Well, let’s see. In college I briefly worked a lunchtime shift in the ticket booth of a theater in Times Square that showed “adult films.” I remember being surprised at how well-mannered many of the businessmen were. Of course, that was balanced out by the ones who asked “how much?”
In grad school I worked evening shifts “word-processing” for law firms – those were the early days of computers, but before the internet. The floor supervisors, had they lived in the antebellum south, would have felt very much at home with whips in their hands. I often thought during job interviews they must have been asked “have you had previous experience being a driven, abusive asshole? You have? You’re hired!”
Then there was my first job doing home visits as a social worker. I remember my last home visit on a particularly rough day – I had gotten fleas and stank of cat piss from an earlier visit – and the elderly client came to the door with a large snake draped around his shoulders. Without even thinking, I barked “put the fucking snake away!” I immediately thought, “well that’s it, he’s going to complain and I’ll get fired.” But he was totally blasé, took it in stride, and just said “Sure. I know Rocco isn't everyone's cup of tea."
It was! For years afterward whenever I heard of some unusual situation or bizarre mistake, I'd say to my husband, "well, Rocco isn't everyone's cup of tea, you know." LOL
My late brother worked in an adult bookstore - one of those places with the video booths where you fed quarters into machines to watch porn, back in the days before the Internet. I wish I could remember some of the stories he told.
Welp. Working an adult theater in Times Square certainly trumps my adult bookstore w/movie booths in Waterloo, Iowa! My regulars were always friendly and polite. The college boys? Not so much.
I think I only worked there for about 1 to 2 months. There was absolutely no amount of money that could have persuaded me to walk into the theater itself -- I went straight from the front door to the office to clock in and then to my locked booth. And I went down the street to the luncheonette to use the toilet, even though they had roaches the size of sparrows.
Much like your experience, there seemed to be two extremes: the businessmen who were extremely polite, and then the guys who were "how much to suck my dick" without any middle ground in between, LOL.
My old laptop won't let me post stuff as a new comment, so I'll tag along with yours. Sorry.
This is harder than I thought it would be. For one thing, I never worked in any porn-related venue, which seems to feature in some of the worst stories. But for another thing, there was always something that mattered about the experience, even if I had nightmares about it later.
My big regret was failing completely at restaurant work, because damn, you can get by if you're good at it. I couldn’t manage the pace when it got busy, plus I lacked the requisite dexterity.
I did some home health care work as a temp. One job was for an elderly woman, Joannah, who lived with her son, but he worked all day. She had dementia, but fortunately her affect was mostly sunny, if blunt. When I was introduced to her, she looked up from her bed and said cheerfully, “You’re not very pretty, are you?” I lied to her and told her “Well, my mom thinks I’m beautiful”, and she laughed and then we were friends.
I fixed her lunch, gave her bed baths, and managed her incontinence pads. She often thought I was getting her ready for school. So I played along with that, brushing and braiding her long yellow-white hair, and sometimes being naughty and putting lipstick on her, helping her blot it with Kleenex so her son wouldn’t encounter lipstick stains later. Joannah was okay.
Mostly I labored in retail in the early years. One shop in Sausalito, called Handcraft From Europe, carried a huge assortment of braid, buttons, and trim, all colorful and shimmery and lacy. The Austrian owners were old school. Only young women could work there, we had to wear skirts or dresses (and pantyhose, no exceptions), and we weren’t allowed to use cash registers or adding machines - that was simply not authentic. We carried around notepads and pencils to add up sales. One employee got fired when she arrived at work with soft pale green nail polish, something up with which they could not put. I was not unhappy to be laid off after the Christmas rush.
I also worked at the Bead Bag in Ann Arbor, selling craft supplies, next door to the handmade dress shop Get Frocked, which was downstairs from the head shop (with lots of posters) called Middle Earth, not far from the bath and lotion supply store called The Garden Of Earthly Delights. The shops were owned by two women, lesbian partners, and were very popular, having popped up before the big chain stores took over, like Bath and Body Works, or Lush, or even Hobby Lobby.
