the world premiere of an iconic playwright and the first day I accidentally dropped the enormous script off the music stand and got a death glare from a Tony-winning director.
The almost-job for an anti-slave-trafficking organization whose director got really pissed at me when I told him I couldn’t work for free (irony….).
“Where are last month’s ad stats?”
“We lost them in The Coolatta Incident.”
“The job where salaried employees weren’t paid for overtime but still had to sign in and out every day. ”
IOW, every government job.
That last one though. No cognitive dissonance whatsoever, Mister Director Sir?
The job where it was demanded of me to ask a major funder how much her jewlery cost because she would throw a fit if no one did. Same job where another major funder heard we needed some equipment replaced, asked what it would cost, and proceeded to peel off fifteen 100 dollar bills from a stack he just happened to have in his wallet. Non-profit development! We put the crazy in fundraising!
Do you subscribe to FundraiserGrrl? You should – and submit your stories. Very cathartic. http://fundraisergrrl.tumblr.com/
Nonprofit With Balls kept me sane (or, at least, saner than I would have been without it, probably) during my time in nonprofits.
I do now! Excellent recommend!
the job where we could all hear that one employee playing video games at her desk
The job where a rich old guy my grandmother knew hired me to teach his DOG to SWIM in his giant kidney-shaped pool and like, it was a dog, it obviously knew how to swim already! But I took that money anyway!
The job where they hired a sexual offender and I got fired because he was not allowed to work with minors (I was a teen at the time).
The job where I was one of like two women and a colleague said to me “you’re acting like a hysterical woman!” at a staff meeting and none of the men I worked with said ANYTHING.
The job where I was laid off on maternity leave.
ahhhhhhhhh that first one what the FUCK.
(also the second one)
(and the third one)
we are all very happy that you have this job now, for this and for many more reasons.
thank you!! this is, by far, the best job I have ever had!
Wow, edit, I didn’t even READ the actual first one, all I could see in my rage was the sex offender one and thought that was the first one – hence my reaction. First one: weird and adorable … second one “ahhhhhhhh that […] one what the FUCK.”
These are all terrible except for the first one, which is fantastic. I keep hoping I will run into a rich old person who will hire me for some ridiculous, easy task and pay me lots of money for it, but it has not happened.
sometimes I’d also do a really lackluster job weeding one of his eighty billion flower beds and he’d give me, like, $40. my grandma was his housekeeper and he was really nice to me!
I’m so jealous of younger you! My parents made me weed the yard in the summers, and they paid me nothing. AND you got to play with a dog in a swimming pool.
The boss of a guy I dated had an on-call pet psychic to tell him what ailed his pets and what they needed. (The boss’s well-paying job was basically indulging the expensive whims of the extremely rich.) Part of the guy’s job was to email the psychic on behalf of his boss to ask for advice. He said he kept telling his boss that the psychic, being psychic, shouldn’t need an email to tell her that the animals were in distress, but his boss didn’t want to hear it. I wish i had the lack of shame to grift that kind of money from anxious rich people.
…laid off on maternity leave *rages*
at least the dog one sounds good
It was REALLY bad. At least the decision of whether or not to go back to work right after having a baby was taken out of my hands??? Fortunately we lived in a very inexpensive area at the time, so I freelanced for a couple of years, not really caring about how much I made, and then just said “fuck it” and went back to school. And then I started writing more, and here we are.
Please assure me that you were not in a swimsuit where the dog-owner could watch you working.
I WAS in a swimsuit. I was probably 9 or 10. He was the oldest man ALIVE and very eccentric and I think fond of me? My grandma was also there the whole time! But I realized after I typed it that it might sound creepier than it was.
Ah, I think that was reassuring? I’m going with yes, reassuring.
I was definitely picturing either a benevolent old man who wanted a way to be nice to a young person or a clueless old man who thought teaching his dog to swim was necessary and–hey, there’s a person who could do it. I’ve definitely known some of the second category (though I personally have never been offered any of this easy money).
Now that I think about it, the dog could probably swim okay as most dogs can, but seemed unusually squeamish about the water at first? The rich old dude was concerned the dog would fall into the in-ground pool somehow and panic and drown. He spent a TON of money on this dog, got it from a fancy breeder, and I am SURE the dog could swim even if it was a bit neurotic, but as I said — I got paid cash money to hang out with a dog in a giant pool all day, it was a no-brainer. And by the end of the day, the dog didn’t seem so hesitant about jumping in, so MISSION: ACCOMPLISHED
This seems like a solid second career option for you.
it is true, apart from editing and not-drowning I have few marketable skills.
The job where I had to ask two different employees, in different years, to not bring their sex-offender spouses to the family-friendly holiday party.
Dog swim coach would be an amazing job, though.
*explodes in furious rage*
The job where bright orange geckos apparently stowed away on shipping pallets from some overseas supplier and then infested the lab, dropping down from the top of the fume hoods onto people’s beakers and flasks.
(This company was later sold to a major pharmaceutical firm for close to a billion dollars.)
OMG. GECKOS.
Or, as one co-worker insisted on calling them, Geicos. I’m not sure if he knew the difference.
If it was on purpose, that’s some quality Dad Joking right there.
This would actually make my current job so much more bearable.
Did you like the geckos? There are a lot worse stowaways I can think of. But poor geckos, I hope they didn’t fall into solvents or burners or anything dangerous. I want to know more. How much of an infestation was this? Like you’d see one every day, or you’d see 15 every day? Did you catch them and befriend them, and teach them about chemistry?
I had a job where a skink got into our lab and was running around, so my friend and I managed to catch it and we were about to release it outside. I handed it off to him, because he wanted to hold it, and aaaaagh it left its thrashing disembodied tail in my hand. I shrieked at first, and then we both laughed so much. It’s one of my favorite memories of that old friend. And that tail kept moving for HOURS. (We put the skink outside and he was fine.)
This sounds really mad scientist-y to me for some reason.
White lab coats, beakers, bubbling flasks of chemicals and… orange geckos?
The job at the doll factory where I was hired because my uncle owned the building.
DOLL FACTORY. MY NIGHTMARES COME TO LIFE.
(Though if this turned out to be delightful and charming, and not a house of horrors, (1) my apologies, and (2) please share more, my god.)
In retrospect, all of the doll parts lying around was HORROWSHOW. Especially the vats of doll limbs sitting under a heat lamp so they would warm up and soften a bit, and I could pop the limbs into the torsos.
But at the time it was just work! I was a young teenager at the time so all of my co-workers gripes about their husbands and boyfriends were the highlight.
The company eventually went out of business, partly because the owners were bad businesspeople, partly because vinyl collector dolls are a middle-class thing and there are just fewer and fewer middle-class women to collect them.
D: D: D:
The job where it was a home office so the guy just never wore pants, and he sent me out on the streets in January to hand out fliers for his condo. His wife put makeup on me first.
You were buying Brain Bleach by the gallon, I take it.
The job where I was a personal assistant to a psychiatrist, who I’m sure would have a medical explanation for why I have blocked all memories of that time.
The job where I was illegally paid as a contractor and told that the months-late health insurance I was promised when I was hired was a “raise”.
If only I had not been a meek 21 year old at the time.
The job where I was literally thrown into the deep end with children and had to teach them not to drown.
The job where when the radiator was leaking in my office and I told HR & the building manager they both said “don’t worry about it!” and I came back to a flooded office after the weekend. They repainted the wall and leveled the radiator but didn’t clean the carpet. Now it smells like paint fumes every time the radiator kicks in.
The job where a small and merry band of cockroaches took up residence in the office phone.
Also, the job where we had to move offices for two months for construction on our building and when we came back the contractors had left a bucket of poop in the bathroom.
Heh. This reminds me of one of GentlemanX’s jobs, except that the problem was the colleague that refused to _use_ the bucket. The alternative was the tundra.
OH! I forgot, I heard one time that you have to be careful about buying equipment like microwaves or TVs from pawn shops/other used places because roaches can be living in there and you won’t know until you take it home. I’m adding phones to the list of things I won’t buy used.
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
and
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
AHHHHHH
Ohdeargodwhy? All I can picture is a phone exploding roaches when it’s answered, that vision will be with me until I die, I fear.
How exactly did you discover it was a band of merry roaches in the phone? Did they play jaunty tunes while you were on calls? Or did they emerge terrifyingly from the earpiece one day? I need to know more!!
And PLEASE tell me they were the littler ones, and not those giant bugs that probably could eat a phone.
‘The job where I was trained for less than an hour on how the phones worked before the receptionist went on vacation for the rest of the summer.’
…did we work at the same place? Because my first job did that to me, too, except the training lasted about ten minutes, and nobody mentioned that some people would be calling in Italian.
This happened to me too! And literally the first person who called was the MAYOR and I was so flustered I hung up on her and she had to call back.
I had a job at a state agency where they forgot to train me on what to do if an elected official or member of the media called, then freaked out at me because they forgot.
For extra props, I called like three people looking for help with the media call and nobody told me what to do.
They trained you to use the phone?
A switchboard is different and more complicated.
This happened to me too, except that they wanted me to know everyone by their *first name* without my having ever meeting them. It was a relatively small office, but there’s no way I can know which of the 3 Anna that person wants out of the 40-60 people working there.
Then I got a call for the HR chick training me and it happened to be her husband. She gave me a dirty look for not knowing who he was and then proceeded to tell her husband that I’m a “stupid receptionist” in Portuguese. Except that there’s not much difference between Portuguese and French (I’m a French Canadian) and I was sitting *right there* next to her.
I refused to finish that job, called the temp agency, and left 2 hours later without finishing the day.
The job where I asked for an employee handbook on my first official day after a few months of contracting and still don’t have one 16 months later.
The job where I was pulled into the CFO’s office so he could tell me that the chairman of the board thought my tops were too low-cut.
The job where everyone thought the ACA was overturned by the Supreme Court because they were watching Fox in the lobby but I was following Scotusblog at my desk.
My coworker and I were also watching Scotusblog. She came in my office and shut the door, we did a quiet celebratory dance, and then we went about our business. Great day.
I had a former manager who told me not to wear the combination of riding boots (no heel!) and (knee-length!) skirt should not be worn again because some of the (creepy, old) men were saying inappropriate things. I don’t think he told the (creepy, old) men to keep their mouths shut, he just told me not to wear that outfit.
Ohhh, this reminds me of the job I had when Dubya was re-elected. I was sobbing in my office when I was invited to the “all staff party” to watch his victory speech.
The job where our office was in the basement of the student union, just past the arcade. Every 3 minutes, all day every day, we would hear: “dance dance REVOLUTION!”.
The job where the IT guy didn’t like that my boss and I were located in the same room as a lot of his IT equipment, so one morning he had a tantrum and moved all of our stuff into the hallway. HR didn’t care and said we needed to deal with it ourselves.
The job where my boss wanted to share a room at a conference even though there was money for both of us to have separate rooms, and then spent all night on the phone with her boyfriend who demanded to know “why she was whispering” and if there was someone else in the room. She also played spa music at a loud volume while I attempted to get some semblance of sleep.
Sharing a room with a coworker *shudders for days*
THE WORST, sadly expected at one of my jobs.
I have shared a BED with a coworker. I could have taken the couch, but I suck at sleeping, so the bed was the lesser evil.
Oh man, me too, with a coworker whom I love but who snores like a grizzly with adenoids. It was a professional conference and we had NO money, so we were FOUR TO A ROOM. After that we found some grant money, thank God, and didn’t have to share beds any more.
At an overnight work event, I shared a bunkbed with a coworker, about three feet away from another bunkbed shared by the head of our host organization and his partner. #nonprofitlife
My partner’s company is running a “morale trip” (he is not going) and apparently the people who go will be expected to share hotel rooms to save money. I am horrified.
Is a “morale trip” supposed to somehow help with morale? If so, I am mystified by this.
ohhhh my workstudy job was next to the arcade, too.
The job where I got called in for a meeting to be given a written warning for not attending to the queue of customers and instead, ‘horsing about’, and I was incredibly confused, and then it turned out that the person who had been ‘horsing about’ had in fact been The Other Chinese Girl.
*aghast face*
Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooh that is super terrible.
Please share with the rest of us how you tamped down the RAAAAAAGE … because We Do In Fact All Look Alike and those of us who are more viscerally aware of that than others know for that same Fact that it’s going to happen to most of us sooner or later.
/long labored weary sigh
Well I was only 16 (over half my lifetime ago now) and hadn’t had a huge amount of experience with racism so far in my life so even though I denied it AND The Other Chinese Girl confessed it had actually been her – they still gave ME the written warning and refused to switch it around? Perhaps to save their racist faces. I don’t think I even told anyone else what had happened because I was so confused/stunned. If someone did that to me now it would be a different story but sadly that has come after a lifetime of microaggressions etc.
Whaaaaaaaa? That makes it SO MUCH WORSE!
The job where I was told to hire a new employee, told a candidate he was hired, and was then informed by my boss there was a hiring freeze and I had to tell the candidate he was in fact not hired.
Most of my horror stories are from that job, except for:
The job where my supervisor yelled at me for putting my feet on my chair, and I replied I would put my feet on the floor when he could assure me the mice problem had been dealt with.
that first job? My husband was they guy who was hired and then not hired. Except I’m sure it wasn’t you because that happened to him THREE TIMES.
And then he got fired while on vacation from his new job. Because … I am still not sure. But no one went on vacation there, in part because they got fired. Of course they got fired when they stuck it out too, but at least then they knew when they were actually not working, rather than being told, on returning to the office that they needn’t have bothered.
Sounds like your husband worked where I am trying not to work anymore. Send him my regards.
The job where an adult woman ate the cookie I’d brought from home and had been saving for my snack, so when I returned to the desk I found an empty ziplock back with a post-it inside reading “Sorry I ate your cookie! I couldn’t help it! :)”
“adult”.
nooooooooope.
Yeah I added that word so that people would know she was not, like, a teenager or anything. She was somewhere between 55-60 years of age at the time.
Just. Wow, lady. Did you suggest she get her kleptomania looked at?
No, but I did get her to buy me more cookies.
Well. Yes. Good for you 🙂
*inserts gif of cat with the “GOOD” face*
OH MY GOD
That is AMAZING.
HOLY SHIT I WOULD ACTUALLY MURDER HER.
Or thoroughly shame her, make it explicitly clear that that was NOT fucking cute and could never happen again, and also SHAME.
That woman has BALLS.
I know I said it on Twitter, but I am still infuriated on your behalf about this incident and shall remain so until I die.