Retail is no way to go through life, IMO, unless you own the shop. The pay wasn’t great, and it was hard to do that and go to school, but sometimes it was fun, and I made friends, and I still have a few beautiful African trade beads. My subsequent retail experience was at a small independent bookstore, then a giant drug store (now CVS), and that was relentlessly vexatious, although I have a souvenir: an empty box bearing the logo of a container of Quaalude #500.
Later I made the leap from retail to office, and I thought I was on the move to bigger and better things. Oh no, I wuz wrong.
Well, you missed out on nothing at all working adjacent to the porn industry – except the kind of crash-course in men that breeds early cynicism, which was useful in its way.
And I was a wash-out as a waitress, too. On my second day working in a Bronx diner I dropped an entire tray of food, getting food all over myself AND customers. Although my dad loved telling the story for months afterward: “so these jerks give the poor kid a tray that’s too heavy for her to carry, like eight plates, cups, the works on there, she drops it, and scrambled eggs get all over the dress of a bridesmaid grabbing a coffee on the way to the wedding AND in the lap of a rabbi! She couldn’t have just hit a couple of bums nursing hangovers, not MY girl, she always makes a big splash!” Dad jokes from antiquity.
I met a lot of home health aides when I was visiting senior clients, it’s the hardest work, and they were some of the nicest people I’ve ever met on the job, so kudos for taking such good care of her. And retail, ugh. I knew I didn’t have the personality for it. I can’t pretend to be thrilled to see some stranger walk in when I know there’s a 50% chance she’ll be an entitled pain in my ass.
Jesus, women work a bunch of shit jobs, don’t we? And the worst part is they want us to smile while doing most of them.
The job I got right after finishing the 5-month, 9 thousand mile bike ride that marked the end of my carefree yout' was in the kitchen of a long-term assisted care hospital. Had the late shift so the rides home at midnight were very soothing.
The joint had a rule that the cost of a new dish was deducted from the wage of anyone who broke one. Ah, you say – whatabout MORE than one? Well, says I, yes, costs compounded accordingly, which was the reason why, on one whizbang Friday night, when my colleague ran the cartful of dirty dishes too fast round the corner and Every. Damn. Dish shot across the floor in infinitely small pieces, all she could do was sink to the floor, stunned, and then start laughing maniacally, causing me to get between her and the rest of the yet-intact dishes. A month's wages lying there...
Later, I was cleaning up after everyone else was gone, and was running the industrial disposal when it started sucking down the One Good Sponge and I instinctively grabbed the other end of the OGS and then felt my hand getting pulled into the drain.
I found a new job soon after.
Told you I don't have epic work stories. Almost all the jobs I ever had I really enjoyed.
First day on the job at the state park. Nothing to do really – everyone just girding loins for the upcoming high season (if you aren't smirking yet, you should be, because at this park high season meant as many as 500 people in the park on a single day(!) Smirk away – I'd already worked in parks that had 50,000 visitors easy, so I was smirking too).
Anyway, I show up to the office and pretty much all the staff are there and they are all pretty cozy in the in-crowd sort of affable/sceptical way. One of the rangers says "I dunno, we're not quite ready for you this morning. How about just cleaning up a couple of the vacant offices first. We'll have some kinda task list by the time you're done." I shrugged and pulled together all the cleaning stuff. It was certainly a reasonable thing to do – the place was a mess. The kicker was when I uncovered a pile of old uniforms and rags and stuff and found a dead rat, but not just any dead rat – no, this rat's skin was boiling and heaving due to the maggot millions tearing its guts apart. I immediately decided this was a joke on the new guy, to see how I'd react. So I simply did what I would have done anyway, which was to pick it up by the tail (gently, because I did not want it to come apart before I was finished with it) and walk it thru every office merrily shouting "Check this out!" and thrusting it in people's faces.
From their reactions I realized that they probly weren't the nasty practical joke types I'd guessed them to be...but they definitely got an impression about me either way.
The Grand Hyatt! When I say that I’ve never seen or been in a Trump property that wasn’t hideous or worse. The Grand Hyatt, besides the hideous exterior, also had awful public spaces -- the first floor event space, the claustrophobic bar... And don’t get me started on Trump Tower.
Anyway. Unspeakably awful job: essentially running the practice of a disengaged, disinterested alcoholic narcissist. An awful human being. Only happy day on the job was the day I walked away from it.
Damn. Now I think the happy hour’s going to start real early today.
That Hyatt was a hideosity for sure -- reflecting the soul of the proprietor. But at night they had a quite good little combo playing standards in the lobby, and now whenever I think of several songs like "Lady Be Good" and "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" I think of their renditions.
I've spent forty years in the admin game. I gave up the supposedly 'prestigious' role of executive assistant sixteen years ago after five years working as admin to a religious official that went a long way toward making me the atheist I am today. 😜 I worked a lot of restaurant and retail over the years to piece things out, but I'm grateful I knew how to type and didn't have to fully support myself on service jobs.
Probably my low point was in my early 20s, in the late 1980s. I was late on my rent, I had no car, no phone, and I was surviving on temp jobs for a year. Ever tried to be a temp with no home phone? I don't recommend it. 😆
My sister did temp work at a university, secretary to professors whose staff had left, until they could find a permanent replacement. In every single one of these cases, "staff had left" meant "the Prof's an asshole" and "find a permanent replacement" meant "never" because all the full-time secretarial staff were on to Fact #1.
One headcase she worked for, a professor of Library Science, was exploring new realms of micro-management, a pioneer in the burgeoning new field of nano-management. The Prof was moving her office, so all her stuff needed to be boxed up. Prof insisted that her new office address be written on every box, "just to be sure nothing gets lost." OK, address was written, but then what if the box is turned sideways or upside down and the movers won't be able to see the address? Write the address on multiple sides of the box! Just to fuck with her, Sis wrote the address on all SIX sides of some boxes before the prof decided that was probably overkill.
Oh, I’ve got a nym to go with my state of workplace hell survival. I’m lucky to be retired long enough that it’s all vanishing rear-view mirror images. But micro- and nano-management sure takes me back, as does the thing with retired professors who will not go away.
Back in the days of yore and word processors, there was the office where I was under the eye of a woman who lived only to storm from her desk to berate me over some imagined transgression. Once she listened to my end of a phone conversation and went apeshit over how unprofessional I was. When I’d asked the caller if I could take a message for someone who was out, he said in a jokey tone, “Oh, are we gonna play phone tag again?” I recognized his voice and joked back, “Well, could we *try* leaving her a message?” “Oh, well, let's try that...” I could sense he was smiling as we hung up, which was when my outraged supervisor flew out of her room. She gave me a bad performance review because two of the higher level staff had the same first name and, “You put a letter for Liz A in Liz B’s slot”--exactly one time for each Liz, but fodder for a bad review. She never deviated from the time she took lunch, so her adult children were sure to call when they knew they could avoid speaking to her. When lunch was over I was the target of her bitterness over her kids. I’d checked “called” on the While You Were Out memo, which rated a furious, “Well, did she COME IN, or did she PHONE?” Uh, I guess I never thought of those notes as having a Called Upon box; seems like in that case, a calling card would have been left with the servant. Following that outrage, every message pad in the place was hand altered for the Called box to say something like Came In. It was a laugh that she was nuts enough to do this herself, to feel secure in the wording of messages from the son and daughter who were avoiding her.
Of course, that office couldn’t keep secretaries because of the supervisor’s antics. I learned she’d once been sent to HR classes–“How to Handle Difficult People,” as if she would have taken the hint about herself. The overall administrator had a good cop-bad cop regimen going. She cast herself as reasonable person saddled with an unreasonable lifer. Her micro-management was as obsessive as the supervisor’s, just done in a calmer manner. After she had proofed letters, I’d have to retype them if the smallest trace of correction tape had been detected. Once, I noticed an infinitesimal brown paper flaw in a page I’d just finished. I decided to turn it in as an experiment. It came back signed, but I could see eraser traces where the brown had been. That gave me the faint pleasure of picturing her looking around furtively, followed by a frantic, “Out, damned spot!”