THAT IS NOT OK
CRUCIAL update, everyone: I went back to look at the photo I took of the Post-It. I had misremembered it. The note ACTUALLY says “I owe u 1 cookie :)” and there are hearts and flowers drawn on it.
WHAAAAAAAAAT. This is soooo messed up!!!
whoaaaaaaaaaaaaa even William Carlos Williams begged for forgiveness when he ate the plums. Murder is too good
Actually he just commanded her, “Forgive me.” Food thieves, UGH.
I appreciate this update, HOWEVER, your false memory is excused in my book because WHAT THE HELL LADY.
SO RUDE. Who even does that?
The job where I had to ask someone to please stop having sex in the supply closet b/c HR refused to do it and had just passively aggressively moved the key to the supply closet.
The job where one of my first orders of business was to fire someone who was rumored to be on prescription painkillers and carried a loaded gun in their purse.
Did you work in my high school?
“Duck club“?
The job where I caught the husband of the husband/wife law firm looking at German dungeon porn while sitting 50 feet away from his wife.
The job in a draughty barn, where one winter it got so cold that the vegetables we had put out at 9 were starting to freeze by 1 and it was noticeably warmer in the cold store.
The job where I convinced a 90-something Dutch man to give money to my college, even though he had only taught there for a year and the period was chiefly remembered by him as the period when his son died.
Oh, also, the job where I was told by my manager that yes, I could definitely have more hours (I only worked two days a week), but they just had to get the budget signed off first. Months passed; they were still trying to get the budget agreed when we were several months into the new financial year. I had left for a new job before it was sorted out.
The job where I spent the next three months saying, “Well, if it was important, they’ll call back” whenever I tried to transfer a call.
I have been at my job for about six months and am still not great at transferring calls/putting people on hold. A few weeks in, a co-worker’s wife called and asked if she could speak to him; I tried his line, got no answer, and couldn’t get hold of his wife when trying to return to the first call. About fifteen minutes later, the phone rang; she had been on hold that entire time and the phone system had automatically called me back to check in. I was mortified.
The job where someone completely unironically put a “If you sprinkle when you tinkle, be a sweetie and wipe the seatie!” sign in the bathroom. In comic sans.
For real, though, I’m all in favor of passive aggressive bathroom signs. Shared work bathrooms can get so gross if people are allowed to get comfortable.
I am a huge fan of passive aggressive kitchen signs too. Ever since my office kitchen gave me food poisoning, thanks to mistakenly believing a knife in the cutlery drawer was clean after I washed it… yeeeah.
It’s not even passive aggressive! If you are putting out a sign saying directly what you want people to do or not do, that’s not passive aggressive. And it’s pretty much the only way to let everyone know about kitchen stuff without sending out a company-wide email.
And I have definitely seen my coworkers use a spoon to stir their food and then rinse it and put away without getting soap involved. As someone with multiple food allergies, I started bringing my own utensils. I’m so surprised someone around here hasn’t gotten food poisoning, given some of my coworkers’ ideas about cleanliness.
As I told my college roommates: It’s not passive aggressive. It’s aggressive-aggressive. I am telling you directly that I want you to do this thing and it is causing a problem. Exactly what’s passive about that?
I feel like calling something passive-aggressive is one of many ways to dismiss the needs of women. It’s a tone argument writ large. “I don’t need to wash my dishes, because you asked me in a way I don’t like.” wth? like how does that absolve you exactly?
Apparently I was supposed to individually, kindly, nicely, ask them to put away their own damn dishes. A sign is faster and easier, and doesn’t rely on me standing by the sink every day glaring and tapping my watch. Turns out that takes a lot of work! (fwiw, asking nicely wasn’t working either. and I’m not exactly a neat freak. just…college houses, sigh.)
I may have some unresolved issues, perhaps. =P
It’s true: if you’re a woman, there is no proper way to ask for what you want or need. At the very least, everyone’s waiting to say “How dare she ask for something for herSELF instead of asking on behalf of other people!” Usually you can’t even ask other women for stuff.
But you’ve got to be aggressive and put yourself out there because the worst thing they can say is no, right? If you only negotiated, you’d get everything you wanted! All you’ve gotta do is Lean In (TM)!
Someday I will do a TED Talk on the importance of cleaning it all with gasoline and drying it with a match.
DAE go into the shared bathrooms and think “These people look so civilized in the office … how can they be such savages?”
It’s nicer at sports tournaments at Madison Square Garden, honestly.
I’ll take a stupid rhyme in Comic Sans over someone’s pee on the seat every damn time.
A friend of mine did that at work, I think in just that way! She was being ironic, but she’s was originally from Texas and in California so everyone just assumed she wasn’t being ironic? It was weird.
I keep threatening to do this at work if people continue to be gross & disrespectful.
OF COURSE it was Comic Sans.
We have this sign in the bathrooms at my work. ‘Sprinkling’ is a mild way to explain what was actually happening…
I had that job!
No comic sans though.
I mean, if that is the only way to keep people from pissing all over the seat and floor, like they do in my office, I’m all for it. I am two steps away from it myself.
The job where the boss picked her favorites based on how low their BMI was.
The job where I had to ask IT to let me click through to sites featuring pics of untreated STIs.
My husband had a job a few years ago where the boss (a woman, since it would be super easy to assume this behavior of a man) very clearly picked all her female employees by their looks as much as their credentials. The men could look like whatever so long as their resumes were what she wanted, but the women were all at least 5’10”, leggy, thin, with long, curly hair (blonde or brown), and always in 3-4″ heels with full faces of makeup. Always. No exceptions. And the boss would judge the wives of the men at company gatherings, if we also didn’t fit the mold (and, lol, I definitely did not).
I am listening to Dataclysm on my commute right now (because I like being horrified?), and there is a whole chapter on hiring decisions of women taking attractiveness into consideration even though it has nothing to do with an applicant’s ability for the particular role.
The data set the author uses is from Shiftgig, so it’s all hourly/service jobs, but there is evidence that those trends are applied in other fields as well.
Here’s a summary: Your chance of getting a job interview increases if you’re attractive
“Male HR reps weigh the female applicants’ beauty as they would in a romantic setting … and female employers view it through the same (seemingly sexualized) lens, despite there (typically) being no romantic intent.”
There is an utterly horrifying chapter on this in The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, and how it has been repeatedly challenged in courts as discriminatory and declared legal. Also how women can be fired for not wearing make-up or otherwise not adhering to gender-specific codes and standards.
I was on a hiring committee where the department chair was basically trying to matchmake candidates and current employees. It was…awkward.
“The job where the boss picked her favorites based on how low their BMI was. ”
A friend’s first summer job was answering phones or cold-calling, but right at the beginning, she had to hire other people. She was 14. Farrah Fawcett was big at the time, and later she realized that all the successful applicants had the blonde, feathered hair she coveted.
The job where a VP and a manager had an email thread about which hotel the employee travelling with them should stay at, which included sentiments like “she cannot stay at our hotel because EXECUTIVE”, “it’s bad enough that we are travelling the same class” and “no, not that one, it’s too good for her, looks better than ours”. I’m still not sure if that’s better or worse than “no, not that one, that’s too shady”. Said employee was cc’d on all emails.
Edit to add: the job where the manager cornered a small colleague in the basement and told her she was “fuckable”. Owner’s response? Just his culture, LOLZ, don’t take it personally.
D:
the job where my boss was fired and we were a two-person department, but they still kept me on for a month afterwards with nothing to do, so I got paid to watch the entire 2014 World Cup on my company laptop. that was nice.
The job where a woman called me on multiple occasions to tell me that she wanted to commit suicide, and when I asked for training to deal with it I was told I could always talk to the least-empathetic, most awful member of management after any calls like that.
The job where the manager got arrested for embezzlement at work after a year of bullying me and 6 months of giving me free food to make up for it.
The job where the cooks intentionally let other staff walk in on me changing on multiple occasions.
The job where I had to tear down the board of directors and find a new set of volunteers because I was being sexually and physically harassed on a near daily basis by one particularly loathsome individual director and he had stacked the board with his cronies.
Same job where I threatened to sue the board if they didn’t do something about this person’s behaviour and instead of concern and support was asked if I was mentally unstable and if I had a history of slapping non profits with nonsense lawsuits (um, no and no).
Same job where I finally had a decent board of directors that allowed me to do my job but when I got burnt out, showed me the door and slammed it behind me. Sigh. Gotta love those small town non-profit art galleries!
I had one of those too!
The job where our executive director gave a month’s resignation notice at the beginning of August and the board started looking for her replacement in the middle of September and finally hired someone around Thanksgiving.
Same job where we were a three-person staff, so I spent two and a half months doing all of my stuff plus all of the executive director’s stuff with no change in (already obscenely low) pay.
Same job where I was dissuaded from applying for the executive director position because I was in my late 20s and “lacked experience” but no one minded me running the place while they … did whatever they were doing with the search.
Same job where they finally narrowed it down to two people, both of whom I knew, and asked my opinion and I told them that Candidate A would be perfect for the position and Candidate B would not be able to handle the pressure at all. And then they hired Candidate B because they had worked in a museum one time. (postscript: I lasted three months under Candidate B before I peaced out due to everything being a gigantic shitshow and three months after that Candidate B was “recommended to resign” because they could not, in fact, handle anything whatsoever)
Same job, apropos of not much, where mice regularly died both under my desk and inside the walls of my office.
I was so tempted to write up a CBC television pilot based on my two years there because of the absolute insanity but coulda-woulda-shoulda…! Oh man, THE STORIES I COULD TELL.
Right?!? The “local artist with delusions of grandeur” stories alone would make a pretty solid couple of seasons.
” The ‘local artist with delusions of grandeur’ stories’ ” WHOO BOY, yeeees…I mean, there were lovely people, too, but holy cow, the amount of crazy was just, well, crazy. Ooh, one of my favourites: I organized a pop-up show of roller derby art and the board president wanted to know if it was “some kind of lesbian art stuff”. Another one: local art diva was PISSED that she had to share display place with someone she considered a hack and raised merry Hell until I gave her a shelf of her own.
The job where a customer verbally abused and insulted my employee and then called corporate when I asked her to leave so I had to personally give her an apology and a gift card.
The job where i had to clean human waste out of a fitting room.
Same job.
Same customer.
Not a question, an observation.
The job where I was given a poor performance review because I had not completed tasks no one had asked me to complete
The job where I was the only person in the building for the first 3 weeks of my job with no training
The job where the bathroom is in earshot and one coworker spends 45 minutes watching youtube videos while he takes a shit every afternoon
(these are all my current job, yes I am sending my resume around)
YouTube Shitter is kind of living his best life though, you have to admit.
Totally! Just wish I didn’t have to hear him living his best life.
The men’s room was in earshot of a couple of offices, and those people would beat a hasty retreat to the showroom or somewhere as soon as the elderly guy made his mid-morning way there.
The groaning. Oh, dear gods, the lengthy, painful groaning.
Oh my god. Here are some highlights.
The job where the sexual harassment of some of the female employees was so bad that one time a waitress went home crying and later I heard it was because the head chef BROKE HER THONG, he pulled it so hard.
The job where the head chef was married to the general manager and they would have screaming fights about 60% of the time and then it was awkward for the rest of the staff.
The job where my coworker (herself a gay woman) casually told me at a sidework station that she just “didn’t understand” about trans people and I did this: D:
The job where every time I started to eat my sandwich my boss, who sat 6 feet away, would stand up, walk over to my desk, hand me a folder or an envelope, and tell me it needed to be taken care of right that minute.
The job where one of my coworkers was sexually harassed by a customer and our male manager essentially told her there was nothing he could do (he kicked people out for doing other things, but apparently it was ok to pour drinks on a hostess’ breasts and then start patting her down with a napkin while leering).
The job where I had to deal with everything from a drunk bride crawling around the club grounds looking for her garter to a drunk man following me into the laundry room where I was supposed to wash towels to slur at me about how sad he was about his impending divorce.
The job where I left detailed, point-by-point instructions for my boss on a simple task before leaving, then was awakened on vacation at 6:30 AM local time by her calling my cell so I could walk her through them.
The job where I was exiled to another room because the client decreed I was “typing too loud.”
The job where they announced, right before my farewell party, that they would no longer be paying for cakes for the farewell parties, because too many people had been quitting.
The job where my boss had me make travel reservations for his affairs while I was expected to entertain his 5-year-old daughter in the office.
“The job where they announced, right before my farewell party, that they would no longer be paying for cakes for the farewell parties, because too many people had been quitting. ”
That is the best god-damn logic I have ever heard.
The job with only 3 staff members where I was the only one that showed up to work everyday.
I worked somewhere with four part-time employees and two full-time employees; the part-time employees were very reliable and always on time, called out if we needed time off, etc., but the two full-time employees rarely turned up before noon and were never on time to meetings. One of them (the bosslady) would circle the building looking for a parking space that was worthy of her, for up to an hour.
The job where my boss also ran a bed and breakfast, where I stayed for one summer and earned my keep cleaning the guest rooms and being trotted out each time there were new guests as [Boss’s] Lesbian Employee: “You know, her partner is enrolled in the grad school here in town!”
The job where all emails were archived; deleting anything (even junk mail) was met with horrified gasps and a discussion with one’s manager about [Company’s] Email Culture.
The job where I asked why there wasn’t a phone at my desk, only to be informed that “there were so many abusive customers for [Client I was now working for], we had to get rid of the phone line.”
The job where, every fall, I was sent (alone) to a refrigerated Quonset hut at the back of the property to bottle apple cider for six hours. Sometimes they remembered to let me out for lunch, but not always.
As a lawyer who is always begging her clients to please find those old emails PLEASE omg they would prove your case, I approve of that Email Culture.
Oh yeah, for actual emails it was a fantastic policy–whenever a customer tried to claim they were never told about XYZ fee or something, it was immensely satisfying to write a sweet, polite email back, attaching all of our previous correspondence about said fee.
The job where I pulled my pickup truck full of produce into a parking lot during a tornado warning and went into a store to call my boss and he told me to go back outside and make sure the vegetables were okay
The job where we had to lock ourselves into the walk-in freezer during a tornado and I had a massive panic attack but I wasn’t allowed to take lunch after it was over because we didn’t get breaks
The job where my senile old boss and I worked out of a public space so I had no bathroom and had to shuffle off to the bar next door every day in embarrassment, and where one time a woman accused said boss of touching her and her daughter, and he screamed “Why would I touch you?! You’re both ugly!” (Fortunately I was home sick that day but was told about it afterwards)
The summer job where the soft serve machine managed to snap my bra. More than once.