During the six months of this I had to wait out to be eligible for transfer to the next set of crazies, I would compare notes with the secretary in a unit across the hall. She told me about working in a one-man office where the guy pulled a gun on her. If I'd ever wondered how bad a situation needs to be to draw unemployment for "voluntarily" quitting, she was able to get it.
My mom worked as a school secretary for decades, long enough to see a few School Superintendents come and go. One guy she particularly loathed (the school later bought off his contract just to get rid of him) got it into his head that he should have a cup of tea mid-morning, prepared by his secretary, of course. First day two teabags go into the cup, steep for a while, then come out and the tea goes to the boss. Next day three teabags, same routine, then four, then five. I think it was at five that he stopped asking for tea.
It took me so long to figure out work-arounds. Like one time I was on the check stand during a busy sale day and a mean guy came through wanting to buy a checker board. It didn't have a price sticker (way before scanning) and was probably something he broke out of a set. I kept calling for a floor manager for some kind of price check, but they were up in the office laughing at me. The man got so angry. Now, of course, I'd simply whip out my box cutter, slash the board, and tell him, "Sorry, sir, this item is defective. Next!"
The How To Handle Difficult People class should have had a big mirror propped up in front of her seat, with a sign on it saying "calm the fuck down," LOL.
At my Fed the "How to Handle Difficult People" class was always for GS-9s/11s and below. Never, ever for anyone in a supervisory position or Senior Executive Staff, the people who most needed to be there.
So many to choose from, both I guess I’ll go with Fish Processing Boat in Alaska. 16 hour shifts, sometimes 24, hard, repetitive physical labor with many genuinely stupid and/ or crazy and/or violent people. One of the first things I noticed when I got to Alaska was that a lot of people were missing teeth, and I was to see several examples of why. But I think the best anecdotes concern how I rose rapidly through the ranks. My first job was the lowest of the low, which was grading fish from 1 to 3 and putting them in different pans accordingly. This process was overseen by a specialized from the Japanese buyer boat that was always tied up to ours. The morons I worked with who had been doing the job for a couple days were constantly arguing with the Japanese professional about how to grade fish and you could see his frustration steadily grow. Unfortunately, it was I who caused him to lose it, not because I don’t respect him, but because I hadn’t slept for several days. He yelled at me shaking the mid-graded fish in my face, tossed it up in the air and stormed away. It came down on my shoulder and I didn’t want to, but in that situation I did the only thing I could do, picked up the fish and threw it, hitting him in the back of the head. Everyone thought I’d get fired, but I was treated as a hero and promoted. Then the man came to me with the Japanese boat captain and very formally apologized. I truly felt like shit. I could go on (and on) with examples of how shitty that job was, but suffice it so say, it was shitty.
Fishing boats yea, fish processing boats not so much, and then only because you get so much OT and have nowhere to spend it. Though at least two people I knew lost it all playing poker and got off the boat with nothing.
One of my colleagues earlier in life spent a summer doing the Alaska salmon thing, sending the proceeds home to his wife in Puerto Rico. He returned home after a backbreaking salmon season to find the power in his apartment turned off and an eviction notice on the door. Wifey had spent the summer’s earnings on a round of parties and bar-hopping, in the course of which she met a nice guy and moved in with him.
My old high school buddy (who I visited today – 1st time in over 15 years) spent a short while on our chemistry teacher's fishing boat one summer, until the boat ran aground on the one place along that stretch of Oregon coast that is not rocky shoals and cliffs.
That was the prof's second fishing boat – the first one sank in the harbor while he was christening it.
I don't know how we're supposed to compete with getting hit with a chair by a mobster, cross-dressing as a tomato or Quiche and Tell.
Friend of mine was a store manager for PetSmart. We were hanging out one night and I started bitching about how I've been trying to save up a down payment up for a larger house but in Bush the 1st's America, a guy just couldn't get ahead. I had a pretty good job - marketing director for a Hyatt Hotel - but shit, between three kids and real life I just couldn't get ahead.
He says I got a good part-time job- I need bather/ brushers in The Grooming Department. You can make 10 bucks an hour with tips.
I've been a dog owner all my life. How hard could it be? 10 bucks at the time was OKmoney
The first dog I worked on drew blood. An Airedale scratched my face so bad I had to go to the emergency room. My buddy called me up to see how I was doing and to make sure I was coming to work the next day because it was going to be really busy.
I learned right away that most dogs really hate going to the groomer. I only worked 2 days a week. Every week something got nip or scratched. The money was actually okay but before long I was to the point where I couldn't sleep the night before a shift I dreaded it so bad.
One of the things we had to do was trim the dog's toenails. Dogs really fucking hate that. For the big dogs we had rings on the floor where we would tie the leash and work on them. I got talked into coming in for a Sunday. I usually did the dog grooming on weekdays. The hotel kept me busy most weekends. The night before I was supposed to come in I was at the hotel for a very large banquet. It went well and we celebrated with drugs and alcohol out in the parking lot for most of the night. I went home slept for an hour, got up and went in to take care of some dogs.
First dog that morning with some kind of Bull Mastiff German Shepherd mix that needed his toenails trimmed. I tied his leash to the ring on the floor, picked up his front paw and proceeded to trim his nail. The instant nail was cut big dog lunged at me and tried to bite. He missed my nose by an inch. I was in a corner of the room. I scuttled up against the wall, just out of reach of the dog. I couldn't leave the corner without going back within his reach.
He would lunge at anybody that came near. I was stuck in the corner for a half hour with Cujo barking in my face until the city Animal Control people came in with their Hatari lasso rig and dragged his viscious ass away.
Just one? Hard to pick but one memorable day in hell was doing telesales for Lincoln Center, which compromised calling lapsed subscribers to re-up... after a few hours of having The Greatest Generation hang up on me with disgust after hearing their assorted, toothless rants about what a putz James Levine was I walked out without even trying to get paid for the day. Elder abuse in reverse!
I've only ever heard the name James Levine on Public Radio, presented with all the respect that a public-radio-announcer-voice can muster. So "what a putz James Levine was" made me laugh.
I had so many shitty jobs in my first 20 some working years that it’s a tough assignment just to pick one. Like Roy’s, most of them paid barely enough to scrape by. (I used to wonder what the word “career” meant, but then I was also unfamiliar with “college dorm” and “spring break.”)
It wasn’t the shittiest, but the scariest job I ever had was as a driving instructor for a school in Brooklyn that had seen better days. It was risky, but at least I had my own brake pedal. I swear I took people out on lessons who had clearly never even been in a car before. Like one of my first students, a young guy from someplace in the Caribbean, who put the car into Drive, got it up to 40 on a residential street, and then asked “Where the brake at mon?” And I almost got killed the time I was looking down to light a cigarette (those were the days ) and looked up to see we were about to plow into the front grill of a Mack truck.
Then there was the poor young woman who suffered from strabismus, where one one eye looks straight ahead while the other drifts off to the side. I felt really sorry for her, because having two separate vision inputs would sometimes confuse the hell out of her brain. One day, she was making a simple left turn when this confusion occurred. She completely panicked, spun the wheel in the opposite direction while hitting the gas pedal and headed for the nearest parked car, whereupon the tires squealed as I slammed on the brakes. There we were, inches away from the parked cars and perpendicular to the sidewalk, when a Brooklyn gentleman walking his dog looked at me and said, “Jeezus, pal, that’s some fuckin’ job you got.”
LOL. I was friends with a guy who worked as a driving instructor for about 6 months. He was in his 20s and he always swore his hair started to go gray from that job.
I hold fond thoughts of the driving instructor assigned to me when I was a lad in Bridgeport. I remember him rubbing his eyes in frustration after each of the many instances when he had to hit the brake.
Sep 29, 2023·edited Sep 29, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
I had a part-time gig teaching driving lessons. It was OK. The guy that taught me to teach said, "You're gonna know by feel when someone is about to step on the gas instead of the brake. Just slide it into neutral" I was dubious but wouldn't you know, I always seemed to get it in neutral on time!. Of course, I quit once I got promoted in my main job.