The job where my boss described my role to a client as “helping out in the office” when I’d been running the department for six months, but had no idea why that was an offensive thing to say
The job where my boss responded to my perfectly reasonable request for a post-IUD-insertion Tylenol by saying, “Well, maybe that’s a sign”
The job where I spent weeks filing X-rays in a crawlspace with a four-foot ceiling, using a backless rolling chair to navigate
The job in the call center of a major health insurance company, which frequently involved telling people that services weren’t covered/they were going to die because of it
The job where I was the only person on staff that understood some of the basic processes involved in the job and therefore ended up training all the rest of the staff, after having been there four months and holding tight to “most junior person in the building”
The job where everyone that sat near me was reading Fifty Shades of Grey
The job where you had to pay in $5/month in order to drink office coffee
I used to have to pay in to drink the office WATER from the filter/jug, that also did hot water. (Tap water was free, but the only way to heat it up was in the microwave, which only mostly worked.)
We’ve all had the job where everyone sat near us was reading Fifty Shades of Grey.
Mine was Twilight, but yeah.
A sign?? A sign of WHAT?
Perhaps your crawlspace job was just saving on overhead. 😐
What do you mean, flying rats?
Oh… Ants… you meant ants.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN, FLYING ANTS?
We get flying ants in our edit bay. I’ll be sitting there in the half-dark and my spine will start to tingle and then there’s a malevolent sussurrus…
The males and queens have wings so that they can have mating flights. The males then die, and the queens lose their wings, usually while excavating a new nest.
At my old apartment, I was watching TV in my sister’s bedroom with the lights off, notice something small hit my laptop screen, then another one, then another one, turned out the light to find I’d been watching TV while there was an ant swarm happening around me. It was awful. I spent the next few days convinced there were ants in my hair.
this feels like the place and the time to admit that I honestly thought flying ants were a MYTH until Ant-Man.
I thought that fireflies were made up; we’ve all been there.
is this sarcasm
No! Seriously, I live in a place that doesn’t have fireflies and to me it was obvious that the whole plan was to get the kids to run around like crazy with a bunch of jars to wear themselves out right before bed. Because, yeah right, there are bugs that light up, how gullible do I look? I think I was 14 when I found out they were real. I only saw my first when I was 19.
My English cousin came to visit and saw fireflies for the first time one summer, everyone gleefully made her repeat that they lit up from the “arse”. Good times.
The job where my boss would pull me into a corner and ask me to look at her butt to check and see if her period was leaking through her pants. Every month.
Was horrified at the time but now I wish I had been more chill about it. Sometimes you really need to know!
But… like… just go into the bathroom and look for yourself! Why do you need an employee to look for you!!??
The job where I spent its entire duration going by a name I hate because I was too shy to tell them my preferred nickname.
The job where the police raided our store and took away most of our computers, including our server, and arrested my (verbally and emotionally abusive) boss for soliciting 14-year old girls online.
We now use the cloud, as well as our server. It still has the police evidence tag on it, though. Listed victim: society.
Listed victim: society.
This here is my favourite thing I have read allllllll day.
I’ve thought about removing that sticker a couple of times, but then I leave it as a reminder that the state government will keep him out of our lives for a long, long time.
The job where my entire team was on the same anti-anxiety medication,
The job where upper management distracted us with free cupcakes while all of our direct managers got fired.
The job where a coworker brought in a flask of vodka, which we then mixed with Sprite and drank at our desks because we were all being let go in a few weeks anyway and had no fucks left to give.
(These were all the same job.)
That cupcake thing is evil. I bet it worked really well.
It did, but after that, any time there was free dessert (usually cupcakes) we were paranoid that something else bad was going to happen. (Something bad usually did happen. Cupcakes have been ruined for me forever.)
I had a friend who told me (after he had left the company in question) that his co-workers had a mason jar full of Xanax that they passed around. What.
I’d believe it.
The job where the manager would shake hands with men, but insist on hugging women.
The job where the manager only respected me because he found out I won a wing eating contest.
The job where the manager would shake hands with men, but insist on hugging women.
Aaaaaaaaaaagh. This taps into the same rage-place I go to when Pat Sajak takes the women’s hands, but not the men’s, on Wheel of Fortune when they’re going to the Bonus Round.
To be fair, I would probably also respect someone who won a wing eating contest.
Like, not JUST for that. But still.
The job where I tried to explain something to a confused old lady and was threatened with a lawsuit by my managers.
The job where I had to explain in the application how Jesus had touched my life.
The job where I got to see the horrifying result of a coworker’s botched dental surgery.
The job where I had to clean up after a cupcake fight.
The job where I only stayed for two hours because my supervisor said something really racist- she then tracked me down on Facebook and tried to tell me in a private message that she can’t actually be prejudiced because her mother is married to “a man of race” (STILL my favourite shitty euphemism of all time).
The job where there was so little for me to do that I got to spend time posting Toast comments instead of working.
A man of race! That is incredible.
Ain’t it just! (My second favourite shitty euphemism is when the mother of one of my high school friends referred to my then-girlfriend as my “alternative lifestyle partner.”)
The job where I was commended for being the only temp not to cry in the bathroom.
The job where I was given a written reprimand for failing to keep up with the frequently changing (and not even remotely standard) cataloging rules.
The job where I was stuck doing office manager and IT support duties but they refused to pay me for said office manager or IT support duties because surely that’s not the direction I want my career to go in.
The job where my manager forced me to expel a child with autism whose mother had been given no warnings or expectations for behavior. A week into my tenure.
The job where I routinely broke up fistfights between six-year-old girls and ten-year-olds who weighed more than me, and no policy for sending them home existed. (That was the same job.)
The job where hourly employees were told, IN WRITING, that “really successful people work outside their hours.”
The job I worked for four years before the organization folded overnight, about which I was informed via email, and for which labor I am still owed $1500.
The job where a coworker took me out to lunch, put his hand on my knee, and told me that the coffee and grapes I had would give me gas.
The last one – I would have crop-dusted that man every time I walked past him, with 0 regrets.
I’m imagining that the hand-on-knee and coffee/grapes-comment moments were, in fact, the same moment.
Like: I just want you to know I’m really concerned. You know. You can talk to me about your gas. I’m here for you.
The job where I was hired to do data entry but then very quickly realized that I would actually be spending all of my time going to Wolf Camera to print my boss’s family photos and then organize them in albums. Including pictures of her having her children.
The job where my supervisor once told a sick-on-too-much-cake child “If you have to throw up, do it in the tray and not on the floor,” right in front of the soda machine, which I then had to clean out.
The job where the boss once saw someone listening to her iPod during her break and then declared all music banned from the office for everyone because it enraged him that she had earbuds in.
The job where the boss’s wife stood outside the bathroom door with a stopwatch whenever someone went in there to make sure they weren’t wasting time.
Oh! One more! The first job, with the family photos? Also the same job in which my boss would give his wife her fertility shots in his office and not shut the door all the way, so if you happened to walk by or knock not knowing they were in there, you were likely to get a full view of her bare rear end as she leaned over the desk for her shot.
How long was an acceptable time to use the bathroom? Would she start banging on the door when your time was “up?” Isn’t standing outside the bathroom every time someone uses it a MUCH GREATER waste of time than any one employee’s bathroom breaks?? I have so many questions.
IIRC she wouldn’t ever say, she would just click off the stopwatch and tut at you as you came out the door. I think it was meant more to intimidate people.
(yelling from inside the bathroom)
“I’m three-quarters of the way done shitting, how am I doing on time?”
Good god, I’m only on page 2 of this thread and we already have two counts of “unexpected childbirth photos.” My workplace stories are starting to seem really tame.
The job where the owner didn’t give me any training on the cash register at all, just said ‘well, there it is” and walked out, so I had to call my Mom and ask how to use it.
The job where instead of firing me they cut my hours back to one shift a week so that I would quit.
The job where my coworker quit in the middle of a shift without telling anyone and I had to explain what happened to my boss.
The job where they made me be a full-time scheduler of the students classes, but wouldn’t promote me from admin assistant.
15 years ago I worked at a store for the summer where I was never really shown how to use the register. Luckily I never worked alone, so I always just shuffled customers over to someone else when it was time for them to pay. I still have stress nightmares about it.
The admin job where my boss wanted me to be “adequately mentally stimulated” and so kept giving me extra projects and duties but because it was a state university he couldn’t raise my pay to be commensurate with the job I was actually doing.
The job where my manager was passive aggressive and bitchy to me, blamed me for things that were her fault, but then also locked her door and cried for hours. One week after I gave my two weeks leave, I learned she and the CEO had an affair, and she got pregnant. Both were married with kids. She was keeping the baby, but being the *wonderful* person she was, was using it as leverage to get what she wanted at the company. A couple months after I left, pretty much everybody but her was fired, including the CEO.
When things get crazy at work, I just remember how sane they are in comparison.
That’s a Lifetime Movie just waiting.
The job where I was expected to cover the phones for the entire office while the other employees met in the conference room for weekly Bible Study.
That makes my “not-mandatory-but-boss-waited-until-entire-staff-showed-up-before-starting-so-the-only-way-to-miss-it-was-to-be-super-late” prayers sessions before work look less annoying.
The job where I was hired to answer phones and run copies and ended up being having to work 12-hour days twice a week (for no extra pay) managing the massive full-color print jobs I’d never been shown how to do.
The job where the 11-year-old daughter spent 90% of her waking hours unsupervised on fanfiction sites while I chased after the un-potty-trained four-year-old and repeatedly told the 7-year-old that it wasn’t ok to touch other people’s private parts.
The job where I worked overtime to plan and set up an in-office “retreat” for the entire staff, then had to attend the retreat, after I had to FIND MY OWN VOLUNTEERS to cover my desk for the day. The theme for the retreat was work-life balance, ISYN.
The third one, OMG. I am seething at my desk on your behalf.
I was so unbelievably depressed while I had that job, it was awful. My supervisor asked at one point (during the lunch I had to step out early to set up) why I seemed disconnected from what we were discussing, and he was *visibly shocked and distressed* when I told him that it was pretty clear that none of it applied to me. “What do you mean? Of course it does!” *death glare*
Feeling you on this. I had a job where I had to stay late to finish work before a deadline, because I was required to spend the afternoon at a mandatory team-building event hosted by our Morale Committee (uuuggghhh). Then I got in trouble for saying that it failed to boost my morale.
We had to be browbeaten and begged and cajoled into serving in the Morale Committee. I managed to participate in only one meeting and then declared that I had served my time. We had two almost totally different companies working under the same roof, and we were kept apart nearly all of the time (they resented us and sometimes got in trouble for talking to us), except for special holidays in which we were suddenly forced to join together and be friends. A supervisor once came to order us back inside to play bingo when I accompanied a friend outside on a smoke break.
TBH I was always very grateful to my brother for being the high-maintenance one/primary trouble-maker, so I could get away with spending 90% of my life on fanfic sites.
The job where I smelled like steak all the time.
The job where I smelled like coffee all the time.
The job where I smelled like beer all the time.
The job where I started crying in front of customers on Valentine’s night because I was expected to be the server for the entire second floor of the restaurant (approximately 25 tables), and when I told my manager I wanted to quit, she started crying too. I didn’t quit.
I had a corned beef-smell job once. I only remember it now on St. Patrick’s Day.
The job where I smelled like French fries all the time.
I worked at Subway for over a year at one point and smelled like sandwiches all the damn time (showering didn’t even help). I feel your pain.
Subway has SUCH a distinctive smell too.
The job where i smelled like mortadella all the time and was a vegetarian
My brother and sister both worked at fish and chip shops. The smell was a definite issue.
Geez… I worked at a Buffalo Wild Wings for a year or so, and nothing smells quite like the smell of hot used oil seeping into your shirt and pores. I was on the train the other day – years later! – and someone who must have been coming off their shift at a similar place got on and stood next to me, and I had some serious flashbacks just from the smell. I’d know it anywhere.
The job where I smelled like popcorn all the time.
The fantasy job where you make a 1,000 pound printout of all these stories and, next time Steven Pinker does a TED talk about how society is becoming more enlightened, you climb the rigging and drop the printout on his fool head.
oh god I just about choked on my sandwich at that
THIS IS PERFECT
I don’t think you need to wait for him to give a talk. Just find him and drop them on him.
oh who am I kidding he’s always giving talks.
The job where I was bullied into being a bridesmaid for the head assistant. As you can see I am very very tough.
Funny that this was posted today, when I’ve spent the last three hours seething with resentment because they told us that Monday was Hawaiian shirt day and GUESS WHO IS THE ONLY ONE WEARING A HAWAIIAN SHIRT.
F them, man, they don’t know how to have fun. Wear Hawaiian shirts every Monday forever!
This is a nightmare of mine that dates back to middle school. *shudder*
A mean girl in high school once invited me to a party just so that she could falsely tell me it was a costume party and see if I showed up. Joke’s on her though, because I did, and after a brief moment of embarrassment a couple of other kids decided to get into costume themselves in solidarity. I have been friends with those kind people for more than 10 years now.
The job where my supervisor didn’t talk to me for a month (it was a great month) before calling me into her office to ream me out for making fun of her accent. She didn’t have an accent, and I hadn’t made fun of it. I went back to my desk and started updating my resume.
The job where all five of us work in the same office and one of my coworkers plays CCM through her computer speakers constantly. (Tobymac. So much Tobymac.)
The job where I was the youngest person in the office and everyone else treated me like their kid. Oh wait, that’s all of them.
The job where my boss told just-out-of-nursing school me that minor paperwork errors would get my license suspended in an effort to scare me away, because they hired more new grads than they needed.
The job where our boss went on maternity leave and the lady they put in charge was basically Umbridge.
The job where the aforementioned Umbridge called my cell phone on my last day and screamed at me for ten minutes, after I’d turned in my badge. “You’d better get back here! I was gonna box your ears for that! Leaving without saying goodbye, that’s horrible!” (Everyone knew it was my last day, she’d been busy, we were on a time crunch, etc.)
Nothing worse than being on the ‘Young’ Team, people use it for so much bullshit behaviour.
“I was gonna box your ears”????? Mrs. Medlock??
The job in fashion pr where my sober boss instructed me to secure coke & heroin for a VERY famous designer who wasn’t even a client.
Were you given, like, instructions for how to obtain them? Or was it just assumed that you would have your own hookup?
Nope, I was young and “edgy” enough that they assumed I knew. I didn’t.
Was this in advertising? I think I worked for this guy too.
No, pr & my boss was a woman. But if I said her name you’d probably know her.
The job where the boss made me scrub his boat after his teenage son had run it up on a sandbar in the river and got it caked with mud.
The job where there was always a rush to the bank to deposit the paychecks lest you be the last one and in danger of having the check bounce.
The job where the boss would regularly ask me to get the wrong part/component from the supplier and then dress me down when it wasn’t what he wanted.
These were all the same job.
The job where I only lasted three months because there was routinely not enough cash in the bank to fund payroll, and so I went to the bank with my final paycheck, CASHED it at the bank it was drawn on, and deposited the cash into my bank.
The job where I got Wendy’s for myself, my coworkers, and my manager, and my manager tweeted an hour later, “The Lord allowed my enemy to buy me lunch, he used my enemy to bless me.”
I have so, so many questions about this. Was this guy totally nuts or did he seem normal? Why were you his enemy? Is Wendy’s really a blessing that God gives out?
I have *no* idea why she considered me her enemy. I mean at one point we both went for the manager position, but I voluntarily withdrew from the running, so maybe she saw me as a threat? Also, she liked hiring people she knew personally and who were easily controlled, and I don’t play like that.
She tried to get me fired once, but ended up getting fired herself.
This is too good. Did you respond?
I didn’t, because we didn’t want her to know we all knew about her Twitter account. It did come up again, though, when she tried to get me fired for completely fabricated reasons, but ended up getting fired herself.
The job where the administrator literally picked up a chair and threw it across the room because he was angry.
The job where the director described anyone not wearing a suit (which wasn’t required) as being dressed “for a picnic.”
The job where I was required to write employees up for 1/4th of a “tardy” if they were 2 minutes late to work.
Ha dressed for a picnic, that person sounds fun. I may use that expression going forward though, ngl.
Ooh, I had the converse of “for a picnic” person! I went to a job interview (for a part-time position teaching an after-school reading program at the library) dressed, you know, like you do for a job interview, and the program director repeatedly and heartily expressed concern that I wouldn’t be willing to get down on the floor and do activities with the children because I “dressed so nicely.” I got the job and the kids were wonderful but the director was awful, and I was so glad when I found a full-time position to move on to.
Augh, we just had a straight up “tardy” if we were even one minute late – or one second, since we had to swipe our card and the clock might change just at that moment. The clock would automatically record you as 5 minutes tardy (then 10 minutes, etc., in increments. It would do the same, backwards, for the end of the day. If you left at 5:04:59, it would just record you as leaving at 5. You could theoretically miss 2 seconds of work and get docked 10 minutes pay. Or just be recorded as having missed 10 minutes of work that day, if you were salaried. It was a professional job, for which I had a master’s degree.
The job where several coworkers independently and randomly told me I shouldn’t have children because I’m disabled.
The job where my coworkers tried to form a secret cabal to get someone fired because she was using intermittent FMLA and corporate refused to hire a temp to help out with the workload, while randomly telling me I didn’t have to worry because unlike SOME people, I came to work.
The job where I had my annual review trashed because I called out of work for several days due to having the flu. I did not violate any formal HR policies with my actions, and the client had recently told people to stay home if they got sick.
Same job.
I can’t wait til I test for my A+ cert next month and gtfo of here.
Boss got sick with stomach bug and was out 3 days, then came back to work too soon and got us all sick. I stayed out 5 days, sick as a dog (along with all the other people he got sick.) I got in trouble.
The job working for a neighbor who at the start of the first and only day I’d have described as “a great guy with an interesting perspective,” at the middle of the first day as “a conspiracy theorist,” and at the end of the day as “suffering from paranoid delusions.” It became clear pretty soon that while he was a mensch, he was not stable enough to actually work for.
The job where I had to rub ointment on the hairy back of the supervisor who pulled a muscle.
The job where my boss and another department boss competed for who could fire an employee quicker, and whether they made him/her cry in the process. They would compare notes after firings.
The job where the receptionist called me on the intercom to ask how to spell “reception.”
The job where my boss had serial office girlfriends, not to be confused with his actual, long-term, live-in girlfriend at home. The reigning office favorite didn’t have to do any real work once she was crowned, but went back to the doldrums of everyday tasks when she was dethroned by the next one.
The job where the managers had a wink-nudge agreement with the nearby Irish bar to let them in the back door at 7.30am for pre-workday Bloody Marys on mornings-after.
The job where one of the three (married) owners of the company came to an industry-wide Christmas extravaganza at the Waldorf with a callgirl on his arm.
All my good ones can’t really be distilled pithily?
The job where after one coworker was unjustly fired, another coworker she was having an affair with and who as shady as hell got really high on something, tried to sexually assault the 60-year-old collections manager on a Saturday, was escorted from the premises, and then circled the block in his car ominously for the next two working days while we all got restraining orders set up.
The one that actively violated labor laws re: overtime (it banked overtime hours at straight time and refused to pay them) and required a doctor’s note to go home sick even though no insurance was offered and we made barely over minimum wage.
aaaaaand
The one where a car exploded in the parking lot on my second day and melted half the siding off the building.
The one where we found a dead body in a parked car.
The one where we had to come up with a code word for “bedbugs” when discussing units around prospective tenants.
The one where a tenant got arrested and left a dog trapped in her unit for the weekend with no food and it tore into all the bags of trash in her unit which were full of rotting food and dirty diapers, and we came in on Monday to several calls asking of someone had died, and her power was off and her fridge was full of maggots, and between the maggots and diapers and rotting food and dog excretions we had to strip every scrap of everything out of the unit and bleach the concrete slab, and then she got mad at me because I wouldn’t give her a good rental reference and indicated she wouldn’t be getting her deposit back.
The one where they fired the manager and the regional manager quit and three staff members IN TOTAL were left to handle 300 rapidly crumbling apartment units (two leasing, one maintenance) and we put in 12-hour days while getting ALL CAPS EMAILS from some COO two states away asking why we weren’t getting more marketing done.
I settled into a nice union office job in an aggressively stable industry almost 5 years ago and haven’t looked back except to tell horror stories but fyi, DON’T WORK IN PROPERTY MANAGEMENT, KIDS! (I have honestly thought about writing a series about that industry but I can’t quite cohere it concept-wise?)
I am long-distance petting your head. 2009 sucked.
2009 DID suck. Though honestly the worst of those stories are from a less-than-6-month-long period in 2011 – I can only imagine the stories had I held out there any longer.
Write that property management cautionary tale as a television drama series and I will totally watch it.
I already guiltily watch “Hoarders,” which is in the same vein but also a big downer most of the time. I would 100% watch a fictional version instead
I’m so horrified about the dead body in the car! Had they been dead long?
Wait, was the dog okay??
Well, in that it was picked up and taken to animal control? We’re a no-kill county generally though, so probably.
My slightly more heartwarming dog-related story from that job is when the Meals on Wheels people decided that a client who was off having outpatient surgery and missed her appointment with them was gone long-term and had abandoned her dog and called and had the humane society pick it up. 6 hours later she’s in my office straight up having a panic attack and like can you blame her? That dog was her constant companion! I manage to track him down but naturally I can’t get ahold of her caseworker and she doesn’t have the money to get him released and she doesn’t have his rabies records and she’s incoherent with panic anyway and basically 5673489 phone calls later I wound up driving over there myself and paying out of pocket to get that stinky ol’ dog out of puppy jail. It was a very happy reunion, though. Worth the $50 and lingering dog smell in my car.
The job where if the boss was in, there was a ~20% chance that there’d be a forty-five minute long lecture to the entire office about whatever it was that angered him about his employees, or the modern work ethic, or whatever. This is the same job where the boss would occasionally smoke cigars in his office, which doesn’t sound so bad except a) illegal, b) no air purifier, c) for a period of time I sat ten feet away from his office in an open floor plan.
The one where I was asked my (Western) zodiac sign in the interview, and then learned about a month later that the interviewer actually believed in that shit to the point of talking smack about various signs.
EDIT: Reading everyone else’s experiences, I feel like I have been blessed.
Yeah, I was like “oh fun, let me play!” and then after I posted I read more of other people’s and I was just like D: I have been so lucky.
The job where a coworker nicknamed ‘Possum’ invited me to go with him behind the dumpster because “It would make [my] day, [I] just didn’t know it yet.”
The job where, except for our tiny dept, 2000 people were laid off in one day and armed guards were posted at the doors of the building.
The job where the CEO had two estranged brothers with similar companies in the same industry, so when one of the brother’s companies did something, we were ordered to drop everything and do it too, and do it BETTER (and put in massive! unpaid! overtime! because we still had to do all our other work as well).
The job where my department (the art department) was referred to as the “trained monkeys.”
The job where, every week, we each had to take a day to drive 2.5 hours to an office in another state, “work” for three hours, and then leave to drive 2.5 hours back again, because our CEO was pulling a power play on our boss.
The job where an HR guy was hired who immediately pulled a Single White Female, turning himself into a carbon copy of the CEO by losing 40+ pounds and changing his hair, dress, voice and mannerisms to EXACTLY match the other man. He was rewarded within a year by being promoted to the second most powerful position in the company.
The job where I was asked to paint fake wood grain onto the owner’s hardwood floors at home, which were destroyed because she let her dogs pee wherever.
The job where our group publisher hired the bartender (a bodybuilder with no experience in sales or publishing) from his local drinking hole to be the publisher of one of the magazines I worked on. Not an entry-level sales position, the PUBLISHER.
The job where I was working late in what I thought was an empty office, when a blazing fight (“I WAS LEAVING MY HUSBAND FOR YOUUUUU”) broke out between two upper managers who we had all suspected were having an affair. I tried to silently extricate myself from the floor but tripped into a metal filing cabinet, fled in panic, and hid in a bathroom on another floor until I thought it was safe to leave.
Ooh, I worked at a place that did a sizeable layoff (it was not that big, but a big enough percentage of the workforce) and there were guards stationed at the doors for a few days following the carnage. I happened to survive that round of cuts, and it was eerie to see.
Yeah, I remember wandering though the huge building after everyone had been laid off, and eerie is the perfect word. Desks full of work abandoned mid-stream, because no one was going to take it over.
Plus the awful feeling of guilt for being one of the few left standing – even though we all knew the axe would eventually fall on us, too (which it did).
You were asked to PAINT FAKE WOOD GRAIN onto their floors? I must know: did you do it?
I did! I have a degree in painting and I veer towards the photorealistic, style-wise – so the job was right up my alley, tbh. I sanded the whole floor, painted over all the black, damaged areas, and then heavily varnished the whole thing a few times. It took forever but it looked amazing; you never would have known there was a problem! It’s held up, too – this was back in 1998, and I was there for a party a couple years ago and it still looks great. They top up the varnish every few years so it’s a pee barrier.
I should get them to endorse me for “faux bois” on LinkedIn.
The job where I got Tuberculosis contact on the job & they fired me.
The job where they tried to rehire me once they realized I could sue for wrongful termination. No thank you.
The job where I nearly got fired for not knowing how to cut a tomato for sandwiches.
The job where, once a week, we would let anyone return anything.
The job where I got a muffin at the interview.
The job where I called 911 on a regular basis to break up fights or ask the stalkers to leave me alone.
The job where I got hired because I was pregnant, & she thought having someone with a baby at the office would be nice.
The job where [same boss] asked me not to correct her in meetings.
Currently saving all my crazy job stories for when I am not longer here.
Oh my god I have been SO LUCKY with my temp jobs so far. The worst thing that happens to me is there are scales/calorie counting books/constant diet talk/other ED/disordered eating triggering behaviours.
That stuff is really hard to deal with sometimes tho, so don’t feel like this is a competition! You have my sympathies, truuuuust me.
ughh I also have the constant diet talking coworkers and it is so stressful.
I SWEAR team building exercises ALWAYS lead to boob grabs. Especially if blind folds are involved. This is just a rule of the universe.
The job where the water coming into the sink is from a garden hose, and we used to keep a sauce pan on a hot plate during the winter so we could wash our hands with warm water. We finally got a water heater. Still have garden hose.
The job where I wonder if the place will burn down overnight because it is heated only with space heaters, and some of the wiring is what an electrician euphemistically called “temporary.”
The job where the toilet in the employee-only area is of the composting variety. Job is located in a city which is located in a region that is highly urbanized. Job is NOT located in a part of the world where modern plumbing is a novelty.
The job where there is evidence of mice, but no one seems to care.
The (same) job where I like the work and my coworkers, but every time I mention even this little bit of what we put up with (even without mentioning the whole other kettle of fish known as dealing with the owner/boss), I wonder why the fuckety fuck I’m still there, and feel a twinge of shame, because I am not normally a person who puts up with shit. Oh yeah, I need to find another job first.
The job where the 40 year old line cook with neck tattoos wanted me – the brand new 15 year old ice cream girl – to come “party” after the closing shift.
The job where the aforementioned 40 year old was sleeping with the other 15 year old ice cream girl.
The job where all of the cooks would try to steal my empty whipped cream cans out of the trash before anyone else got them (it took me a long time to figure this out – I thought they just really liked whipped cream?).
The job where I spent a whole day dying cat bones neon colors and couldn’t get the dye out from under my fingernails for a week.
I worked with a similar-sounding neck-tattoo guy who once came in on his day off carrying a terrarium, because his pet snake’s eggs had just hatched and he figured we would all want to see some baby snakes. (I mean, I kind of did, but come on dude, we serve food here)
The retail job where I was working late and started smelling smoke and frantically called my boss who discovered that the manager of the store next to us was smudging the store, because she believed the 5 year old building the stores were in was “full of evil spirits”, and became enraged when my boss told her this wasn’t ok (very little ventilation, making expensive merchandise smell like burning herbs, there were apartments above the stores, etc) AND said that if we ever called the fire department or told the owners of the building about it she would curse us. She was also 22 and Russian and sleeping with the owner of her store, who was a 75 year old married man.
The job where my boss showed me the scrapbook of photos of his stillborn child.
no way! D:
It made his complaints about his ex-wife far more palatable in comparison.
Oh, no…. 🙁
The job where I was granted a whopping 35 cent raise when the water heater caught fire and both adult managers decided to flee the building and leave me, a hung over 16 year old, to put it out.
The job where I was told that if the group of people I was managing weren’t scared when I walked into the room then I wasn’t doing my job right. (I instead chose to foster a good working relationship with my department because I’m not an asshole.)
The job where my boss began bad mouthing my work the moment my contract was done even though she had never mentioned any of these problems to me while I was there.
The job where the owner was committing tax fraud by claiming to live in Washington (where there is no state income tax) while actually living in Hawaii, and also claiming his trips between Hawaii and Washington as business expenses.