Not my job. But I was in the back seat when my student colleague started racing round the curves of Pt San Pedro Rd, faster and faster, then finally hearing her yell "I'm braking! I'm braking!" To which the instructor calmy replied "You're clutching. You're clutching."
I too have done hard time in restaurants but I’ve blanked a lot of it out. Perhaps because when the shift is over, it’s over. Unlike corporate gigs, in which you can be tortured with the same project for literally years.
So here’s one from the wonderful world of advertising. Sitting in a pre-production meeting for a shitty commercial for a giant consumer products company. That company had a Head of Production, which I think was a made-up job for some emeritus executive they couldn’t push out the door. He came to all of these for the chance to get out of Cincinnati, and to lord his tremendous power over the agency folks.
My co-worker sitting next to me got bored (PPs are dull) and starting passing me notes with “funny” cartoons. I could see it was being noticed and did not react or respond.
Couple weeks later co-worker and I were called into the office of someone many levels up in the agency. Big trouble. Head of Production wanted us fired for “mocking him” at the PP. (None of the jokes were about him, and he could not have seen them anyway.) In order to save our jobs we would have to call this guy and grovel; if and only if he accepted our apologies, we could remain employed.
Co-worker went first. After the call he reported that Head of Production wasn’t a bad guy at all, in fact they had a great call, lotta laughs, what a sense of humor.
My turn. Head of Production ripped me to shreds. Can’t remember all the deets, it was brutal. But I’ll never forget his closer: he knew I — whom he’d never met before — was going to be a problem before the meeting even began because I had “a weak handshake.”
He granted that I could keep my job, but I left pretty soon after.
Funny the stories that came to mind first when I saw today’s REBID all involve shitty white men drunk on power. (Although I have waited on Madalyn Murray O’Hair, and lemme tell ya, that’s an experience.)
I've had similar experiences where there was some perceived misconduct, and my male co-workers would get slaps on the wrist but I'd get raked over the coals in true "Now let me make myself very clear, young lady..." style.
Relishing the role of petty tyrant with women is a definite Type Of Guy specific to some white dudes.
At my last job I had a male, PhD co-worker who couldn't get an academic job so he'd constantly try to pull rank or bully me. It was a pleasure to annoy him by returning a blank, level stare and then ignoring him.
Unfortunately, there never seems to be any shortage of guys throwing their weight around who remain oblivious to the fact they epitomize the saying "god grant me the self confidence of a mediocre white man."
Yes. At that point in time (and maybe always) she was a mean, angry lady who enjoyed abusing anyone who crossed her path. She came into our restaurant a lot (sometimes with her stunted middle-aged very strange son) and we took turns waiting on her. Relished being a nasty person, never tipped. Hard to believe she was ever taken seriously as a "leader" of any kind of movement. (Maybe that was the deal? Promote her as the face of atheism to discredit?)
Not a shitty job, but definitely the shittiest day at work I've ever had:
Back when I was writing/editing a magazine on aircraft maintenance, I used to work for a maintenance shop that specialized in a certain kind of twin-engine airplane. Each engine on these things had two turbochargers, and it was a regular thing to change them out because they were worn, broken, etc. So one afternoon, I changed out two of the four turbos on one airplane--one turbo on each engine.
A week later I'm driving to work. It's snowing hard and traffic is crawling. On the radio, I hear a report that the cause of the backup is a plane crash. Since the shop was on the way to the office, I stopped there to wait out the traffic and maybe find out more about the crash.
I walked into the shop and could instantly see that everyone was shell shocked. The airplane that crashed was our customer, and the very same airplane I had worked on a week earlier. The pilot had reported that both engines had quit. There were no survivors.
I spent the next year wondering if I had killed two people. It wasn't until the accident report came out that I learned the pilot had managed to starve both engines of fuel by doing something the flight manual specifically said not to do. But until that report hit my desk, well, that was the worst and longest day at work I've ever had.