That same owner would commandeer our delivery van to run errands (or have employees run errands for him) whenever he actually was in Washington, would make the manager do his laundry in the on-site washer & dryer, and, when he finally moved out of his apartment above the store, made the employees (fortunately, this was before my time) move his stuff & clean it for him (during which project they found a number of, ahem, *inappropriate* photographs).
My coworkers have much better stories than I do (none of these from our current place of employment!). Excerpts from the email thread I started this morning:
“The job where the first day on the job when my co-worker tells me she’s going out for lunch and “not coming back”. She didn’t.
The job where we found our boss doing a line in the bathroom.
The job where I get a call from the lifeguard at the spa inviting me to come take a swim as he and the other guy needed some entertainment.”
“the job where a customer threw a ceramic mug at me
the job where a boss made it an accepted norm to call me on speaker phone and call me baby, lover etc. as well as other general crude statements
the same boss would then turn around and scream in my face and throw things
the job where a coworker dropped his pants and mooned me in the middle of the street, at work”
And, my personal favorite:
“the job where a coworker kept a severed finger in a jar on his desk from someone who cut it off using a cutting machine”
Me: “A SEVERED FINGER?”
Her: “It was in, like, formaldehyde”
gah… Mine mostly involve working at the small town grocery store where rumor had it a couple of our regular customers had, uh, done it with farm animals. Hoo boy… (sample quote from a worker in the deli – “I ain’t goin’ out with no sheep f****er!”)
The job where I accepted a new job & did days worth of pre-employment paperwork (incl drug tests), and came into work at current job to resign only to find my boss was out that day. 20 minutes later New Boss called me and asked if I had resigned yet. I said no, whereupon he breathed an audible sigh of relief and told me the new job was a no-go. A week later his whole department was canned.
Bullet dodged. By luck.
Wow, yeah, totally a bullet dodge, but good on New Boss for following up with you so promptly to try to not screw you.
The job where my manager informed me at a review meeting that I often clocked in from my fifteen minute break 3 seconds late, and that time adds up and I am stealing time from the company, and, essentially, robbing the compay by being late from break.
The job where the owner/CEO would routinely go through my desk on my days off to make sure I wasn’t “hiding anything.”
The job where the owner/CEO informed me that I wasn’t allowed to eat crackers at my desk to combat my morning sickness, but the office manager and the owner’s daughter ate breakfast sandwiches at their desks daily.
The job where the manager demanded my co-worker with a walking cast for a foot injury bring in a doctor’s note proving that she needed the cast and wasn’t trying to get around the office’s dress shoe dress code.
The job where my boss told me I was taking too many bathroom breaks when I was pregnant. I was informed that if I had to throw up, maybe I could throw up in the trash in the hall instead of going all the way down to the bathroom.
The job where I was allowed to work overnight by myself with a sex offender because I was 19/20, and he would tell me awful things, and he’d laugh while I cried.
The job where I found myself a replacement and called out of work one night shift, and then the manager came to my apartment to find out why I didn’t come into work that day. This was the sex offender. When I complained to the store manager the next day, she said that he had told her he “couldn’t find [my] phone number.”
The job where the company wouldn’t buy health insurance for its employees (pre-ACA) because “too many of you are young women” and “maternity care is expensive.”
The job where the owner’s wife put hand soap in the dishwasher. Twice.
The job where I managed to win the fight for a room to pump breastmilk in, but I had to let anyone else use the office if they needed to make a private phone call. But I was “lucky” because our company was too small for pump room laws to apply, and this was a favor they were doing for me.
The job where I was a nanny to a baby and the house I worked in didn’t have outlet covers or cabinet locks because they didn’t match the decor & they would scratch the hardwood cabinets.
The job where I was a nanny and was told to make sure the baby didn’t drop food on the floor because the dog couldn’t have people food. I asked if I could put the dog in a different roomm during mealtimes, and was told no.
The job where I was a nanny and they asked me not to wear glitter nail polish because a sparkle came off and they were worried the baby would eat it. This is the same house that didn’t have outlet covers.
The job where I requested and was granted a Friday half day off to go to a friend’s wedding. I received a call from my co-worker that afternoon that the boss had torn apart my desk and started screaming to the office at large that she “knew” I had a job interview that day, and she wanted to know where it was.
The job in a fancy cafe that had restrictions on bringing lunch in and where I was too poor to afford the lunch there so I lived off small servings of their potato salad.
The job where I was known as the only employee not brought to tears by the manager.
The job where the manager set up a sex ed class for staff.
The job where I was asked to ignore my mandated reporting duties by my boss.
The job where I was put in an unheated office for a month in the middle of a eastern european winter.
the job at a storage place where I stepped down as manager due to the extreme stress caused by lack of support from upper management after being screamed at and threatened by customers on a near-daily basis,
where I lived on-site (which did not alleviate my stress at being threatened) in an apartment that was not really designed to be an apartment, which smelled like a septic tank on hot days,
where the manager who took over after I stepped down verbally sexually harassed me and was only fired when our district manager decided he personally didn’t like the guy,
where I had to facilitate auctions for a bunch of people who thought Storage Wars was 100% true during which I often had to sell the belongings of people who were broke and had begged and/or threatened me (I’m not sure what was worse) on the phone not to sell their stuff,
where corporate made us wash the walls in the storage building because the swamp coolers would cake them in dust, a Sisyphean ordeal in the middle of a desert and miserable in 100+ degree weather,
where finding the carcass of a long-dead cat in an unused corner is a humerous anecdote my friend/former co-worker reminsce about because everything was so terrible there.
all this is very bleak. once at a different job, the new general manager hated coffee because it reminded her of her father whom she also hated, and had the store coffee maker that customers used to make samples torn out and lied to corporate that it was broken.
Ugh. The job where the Executive Director wasn’t fulfilled unless she had made someone cry that day. She would have audible shouting fights with staff members in her office, which was just above the gift shop of the children’s museum where I worked.
The same job where, after firing me without cause, the ED tried to block my unemployment checks. Too bad she had given me a positive review four weeks earlier.
The job where a board member eavesdropped on a private conversation between myself and a co-worker and reported us to the Executive Director, which resulted in me (but not my co-worker) being written up for insubordination.
The job where you can’t correct someone’s misinterpretation of insubordination without actually being insubordinate.
The job where my boss called me in for a performance review and instead cut my job from full time to part time, with one week’s notice. Oh, and no health benefits for part time workers. I had worked there for more than seven years, and they had just hired another full-time employee.
The job where, four months after cutting my job from full time to part time with no notice, the boss told me I had exceeded the amount of vacation time allowed to part time employees and thus couldn’t accrue any more. The board disagreed with her, and I was paid for the full eight weeks when I quit a month later.
The job where, more than a year after I quit, my former boss was still calling me, sending letters, and threatening me through mutual acquaintances because I “needed” to do something for her.
The job where my boss told me I needed to do a better job of knowing what he was thinking.
The job where, when I started, there were twelve employees and one year later when I left, there were 22, but over the course of that year twenty people were fired. (Mostly for not being able to read minds, I think.)
The job where I was told that I was being replaced as the accountant/benefits manager and my new job would be “helping with sales & marketing” because I am a Caucasian woman and “we want people to see our diversity.”
The job where my boss and coworkers paraded around the department the morning after the 2004 election, crowing that their guy won.
The job where my manager followed me around a usually-empty sales floor, telling me about her past lives.
The job where my allergy to the cleaning products did not exempt me from shelf cleaning duty (it was a video store). It also didn’t earn me any latex gloves.
The job where my supervisor called me “excessively assertive” and then offered me an hourly, part-time position working at her family’s greenhouse (I was in graduate school and about to go on the professional job market).
The job where I made a decent-sized mistake during training, while being supervised by the middle manager, and was made to apologize to everyone. The middle manager was not reprimanded or asked to apologize.
The job where I had to find a way to tell the head of the organization that black people did, generally speaking and having nothing to do with their ethnicity, know how to swim.
The job where the entire camp had to be evacuated because of a fast-approaching, massive wildfire.
Ohgod I could keep going.
Some of these are jobs some of these are volunteer and some of these are the same job.
The job where I had to spend hours cleaning the office because there was mold in the coffee cups & cockroaches in the closet. I was not a janitor and this was a lawyer’s office.
The job in which the manager never washed his hair and had the Talking Heads on repeat all day long. I found out later I was literally doing his entire job.
The job in which I was chastised for not being aggressive enough despite the fact I literally had a gun pulled on me.
The job in which I was too weak to carry construction lumber, so I got to sweep sawdust. I was allergic and the face mask wasn’t enough.
The job in which my coworker was more afraid of the neighborhood than I was.
The job in which I was repeatedly interrupted because the office manager didn’t know how to use Outlook and thought it was a “nice” that I taught her how to do this. However, it wasn’t worthy of a bonus. When I asked her what was, she had no answer.
The job in which they wanted me to sign a non-compete upon entering the interview. I refused.
The job in which my coworker would come into work hung over and once left me in the lurch so I had to remove a holter monitor. I have no medical training whatsoever. She was not reprimanded and the manager kept making excuses for her based on her family background.
The job which is the reason why this article made me want to kill everyone yesterday. What Happens When Millennials Run the Workplace
The job in which a man a foot taller than me and a hundred pounds heavier went off on a scary rant because I didn’t address him with “sir.”
The job in which a man would regularly wait behind the door right before we opened up. We were the last office on the last floor.
The job which demoted me and reduced my pay but wanted me to get a smartphone (which was to come out of my own pocket) and the boss wanted me to apartment hunt for him. He also thought labor laws were a suggestion. He and his partner cornered me in a small room to get me to sign something agreeing to forgo back pay. They went under.
The job where my boss snorted Percocet off his desk.
The job where my bosses, a married couple, were bucking for a threesome with me, and I didn’t realize it until a friend told me they weren’t “just being really friendly” when they helped me shop for underwear and invited me over to hang up my stockings with them on Christmas Eve.
The job where I was required to submit a to-do list at the beginning of every day, and at the end of the day submit the same list with exactly how much I had gotten accomplished.
The job where the executive director called me in to her office to ask me what her new psych meds were supposed to treat.
The job where we were warned to be on the lookout for the executive director’s estranged husband, because it was feared he might show up armed.
The job where I was accused of “standing around chatting with coworkers” because I was asking a job related question of someone who had been there longer than me.
The job where I and all my coworkers at the same level were accused of holding “conspiracy meetings to sabotage the program.”
This was all the same job.
That read like a horror story where at first the reader knows something is unusual, but not necessarily wrong… and then it takes a left turn just south of Night Vale towards Desert Bluffs.
Sounds like maybe more people needed psych meds, or better ones. “Are these psych meds supposed to treat paranoia? Because I am not paranoid! Everyone’s trying to sabotage my company by telling me I’m paranoid, even the doctor!”
(Why are so many paranoid people in the highest levels of business?)
Oh wait, I forgot about the armed ex. Ok, that’s a very good reason to be paranoid.
One of those things where someone tells you how insane their ex is and due to other evidence you wonder just who the mentally ill one REALLY is.
Yeah, I had a coworker like that. We were all amazed and sympathetic at her stories of a former boss who threw a knives at her in a rage. But then she started telling our boss that we were doing similar things to her. (Not purposeful lies, she believed them. I heard later that she had stopped taking her meds because they were too expensive. All the more reason for some healthcare reform.)
She had also gotten a coworker fired for an insult that the coworker denied. Said coworker really was a meanie and we were glad for them to go, but later I wondered if the insult had been a delusion too.
I am probably the crazy horrible coworker in her stories now. I feel almost like she’s an ex.
Some of these are the same job. Some aren’t.
The job where the boss liked to have meetings at a strip bar that served steak while the dancers performed on the tables.
The job where a coworker saw a photo of my husband and said, “He’s much better looking than I expected someone like you would be with.”
The job where my boss said she’d prefer if I watched TV if there were no customers because reading a book made it look like I thought I was smarter than everyone. The same job where the boss would monitor me via closed circuit TV.
The job where my boss asked me to cook and serve sausages so off, they were green. I cooked them anyways to prove a point. The smell was unbelievably bad.
The job where my boss would throw condoms at people randomly.
The job where I convinced a coworker to quit so I could get her hours.
The job where someone’s assistant refused to call me by my name and I refused to answer her.
The job where my manager sighed and said she knew I wouldn’t stay because I was too capable, but that it really made her life easier to have me around.
The job where my manager tried to discipline me for not wearing makeup to work (while she made sure her bra was visible at all times).
The job where my manager gave me a checklist and I corrected the spelling and grammar on it and never had to do another one.
The job where they closed the plant, but we were expected to stay on until the end, so I ran an informal resume and cover letter clinic from my desk.
The job where I got lost in the corn maze because the owner forgot to put in an exit. (That was actually a really fun day at work.)
The job where I ran an indoor sports program at an outdoor pool (there was a curling rink that saw no use over the summer) that no one attended, so I got paid to basically sit around and get a tan.
The job where I got lost in the corn maze because the owner forgot to put in an exit.
Ok, but that actually sounds like a hilarious story (although I’m sure it was stressful at the time!).
It was really funny at the time too! My friend and I went at lunch and were wandering around it for a solid two hours before we were like, OK, enough time wasted, let’s just pick a direction and walk out, paths be damned.
The same job where the boss would monitor me via closed circuit TV.
I had that too, supposedly for security reasons. We were watched by a boss several rooms away. We would walk over to have personal conversations with each other, but we would hold an open folder and point to it so it looked like we were discussing work.
The job where money was missing from a deposit, and the GM told the police that he remembered leaving me alone with it. (Turns out it was the shift supervisor.)
The job where the union didn’t let the department change my job description so I could make an extra 10k a year.
The internal job I didn’t get because the boss’ boss was “so disappointed” that there was a typo my resume. (They changed the job after that person walked out, I got it but got paid 4k less than male predecessor.)
The job where I opened the browser on the shop computer to search something for a customer only to be confronted with my boss’s nude photos instead of Google.
The job at a cafe where the boiler broke two weeks before I quit and the bosses just said to ‘use lots of soap!’ when I raised the issue of washing up without hot water.
The job where I was led to believe that after a probationary period, I would be eligible for full-time status and benefits, but then it turned out that nobody in that position was ever granted full-time status and the accompanying benefits. And when I asked the head of administration how people in that position got health insurance, she replied, “They marry people who have health insurance.”
Oh god, I played hooky today and now I am full of REGRETS. I don’t love new job, but I am now very aware it is not actually all that bad. Please don’t fire me, new job.
The job where I was the only person in the company who was not: the boss, the boss’s ex-girlfriend, the boss’s current girlfriend, the boss’s best friend for 30 years, the boss’s son.
The job where, when I asked to be trained on a program that would benefit the business, was told no because if the boss invested time/money on training me in something, it would be “stealing” from him because I would eventually move on to a new company and use the new skills there.
(These were the same job.)
Training!!!
The job where I was pushed into management after my manager was suddenly fired, and I was told to do her work for the same pay I was getting before, and maybe they would eventually give me a raise after a while if I was very very good. When I asked if I could be given some managerial training, my boss told me no, there’s no such thing, there’s no way to train someone to be a manager, you just have to learn by doing it. (It sucked and I ended up saying no thanks, just hire us a new manager. Years passed and they never managed to cajole someone into that job, so we just managed ourselves.)
(In that same job, it DID happen that every time someone was sent on a really enviable wonderful training course, they ended up leaving the company soon after.)
Do you want to guess what kind of company mine was?
That’s right! A training company!
Definitely a “do as I say, not as I do” situation.
Oh my goodness! Augh, that’s even worse! The cobbler’s children (and employees) go barefoot. Though I guess that makes sense that it would be viewed as “stealing,” (by a mean boss) since you would be taking the company’s product. But ugh, it should be like in nice restaurants where they let the waiters and waitresses eat and drink everything so they’ll be able to recommend it to the customers (or so I’ve heard. I’ve only worked in a cheap restaurant.)
The job where the owner may have actually been part of the Mafia. Is there a Greek Mafia? All I know is that he would have me give “special attention” to a terrifying man who treated me very nicely in a way that clearly telegraphed he could have me killed if he so chose, and tipped me in $100 bills.
The same job where the owner cursed in Greek every time anyone made the smallest mistake, so that to this day I know three words of Greek and they are all curse words.
The job where I was ostensibly a “legal secretary” despite having no experience in law, and where I was required to pretend to be working for about six hours of my nine-to-five shift because that’s when the lawyer would arrive and give me something to do. I was not allowed to do anything but sit at the computer and fake working, or reorganize files.
The job where the owner asked me to give him a ride home from work one day and then invited me up to his condo to “show me the paintings.” I declined this invitation, rather graciously, considering he was making it extremely plain that if I said yes, I would be opting in to boss-sex. I was fired shortly thereafter.
The job where the manager reprimanded my black friend for making customers laugh too much as he checked them out. He was a fast checker and bagger, so the only reason for the reprimand was that it annoyed the manager to see people laughing at anything my friend said. (He reprimanded all the not-white employees regularly for similarly ridiculous reasons.)
The job where the creative director of the agency stood in a sunbeam, that streamed through the loft window of our open plan office, one spring afternoon and said, “Man, weather like this reminds me of college. We’d play hacky out on the quad. Every day. I always wore a red bandana tied around my left ankle. And after a while, everybody knew me as like, that guy with the red bandana. Yeah.”
The job where my boss banned pants and flats. The same job where multiple strangers on my morning bus commute asked me if so-and-so was my boss because I looked like ‘his type.’
My two-day (extremely local) public television acting career where I had to be pretend-friends with this other 11-year-old, whose leading role on this show that only ever aired on Wisconsin Public Television before seven on Saturday mornings had gone completely to her head, and we mostly ran around with butterfly nets and fought over whether or not I got to wear my own hair clip.
Oh! Two more. The job where I regularly had to visit the cubicles of two long-time state employees, one with a full Princess Diana shrine, complete with lit candles and fresh roses, and the other with her taxidermied dead cat curled in a lifelike sleeping position on top of her filing cabinet.
And the job where my boss spent the entire summer trying to sell me on 9/11 conspiracy theories in between customers.
The job where my colleague (he was a financial adviser, me a new admin assistant) mentioned to me that he’d like to see the bikini that matched my mint green nail polish after I’d only been at the job less than 2 months.
The same job where I found out after said colleague had been let go that he had a problem with sexually harassing all the young women in the office, but my boss WHO WAS THE VP never bothered to mention it and he was let go for a totally unrelated reason.
The job where a client who was told repeatedly that if they did another perm on her hair, it would all fall out but she wanted it anyway and signed a contract and then her hair DID fall out and my manager had me lock the contract in the safe while perm lady yelled at us and everyone in the salon until the cops came to escort her out.
The summer job where, in an attempt to save the struggling company, Howard* was hired @ $50K / year to do marketing. The company folded soon after he left. Our supervisor made about $35K, I was paid 6 bucks an hour, and the full-time peons (all female except the other summer student, and all management was male) made about $8. Once Howard said to 4 of us women: “I can do anything better than a woman, except for having babies.” Another time, I saw him leading the new employee, a young woman recently immigrated from Kenya via England, by the hand to the receptionist’s desk. Turns out she’d asked him for some Tippex, not realizing it was called White Out here. Howard thought she’d said Tampax. Schadenfreude: I saw Howard trying to sell encyclopedias in the mall about a year or two later.
But worse than this company was one of their clients, a major employer in a small city nearby. We were providing slides for presentations for their company restructuring (read: massive layoffs). The slides got sent back several times for revisions, and once it was to put little hardhats on all the chart people. They paid extra to make the chart people look cute for a bunch of guys sitting around talking about how many people they could fire.
*Hell, yeah, that’s his real name. He doesn’t deserve anonymity. I only wish I could remember his last name.
The job where the photographer would have employee meetings to pick our brains for advertising ideas because he didn’t want to pay to have it done. He also took on a job cleaning and repairing artwork even though there was nobody even remotely qualified to do the work. They cleaned an oil painting by wiping it with a wet cloth. I got my regular minimum wage ($6) to repaint a damaged portrait, and the client was charged $60 an hour (for the oil painting “cleaning” too). One day the boss went around handing each “girl” a rose. Also, he’d been penalized one year for not paying time and a half on stat holidays (and by penalized, I mean having to pay his employees time and a half, I think, don’t think there was an additional penalty), so when they thought an inspector was coming, we had do go hide upstairs. But I will forever remember him for the pics of a stag (his brother was the groom, I think) another employee dug out of a filing cabinet after hours. Scene: some farm outside of town. Groom stripped naked except for his brown socks and Wallabees. Balls painted blue. Then strapped to the top of a car with rope and driven around. Yes, there were passing cars. Later, back at the barn, guys yucking it up and drinking beer, groom still naked.
The restaurant job where we had to be on the floor working 10 minutes before our shift started. This was one of many minor instances of openly flouting labour laws. They would also put more people on the schedule than they needed, then tell some to go downstairs and wait, unpaid, to see if it got busy. It never did, so the person would be sent home, having earned zero dollars for their shift. I found this out when I asked a single mother, who was paying a sitter to look after her kid while she was at work, why she was sitting downstairs. About a year after I left (only stayed 6 weeks) someone put in a formal complaint to whatever government department, and there was a newspaper article. It included comments from the owner, interviewed at his million dollar summer home, where he defended the practice, saying that was the only way a small business could make it.
“…leading the new employee, a young woman recently immigrated from Kenya via England, by the hand to the receptionist’s desk. Turns out she’d asked him for some Tippex, not realizing it was called White Out here. Howard thought she’d said Tampax. ”
Oh my god. Because if she HAD asked for Tampax she could assumed to menstruating and thus in need of of gentle yet firm guidance. :/
The job where I was that person on the sidewalk with a clipboard asking passersby for donations for some random nonprofit (I’m so sorry) and then I got fired on the first day for not raising enough money.
OK, I have to elaborate so that I might save some poor souls. A warning to college students: These employers are revolving doors. They’ll try to suck you in with an important-sounding name and a really vague job description that just emphasizes that you’ll be making a difference! so that you don’t actually know what you’ll be doing until the first day. Then you learn that you have to meet daily quotas or else you lose your job. Even the canvassers that survive the first day don’t usually keep their job more than a couple weeks. They’re hella exploitative. Steer clear.
The Greenpeace people outside my current office make me second guess any decision to venture out for lunch. The guilt trips they lay! They don’t seem to understand that I see them EVERY DAY and am not going to stop each time and that doesn’t mean I hate the planet.
I keep encountering clipboard people who use the opening line “Hi! You look friendly!” yelled at passersby. It infuriates me because 1. manipulative and 2. I do not look friendly. I know, I have witnesses.
I admire your commitment to not looking friendly! I have a killer resting bitch face and it is hilarious to watch street canvases (many of whom are older, bigger, or men) hesitate before approaching me.
I hate it when they veer towards me with arms outstretched, comment admiringly on my hair colour or just say “Hi!” in a really enthusiastic voice. We all know you just want to ask me for money, please don’t waste time with annoying pleasantries.
I have heard “oh do you like music!!??” shouted at me through my earbuds, to which I shout back “NO!!!!” and visibly fiddle with the control button thing.
In the UK, they’re referred to as “chuggers” which is a contraction of the words “charity muggers” because you get the feeling they’d mug you for whatever they could get if they got desperate enough.
I went door to door for two days with an org like that, and then accidentally slept through my 3rd shift and never went back. I don’t regret it.
The job where I was asked to teach high school U.S. History with only 1 hours notice.
The job where they let the current U.S. history teacher split her class lists, so I somehow got all of the known troublemakers in my section.
The job where no one even bothered to inform me they scheduled me to teach a section of English composition, and I found out when students started crowding around me asking where class was.
The job where when I went to the administration to ask if I there was perhaps an error on these students schedules, they laughed and said “oh, did we forget to tell you we scheduled you to teach English Comp?”.
The job where when I asked what classroom I was supposed to hold English Comp in, they shrugged and said “maybe in the cafeteria”.
The job where we had to attend a professional development session with a college consultant who told us we should write students application essays for them so they would get into more highly-ranked schools.
(These are all the same job, actually).
The job where I was sent to go through the ATM on foot so my boss could cash a check with which to buy oversized eggplants, which I was then enlisted to take lewd photos of.
I hope your job description included “take lewd photos of produce” when you accepted the offer!
The job where, despite being 5’7″ in an office of mixed genders, I was the tallest person and was often asked to reach things on high-ish shelves.
The job where I was asked my political party affiliation on day one and upon answering, was greeted with laughter and “OH! You’ll get along real well with Karl.”
The job where I got along real well with Karl.
The job where a coworker would show up hours before his shift and would just. sit. there. We were the only ones in the building and he would say things like “Do you want a backrub,” and “sometimes I get so excited watching sports that my nipples get hard.” He’s in jail now.
The job where I got a call at 11:30pm (after having had the several glasses of wine I used to drink daily to survive law firm life) to come in and pull an all-nighter fixing someone else’s mistake.
The job where my boss, a judge, used to call at 8:01am several times a week from the golf course to make sure me and the other clerk had arrived on time at 8 sharp.
The job where the bar owner’s degenerate cokehead brother used to come in after hours and steal fancy wine, which we didn’t mind so long as he shared with us bartenders.
The job where my boss (a man in his thirties) decided to deal with his second-in-command’s (a twenty-five-year-old man) anxiety problems by making me (a fifteen-year-old girl in her first job!) responsible for his emotional wellbeing through a judicious application of praise and guilt. I was so responsible for keeping Second from OD’ing on painkillers! Second is crying in the bathroom? Well gosh, go comfort him, you can’t leave him alone!
This very predictably led to an unhealthy emotional codependence between me and Second, and while it never turned into a sexual relationship, there were some huge red flags like Second laying with his head in my lap when he felt ill or me being at his apartment late at night and staying over and borrowing one of his shirts the next day, and generally way more cuddling than should happen between coworkers with a ten-year age gap.
This also all happened while I was dating the boss’s teenaged little brother, something else boss encouraged. To this day, I find myself drawn towards men who remind me either of Second or of the little brother, and I have to stop and remind myself, “You like this because an asshole deliberately conditioned you for it, not because it’s good for you.”
Oooh I just remembered a good one! I filled in on reception at a property management office for a VERY fancy office building on Bay Street (essentially Canada’s Wall Street). When I was in there getting shown the phones and stuff one of the tenants brought in a LIVE LION CUB and just had it walking on a leash in the lobby, then proceeded to get super mad at security when they were like, “Um, you aren’t supposed to have animals in here.” (Like, “I AM THE BIGGEST TENANT YOU HAVE IN THIS BUILDING YOU DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO” sort of thing.) I unfortunately did not see the animal myself because it didn’t come to our side of the building, but I got to see the security footage later, because they definitely emailed that around.
The job where the mechanics wouldn’t clean up the tomatoes they used to calibrate the machines so we’d get a fruit fly infestation, and they wouldn’t take care of it until I brought them a piece of paper to which I had taped all the corpses of the fruit flies I had killed at my desk. I did that daily for a week. (What I like best about this story is the idea of them saying “The job where the receptionist …” because in this story I am the crazy one, but I got it done.)
The job where I got to make phone calls to find out “if Mr. Jabbers (had) his monkey yet”.
The job where the fax machine could only handle three pages at a time so I had to line up the 50+ page faxes I needed to send in three-page batches.
The job (same job!) where somehow our fax number was in the local medical system phone registry as being for a clinic so we would get people’s confidential medical information faxed to us all the time. (Throat cancer diagnosis! Pre-natal fetal heartbeat report!)
The job (still same job) where in the last remodel someone had left a phone plugged into a jack somewhere and then drywalled and plastered over it so every once in awhile a phone would ring from the wall behind me.
The job where, when I ask about the fluffy stuff wrapped around some of the support beams in the unfinished and largely unventilated basement where I work, I am nonchalantly told, “Oh, it’s asbestos.”
Holy shit.
The temp job I had where the regular manager left and the replacement manager got the other 4 people on the assignment talking all day every day about orgy bars, favorite sexual positions, favorite sex toys, favorite ways to masturbate, their sexual experiences that week, etc. Replacement manager and one of the women would flirt, talk about ripping each other’s clothes off and what they would do to each other sexually (both of them were married to other people). I was the only one who didn’t participate; we all worked in one very small room and there was nowhere else to go. They would occasionally apologize to me and then start up again. I desperately needed the money, so felt like I couldn’t quit, and couldn’t tell the temp agency because it would be very obvious who had done it.
The job where my boss decided she wanted two assistants instead of just one, so I was demoted to “assistant’s assistant.”
The job where I was never given my own email address, so instead had to communicate using the email address of either the other assistant (who started after me) or the guy I replaced, who got fired for reasons completely unknown to me.
The job where my boss wanted an office but didn’t have one (she felt she deserved one, because nepotism), so she set up one of those old-school screens that fancy ladies have in their bedrooms in the movies. One time, I don’t know how long ago, two employees got into a physical fight – AT THE OFFICE – and some blood ended up on the screen. She never cleaned it off.
The job where I had to reuse envelopes (that my boss had already received mail in) and other office supplies in the name of “going green” but my boss coloured in a scuff on her shoe with a Sharpie because she didn’t want to “look poor.”
The job where I had to be in every morning before 9 am even though the person I was assistant-ing didn’t show up until 10:00, and gave me nothing to do in that first hour, but still got mad if I was late and showed up 45 minutes before she did instead of a full hour. She didn’t read my timesheet, she just asked other people in the workplace to spy on me by asking me “Is [Boss] in yet?” and I’d say no because she never was.
The job where my boss told me “Go downstairs to the storage lockers to do inventory but don’t leave anything in there, but don’t come back upstairs at the end of your day because I’m having an important meeting and I don’t want you to interrupt it,” then got mad at me for bringing home my inventory papers and pen, then bringing them back the next day.
The job where my boss yelled at me so loud and so much that I cried right in front of her, all because I showed up to work that day and she was busy. I didn’t go back to work until she called me, like she said to while she yelled at me. She didn’t call me for two weeks, which happened to be the most important two weeks in the season for which I was hired. When she did call me, it was basically for end-of-season wrap-up and to clean up some paperwork, and when she signed my timesheet she remarked that I hadn’t worked much in that pay period and legit seemed to not understand why.
Yes, these were all the same job. And yet, my current job (the one I kept instead of going back to work for her for more money and better perks) isn’t much better. I’ve got stories on this one, too.
OMG this is cathartic to read!
The job where my supervisor refused to speak to me for two months and instead kept meticulous notes on everything I did wrong, which she then read to me in a meeting with our boss.
The job where my boss, a racist old man named Herb, made me go to a dinner with him, his ex-wife who wouldn’t give him a divorce so was actually his current wife even though he lived with a different lady in New Jersey, and their children.
The job where I started referring to bags of cat shit as Eriks.
The job where there was a management reorg and the four men I worked with all got promoted while I got demoted. (Erik eventually got fired for that one, because sometimes Justice prevails)
“OMG this is cathartic to read! “
Are you sure? I think it’s terrifying.
No wonder there are 20,000 people fighting for every decent job.
Which makes most bosses think they can get away with treating us like this because they know the other 19,999 of us didn’t get that job, so they can lowball all of us applying for it and also subsequently abuse whomever they hire.
I mean – if you doubt me then read through the thread again.
The job where the manager was pissed they’d taken up 10 sq feet of her store with a one hour photo lab (that I ran singlehandedly) so she’d deliberately give me 1 hour slips with only 5 minutes to go until the customer came back and I had to make excuses while the people watched through the exhibit-window at the exotic animal, the photo lab tech…(this was before digital printing)
The job where I had to calculate molarity on the developer daily, but they never listened to me when I told them it was wrong and needed dumped.
The job where the one hour photos where of lots of guns and drugs and I had to snitch to the city dectective when the druglord came INTO MY LAB to pick up his photos!
The one where I developed the photos of grown women in daylight doing things they shouldn’t do in public park trees and I learned the meaning of the words “pendulous dugs” in a way that will be forever etched into mybrain.
The one where I was hired to work as an assistant manager in a high shrink store and the new manager’s father died so I got no raise but worked there alone, and got to know the mall detectives really well. We had to stop anyone with a baby stroller because 98% of the time they were using it to steal. My reward was that when manager came back, not only did she not report me, she wrote me up for stealing from the layaway and the internal audit guys grilled me for a week. Over a single missing $50 bill, that it turned out her hire had stolen.
The one where the lady in the family of wandering thieves came to my store and started screaming at me because we all knew their identities and I wouldn’t give her money, so she then started throwing things at me.
The one where the boss fired me after the wedding but before the honeymoon. He was bankrupt and I hadn’t been paid in months. He then denied my unemployment, telling them that he’d offered to take me back (for no pay) and I’d refused.
The one where you had to call the mall detective to walk you out of your store and through the pitch black mall to your car, in a bad neighborhood, where they’d turned off all the parking lot lights to save money. Ever see those “decrepit malls of the 80’s photo essays?” That mall.
The one where they tasked me to develop new non-gerrymandered voting districts and then told me after a month and a half of research that they were paying someone more than I make in a year to take over, who then drew them without using GIS software. Literally they were hand-colored in magic marker. The county then spent 3 months with me re-creating all of it in GIS. It’s still gerrymandered.
Oh! another photo lab one. The one where the company was too cheap to buy a new machine, so they bought a used machine from a different company, but wouldnt’ buy the appropriate chemicals. Since cross reactions would destroy the new machine, in order to keep using the same chemistry I had to spend a week scrubbing chemical calcifications out of the inside of it with straight bleach and a toothbrush.
The job where we all had to buy, with our own money, new uniforms, because the area manager thought that this was obviously the solution to our poor financial performance, and obviously the general poverty in the town the pub was in had nothing to do with it.
The job where I was had to show much deference to a teacher who was telling off a child aged 5 for not doing something that this kid had actually not been told to do.
The job where the teacher I worked with scolded me, in front of the other classroom assistant, for not starting work at 8:30am. I pointed out to her that I was only paid from 9am.
The job where I was told “we’re covering Geography, do you want to do Australia or Antarctica?” twenty minutes before the class was due to start. This was the first I had heard of this plan.
The job where I was left in charge – the only adult in the room – of the single most difficult class in the school. They were not quiet, and they were not on task, but I did manage to prevent fights from breaking out.
The job where, at interview, I was told that shifts would occasionally finish as late as 4am. I worked there every weekend for 8 months and I can count on my fingers the amount of times I left work before 4am.
Whew!
The job where the owner was proud of having made every single employee who ever worked for her cry. Where I was fired because of my disability (this was a medical clinic……). The manager then asked me to work another week after I had been fired; and on my last day thanked me for being so professional as to not sabotage anything during that last week. When I later filed an unemployment claim, she lied to the government about why she had fired me.
The one where I worked so long hours I hallucinated on the way home.
The one where the 6 foot square metal bins were too small to fit all the bu bags in they needed to, so before I left at the end of the late shift I had to get in the bin and jump on them till the lids closed.
The one where I made tea for BRIAN BLESSED
The one where I cleaned a haunted cinema at weekends.
I
TEA FOR BRIAN BLESSED! I need to know more!
It was a TV job- the same one I hallucinated at. BRIAN BLESSED was pretty great .
The job were my coworker made up a lactose intolerance because she had “mysteriously gained weight”. When offered milk chocolate, she would scream: oh my god, do you want to kill me? A month later she decided it was not lactose intolerance after all and proceeded to eat a tomato and Mozzarella salad for lunch that day.
The job were I had to take care of a group of 52 children and slept on a mattress in an apartment with black mold on the walls for three weeks.
The job in customer service were they could, and did, fire you at the end of every working day for things like: not smiling enough, not cleaning the ashtrays quickly enough, talking to a customer for too long.
The job where my (male) boss polled the (entirely female) staff to see which of two slurs we preferred to be called, then argued when we did not choose the one he would have chosen.
The job where my boss kept the garbage bags locked in a closet to which only she had the key because she was certain we were stealing from her by taking the trash out too often, which caused us to steal trash bags from her and then hoard them.
The job where my supervisor frequently told long-winded, repetitive, personal anecdotes, including one that began “well, my son has discovered women’s bodies,” to which one listener replied “what, like in the backyard?”
Wow, I had totally blocked out when they thought we were stealing toilet paper or paper towels at work, so they kept that closet locked and we had to go get the key from the boss. Nobody understood that we actually needed paper towels for our work.
Haha I love the finding bodies in the back yard.
The job where the manager–being a freshman in college–assigned work based on who he thought was “hot”.
The job where I spent all summer cleaning bathrooms and realized 16 year old me did not qualify as hot to a 19 year old.
The job where I ran the store for six weeks after the manager left, then was told by the district manager that if I stayed with the company I might be management material in five more years. I did not stay.
The job where personal calls were not allowed on our work phones and using our cells outside of official breaks was discouraged, but the supervisor would get into 20 minute fights on her work phone with her boyfriend and then recap it to all within earshot (we were all within earshot anyway).
In the category of Fun Job Memories – the barracks cleaning job where the German Air Force service men would greet you with a cheerful “Morgen!” when they passed you on their way to the showers, wearing nothing but their very brief underwear 😀
The job where one of my cowokrers– a 45-year-old man! with tenure!– watered his plant with old coffee on Friday afternoon, then wondered along with the rest of us why the office smelled like spoiled milk on Monday morning.
The job where my boss had me “run down” to street level from the 14th floor, wait on the corner in the rain until he drove by in his Mercedes, and then throw 10 lbs. of tax documents in through the back window while the car was still moving. Because he didn’t want to bother to come to a complete stop.
The job where my boss quit 2 months after I was hired, leaving me with a huge caseload I was entirely unqualified to handle.
The job where I had to tell my boss to stop shouting obscene profanities across the office because I was meeting with clients.
The job where the girl who replaced me after 10 months lasted even less time than I did.
The job where I was fired 8 months pregnant.
The job where no one in the business office had any clue how to run a business.
The fast-food job where my coworker would unbutton her shirt down to below the bottom of her bra when she was on break, and then walk out where customers could see her.
The job where the company owner interviewed me while wearing a bikini. Also the job where the poorly-trained puppy peed in my purse. Also also the job where the puppy took a shit in the corner and no one cleaned it up, ever, for two months. (It eventually disintegrated.)
The job where my boss was too cheap to buy soap, or coffee, or food, yet somehow still claimed that this was a restaurant.
The job where after being paid under the table for a year I had to fight to be put on payroll to actually make minimum wage.
The job where my boss would clock me in late and clock me out when he thought I should leave(I was working about 3 hours a week when I left)
The job where I was given a complex and difficult regiment for cleaning certain things, when I came back from work after a sick day where the boss had to take over(Not had to, he was too cheap to offer anyone more hours) I was reprimanded for doing things “the hard way”, you know, like I’d been told to?
The job where I watched my opinions of people crumble into nothing while they didn’t even realize I was there.
The job where we don’t have enough people to cover all the shifts but are not allowed to go into overtime. The boss won’t hire anyone else, even when there are returning seasonal workers who do just fine.
The job where I(a 24 year old college student) had better work ethic and a thicker skin than a 45 year old woman with 4 kids and an allegedly highly successful business background. This woman would have a meltdown if anyone so much as spoke harshly in her general direction.
The job where I basically was paid to have people yell at me because didn’t understand how planning worked.
The job where we can’t ask people to leave even when they’re harassing us, physically or verbally.
The job where me and one of my co-workers had to do everything in our power to keep the other co-worker from having to wait on her stalker.
Really, I’ve been pretty lucky when it comes to jobs, it just sucks that there’s really no such thing as upward mobility in any of the ones I qualify for with only a GED and “Some College” under my qualifications.
In the first one, what did anybody DO for working? If there was no coffee, food, or soap?
The job where we were told to go ahead and spend loose change in the till on snacks for ourselves and nobody ever bought the product, ever ever, and I came to suspect it of being some kind of tax dodge or front or something.
The (same) job where I got stalked by a guy who we had to call the mall cops down on.
The job where one of my co-workers threw a full ceramic plate of food directly at my head. When I threatened to quit, the manager made him apologize. He then tried to make things good between us by cupping my ass.
The job where they paid me full-time days to do a part-time amount of mail clerking and then read and write books in a big office by myself, emerging for hour-long lunches to play cribbage with the scientists. Oh, the days of wine and roses.
The job where the security guard in our building got hired to be my supervisor. He considered himself a vampire and upon entering the office would throw his forearm to his forehead and stumble a bit because THE SUN. Then he got transferred 3 months later to another office where his vampire girlfriend worked.
The job where a manager was at a party at my house and got so drunk he cradled my head in his hands and told me he loved me.
The job where I won employee of the year and right after didn’t get promoted to a newly created position between me and my manager. Was told by an HR person that a lot of people hadn’t wanted me to win.
The job where I quit after not getting promoted (see above) and getting a job that paid almost twice as much and my manager said, “It’s customary to give two week’s notice.” I always wish I had said, “It’s customary to promote people when they deserve it!”
The job where our Christmas bonus was done away with, and we were instead given $10 gift cards to a grocery store. The next year, those were done away with as well, because the owner feared that we might use them to buy something wicked like cigarettes or alcohol.
PS – When I tried to use my grocery card, the cashier said there was no money on it.
Hi Toasts! I’ve lurked here for a few months but been too shy to comment (and it’s probably too late for this to be seen by anyone) but I wanted to share my experience at:
The job at the law firm where my boss threw actual KNIVES into the ceiling of his office and left them there to “intimidate opposing counsel” who met with him. Sometimes they would fall out but he just threw them back. I then got yelled at when I took them down because the kitchen was out of clean knives, and he had asked me for a knife with his lunch.
There were other awful things about this boss and that job (toilet flush ringtone, kept bringing his aggressive dog in despite it biting several coworkers and the mailman, had framed photos of himself at baseball camp blown up really big on the walls of his office (this wasn’t so awful, but added to the ambiance of the place), illegal storage and disposal of client files, etc), but the knife thing really stands out.
I then got yelled at when I took them down because the kitchen was out of clean knives, and he had asked me for a knife with his lunch.
The whole thing is nuts, but that part made me laugh. Especially because I’m picturing my own kitchen knives which are old and colorful and dull and not intimidating at all.
The job where, two years after I left, my boss sat down next to me in a movie theater and said “YOU KNOW, I WAS ABOUT TO GIVE YOU A RAISE.”
The job where I fact-checked articles about angels, and then given a bad performance review for allowing inaccurate angel facts into the articles.
The job where my manager started every day with an in-depth discussion of his deteriorating relationship with his fiance. Which moved on to his attempt to get his fiance to stop contacting his family. Which moved on to him disguising himself as the New York Housing Authority in order to get his fiance kicked out of his house. Which moved on to him arriving in the morning and saying “I kissed a nineteen-year-old boy last night. I am going to ruin him, much like fruit.”
The job where a client threw her paperwork at my head after I’d done it wrong. Somehow the paperwork ended up being delayed by three weeks. No idea how. Gosh.
The job where they decided that the senior-level people were costing them too much money in salary, so they randomly demoted everyone and cut their pay.
Yep. In mine the senior people just got laid off, leaving the junior people to muddle through the work on their own. Though one senior got asked to do a really quick training session before leaving.
The job where my boss and I got called into the big boss’ office and lectured because we went to Dairy Queen and didn’t ask one of the other workers if she wanted to go.
The job where my boss left a month after I started, and I had to do her work plus mine at my pay rate even though I had no idea what I was doing, because the big boss didn’t want to hire someone qualified.
The job where the big boss showed me my time sheet after it had gone through the person in charge of time sheets. She had “helpfully” changed my hours and wrote notes in the margins – LEFT OFFICE AT 3:32 NOT 3:40.
All the same job..
The job where my boss made me fill in all my time sheets for the summer then told me she expected me to work an extra hour/day that I would not be paid for.
The job where white teens were allowed to take on semi-management roles but staff of colour were not allowed to cash out tills at the end of their shift.
The job where a child physically assaulted and choked other children but was kept in camp because “his mother needs childcare” and he’d been kicked out of every other camp and my boss running the camp was his mom’s BFF.
The job where the boss’ son was “assistant” front of house manager and hit on/harassed the customers, the staff, the delivery people and anyone he could get near, with complete impunity.
The job where my department head yelled at a mostly-women admin team to “stop bitching” in an employee survey response meeting (specifically held to address employee concerns).
The job where a colleague used the n-word toward a black colleague and the person who reported it to HR was reprimanded for “causing drama”.
The job where my boss found me sobbing under the weight of my work (which should be done by three people and previously had been) and told me to “smile more” and “lie if [I] have to” when colleagues ask how I am rather than admit to them that I’m overwhelmed.
The job where my supervisor told me my job was “smiles and coffee” but had no plan to mitigate the other responsibilities that distracted me from smiling and making coffee.
Too many of those are my current job or a different position with my current employer.
Oh my god, how did I forget…
The job where the weekly production meeting was the owner’s opportunity to verbally abuse his wife (my other boss) and where sticking it out for one year would get you pretty much any job in my hometown because the owner is so notoriously awful. (I didn’t cash in hard enough on this one but I did enjoy giving my notice the day the boss left for a 4-week vacation and having his “You’re really screwing me over” comments roll off my back.
Ahhh day camp jobs! 17-year-old me could probably have used a degree in social work and another one in therapy to help some of those poor financially and emotionally deprived kids. Instead 17-year-old me didn’t understand why they misbehaved. Thankfully 17-year-old me had a more qualified older coworker who was familiar with emotionally and physically volatile children and had no qualms at pinning a child down (seated, arms and legs wrapped around him) to prevent him from attacking the other kids who struck him out at California kickball.
That job where the other duty manager was regularly 1-2 hours late for his shift (which meant my lunch break had to be pushed back by 1-2 hours because I couldn’t leave the store until his late ass showed up waving a Starbucks coffee and telling me his alarm didn’t go off). He would also be late for opening shifts and since I was closest to the location, I would end up working a split shift so the store could open more or less on time.
That job where the other duty manager would arrive late (like 1-2 hours) and sign in as though he’d arrived on time.
That job where the other duty manager never did his job. I did his job and mine for a while before passive-aggressively pointing staff and customers at him when it was his turn to be manager-on-duty. He never did the get the hint. No, actually, he knew perfectly well what I was doing (he wasn’t stupid) but he wanted to be a merchandiser, so that was the only part of the job he’d do if I gave him a choice.
All the same guy. It took almost a year of reporting him to get him fired because our boss was the nicest person in the world and he’d be good for the exact amount of time he was on probation and not a second longer.
That job where the Assistant Manager left for a new job and the next week the Store Manager’s apartment building burned down. She went on stress leave. Then her brother died. Then she quit. So the three Team Leaders (who had less than a year’s experience put together) were left to run the store for 3 months by ourselves until they hired a new SM and AM. We got in trouble about once a week for not following some new directive that had only been emailed to the SM’s email, which none of us had access to. And there was a month and a half in there where every Sunday morning like clockwork I would answer the phone to find it was the person who was scheduled to come in for opening shift calling to say they were quitting effective immediately and wouldn’t be coming in that day.
That job where I got in trouble for not filing the first aid report for someone claiming Workman’s Comp. She worked less than a day, claimed she hurt her back lifting the box of pillows that she volunteered to lift to demonstrate proper lifting techniques, didn’t report the “injury” either on the day or any time after. She just called in sick the next day (and didn’t have a shift for a week after that) and we assumed she had a cold until we got a letter from Workman’s Comp about where was the paperwork we were legally required to file within 24 hours of the injury. This is an actual conversation I had with the rep:
“why didn’t you file the paperwork?”
“we didn’t have the paperwork, she didn’t report the injury.”
“you still should have filed the paperwork. You can’t not file the paperwork.”
“we didn’t have any paperwork.”
“well, you should have filled it out.”
“she didn’t report the injury.”
“you should still have filled it out.”
“…can I fill it out now?”
“no, it’s too late now.”
“so, you don’t need it?”
“we still need it. send us the form you filled out when she reported the injury”
“she didn’t report the injury.”
round and round for 20 minutes. I eventually gave in and back dated a report but filled it out with pointed notes about how I had no information because the injury was never reported to first aid. And got witnesses to sign it.
All the same job.
. . . pillows?
Were they, like, rock pillows? For self-flagellating hermits?
They were throw pillows. And there were only two in the box because they weren’t vacuum-packed. In other words, it was a box containing 90% air. It was the air watermelon of boxes. I could lift that box one-handed and throw it a good distance (and I don’t have any kind of throwing arm).
That’s why I figured it was safe for the newbie health & safety training. *rolls eyes*
For all I know she actually had a back problem that she triggered. But the employment contract made it clear that heavy lifting was a job requirement (also: furniture store) and she volunteered for the demo, so I still wonder if she took the job with… let’s say, less than honorable intentions.
“The job where the office had mice.
The job where the office had flying ants.
The job where a rat died in the walls.
The job where I knew it was a rat because there were more rats.”
Did you work with me at the Professional Theatre Company From Hell? Where the artistic director had a dead mouse in a trap on her desk for weeks?
The job where I interned out of technical school, got the job, and then the previous office admin was fired for being worse at her job than I was… but she was dating one of the guys in my office so she still came in twice a week at least and also I had to make out her last paycheque and give it to her. Awkward.
The job where they would make coffee (stale dollar store stuff) in the morning and let it sit on the burner all day in case customers came in. Eventually my boss bought a Keurig instead and I stopped frantically making a fresh pot every time someone came in.
The job where I gave my boss eight months’ notice that I was leaving to move away and he procrastinated on hiring my replacement (sole admin for the entire office who runs literally everything) until a WEEK before I left. His friend in another office was interviewing for a position there, and my boss said he’d just take his friend’s rejects. That never panned out. And then he hired my LITTLE SISTER and I had one week to train her, so she got tossed in at the deep end.
The job where my sister was repeatedly harassed by a male coworker who would call our mother “my mother-in-law,” grope her (and sometimes me, though I was younger) while ostensibly teaching us how to work a cash register (I stomped on his foot once), and tell her he wanted to marry her – and the next day show her photos of his wife and baby in another city.
The same job where my sister was nearly fired for eating a cold french fry that was about to be thrown out.
The same job where my sister was written up for “making fun of” a customer with an accent by copying them, and disbelieved when she maintained that she had been doing no such thing.
The job where I got hired (at age 15) to do filing and reception at a veterinary clinic, and after three days I was called back to assist in surgery on a wounded dog. I was holding its bleeding leg while the vet was giving it a shot and I almost passed out. The vet yelled at me to get out if I couldn’t handle it, so I left. The next day I came in to work and found a pink slip waiting for me.
The job where I was fired (at age 16) because the sour-faced owner had seen me get in the car of a MAN (my 17-year-old gay best friend) and assumed I was a slut and thus couldn’t work at her sin-free photo kiosk in a strip mall parking lot.
The job where I was threatened with firing for reading instead of cleaning up. After I’d already cleaned the whole store. A bookstore.
(All my jobs as a teenager sucked. It was a good introduction to how the adult world of work was going to suck.)
The job where I had to pay out-of-pocket for things that were part of my job, like making copies, and parking my car all over the city, and was refused reimbursement for any of it. When we needed supplies, we had to ask the secretary to open the locked storage room, and she would mark it all on an inventory chart. One morning I arrived on time and found the door locked, and I had to wait in the freezing cold for half an hour for the secretary to show up. She laughed and said too bad I didn’t have a key! No one had keys to anything but her. She was the hoarding dragon mistress of the keys. She did not give me a key.
The same job as above, where I was hired for one job and then given another to do “until the grant for your position comes through”. After a week I was called in to HR and informed that the job I’d been hired for wouldn’t actually be happening, that I would keep the low-level job I’d been doing. Also I would not be paid the salary I’d been hired at, instead I’d be paid twelve thousand dollars less than I’d been making at the job I’d just quit, and “we hope that won’t be a problem”. (!) Basically they scrounged up an undergrad research assistant position for me. I was 36. If I hadn’t been able to get my old job back I would’ve sued them. BTW this was at a well-regarded university.
The job where, the day after lecturing me about how my sales were too low, my supervisor called to say “I need you to be on my team,” causing me to drive immediately to the office. When I arrived, I was offered a Keystone and a swig from the bottle of whiskey this man kept in his desk. His “team” was for beer pong, which my co-workers were playing on the conference room table. It was about ten o’clock in the morning. I drank.
The job where my brand-new boss took the stage at the company’s (monthly, mandatory) award ceremony, with a speech on the theme of “Finding Your Why,” all about his daughter: how she was in her twenties, and sick, and likely to die, and how he looked up to her fighting spirit, and the importance of family, and how she was his motivation in life. He choked up. We all clapped. And he never, ever breathed a word about her again. This same boss also had an eleven-year-old son, whom he’d bring along to call nights rather than hire a sitter. And he told everyone (he certainly told me) all about how the mother had drug problems, how she’d have run-ins with the police, how the paternity test had proven he was the father, how mutual acquaintances had begged him to rescue the boy from her, how he’d never planned for any of this to happen, how he was determined to do the right thing by his son. And I just kept waiting for another mention of the daughter, and it never, ever came.
The job where my trainer would bring me along on his (hours-long) commute, during which he habitually sped, tailgated, and texted at the wheel. I fantasize now about having had the spine to refuse to get into his truck.
~*This one gets a content note for wannabe-violent racism*~ The job where a co-worker burst out in the middle of a meeting with, “someone needs a noose around his neck and dragged from the back of my truck,” to which I responded with “who, Ben?” Cue incoherent, mumbled “nobody.” (He was talking about Barack Obama. He was responding to a mention of new federal regulations, probably the ACA.) Not only was the guy (Ben Windisch! His name is Ben Windisch!) not immediately reprimanded, but by meeting’s end it was very clear that the coordinator intended to ignore what had happened entirely. I had to stand up before the room emptied and demand a response from the person who was supposed to be in charge. Who obliged with a little speech about how everyone needs to get along. And then seemed surprised afterward that I was still upset.
The job where the entire team was made to create a “Harlem Shake” video.
The job where an elderly husband and wife both worked, and received very different treatment. The wife was under-trained, and pain from her arthritis made her look constantly on the verge of tears. She was essentially left to her own devices, as she wasn’t expected to be worth the time commitment of additional assistance. The boss who told her this, however, spent days – maybe weeks – working closely with her husband, who was nicknamed “Acapulco Gold” for his preferred strain of weed.
The job where I was inappropriately classed as an “independent contractor” despite working solely for the company, usually a good fifty hours a week, for commissions insufficient to cover my travel costs.
All those? Same job.
The job where my boss handed me a paper-clipped stack of page after page of email addresses in tiny print, upwards of a thousand, and said, “I traded our students’ email addresses for the addresses of the students at the yoga studio down the street. Import these into our marketing software system so we can add them all to the newsletter distribution.” And when I asked, utterly skimming over the total unethicality of this since he had already told me to make the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of our newsletters the same color as the background, “Did the yoga teacher, um, give you a digital version of these? Like, an excel spreadsheet or outlook contacts or something?” he said, “No, but it shouldn’t take too long to hand-type them, right?”
The job where the owner was so technologically illiterate that I spent all day on the studio computer playing games while he was teaching classes, and when he ran over real quick to glance over my shoulder, suspecting me of teenage malfeasance, all I had to do was Alt-Tab onto the next window and he said, “Oh, that’s what you were working on!” in tones of total surprise every damn time.
The job where we agreed I would get paid (under the table, natch) every 2 weeks and by the end of my time there it had devolved into getting paid for 1 or maybe 2 weeks every month or so, with an ever-increasing backlog, until I announced that I was leaving for college and he handed me an absolutely massive catch-up check on my last day there. At least he was honest!
(Same job, in the spirit of the thread, of course.)
The job where my boss tried to fire me in a performance review for under performance – at which point I informed him I was beating my targets, had actually broke company sales records in the last quarter rand over the last year, and that I had two job offers that double/tripled my pay and I was leaving in a month.
That was a great day.
The job where middle-aged men in expensive suits would come in and leave sealed security envelopes for the owner.
The job where my paycheck bounced for three months in a row, and the owner paid me in cash.
The job where I was not allowed to stay at the front desk, instead having to stand in the back and pretend to be busy so the shop looked empty when people came in.
The job where, in the time it took me to get to the front to serve a customer, random envelopes with the owner’s name on it would be left on the desk and the customer would have disappeared.
I get migraines and when I was approved to wear sunglasses I started wearing them at all times. I make NO APOLOGIES, flourescent lighting is satan and everyone should be breaking the tubes above their desks on a daily basis.
My first job out of grad school was in a tiny museum where my coworker and I were employees of the state, our actual bosses were in a city 5 hours away, and the head of the Friends group ran the gift shop and, after we completed the inventory we were hired for, the museum.
She tried to get us fired by calling our boss and complaining that we'd stunk up the entire museum with our lunch, giving him the impression that we'd *cooked* it there. When he called to get our side of the story, I started with "Oh, yeah, that was the day of the blizzard…" and he said "Stop right there. You don't need to tell me anything else." (Actual story: there'd been a blizzard that morning and we got fried chicken delivered, and ate it in the break room. There was nobody in the building but us, the receptionist/secretary, and the Friends president.)
And we'd needed to be hired to do the full inventory because the curator had been fired previously. She was a hoarder, and after her house and car got filled, it spilled over to the museum, where she'd had free reign for most of a decade.
The job where I had to push around the snack trolley and ask everyone in the office if they would like a snack or piece of fruit every morning. I delivered snacks to office workers everyday until someone realized I had a BA in marketing and let the next greenhorn deliver the office snacks.