Think I'll go with a grad school story, since no one else has tapped into that particular well of suck. I spent a year basically inventing an instrument to measure shear deformation in high-temperature composite materials, when the asshole professor I was working for fired me (Can you get fired in grad school? Well, I sure could.) Let's just say we had interpersonal issues, which means I hated him and didn't make much of an effort to conceal it.
Anyway, the instrument. The day after my firing, he tells me to put the instrument in a box and give it to the lab manager before I go. So naturally I disassembled the thing, down to the tiniest screw (and this thing had a LOT of parts to it, as a designer I tend towards overcomplication.) All the parts go into a box, then shake vigorously.
The next day, he asked me if I had put the instrument in a box. "Oh yeah, it's in a box, alright."
I took a job as a telephone solicitor (I know, I know...). In my defense, it was for an actual worthwhile arts organization in the DC area, so I figured that it might not be so bad. (Pause for dramatic effect.) I worked one day, left my money on the table, and never went back. Worst. Job. Ever. And I had once spent an entire summer crawling under houses killing termites.
My very first job was a phone job getting people to come to pitch meetings for a real estate scam in Florida called Rotunda, created by the Cavanaugh Corporation and associated with Ed McMahon, of whose preprinted-autograph photos we had many. We were instructed to say "you're under no obligation" but I got smacked in the head once for adding "to buy." Cavanaugh finally went to ground years later: https://casetext.com/case/adams-v-cavanagh-communities-corp-2
I worked in a restaurant - one of those Big Boy places - for maybe three months the fall after I graduated high school. It convinced me a career in food service was not the best choice for me, culminating in burning a quarter-size patch on the back of my hand with oil from the fryer and having the manager try to convince me to finish cleanup before seeking care.
It was a fitting start to decades of being screwed over by capitalism. The coup de grace came in 2019, when at 67 my job changed from a contract position to one done by an in-house employee. I suspect my age had something to do with why I was not offered the job, as had happened in previous instances. But they did the same thing to three of my co-workers, of various ages, giving them cover for dumping me.
Can't entirely blame them - it would have been expensive to buy out my contract for the three years left before my planned retirement at 70. Damned inconvenient though. The extra Social Security money from working until 70 would come in handy these days.
So: beginning to end, my employment history involves a lot of getting fucked, or at least having the attempt made. I suspect my experience is far from unique.
I was in college during the first of Reagan's economic downturns and needed to get a job. Unfortunately, John Deere was on strike (or there had been massive layoffs, I'm not sure which) and I couldn't find anything in fast food and nothing that would fit my schedule of classes. Then a gay friend recommended I apply at an adult bookstore out on LaPort Road. Long story short (and I still remember lots of stories, the place had movie booths with glory holes)-I got the job. 1am-9am. One night, after the 2am bar-closing rush, I was at the counter when a guy grabbed a Debbie Does Dallas blow-up doll off a display table and headed out the door. I immediately ran out after him and was in the middle of the parking lot when the voice in my head woke up and screamed WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING? YOU ARE GOING TO BE SHOT DEAD FOR A DEBBIE DOES DALLAS FUCK DOLL! I did a ridiculous crouch and weave scramble back into the building and called my boss. She said Call The Police. So I called the police. The police arrived, they were giggling assholes, and I was a sleep deprived college student. It didn't go well. I stuck to my determination to file a police report because I had to have one filed for The Company (which was mob-owned, but that's a few other stories). The doll had Vibro-action and was over $50! I did not have to go to court, thankfully, because they never found the guy or his expensive new girlfriend.
And then there was the guy who came in with his very drunk wife and insisted on buying me as a birthday gift for her...
I know this was traumatic for you, but I am literally rolling on the floor over "you are going to be shot dead for a Debbie Does Dallas fuck doll."
I don't doubt for a minute you have far more entertaining stories about the mob-owned sex shop than I have about my brief stint at the adult theater. At least at the movies, there were no thefts -- unless you count stolen dignity, LOL.
I worked at the bookstore for just short of one year, I think. I needed to eat (and drink!). Part of my job was to drag a bucket of clorox water and a mop into the back and swab out the booths before the early morning rush. Looking back, I have no idea how I managed it.
My worst job was my first, newspaper delivery boy. Every day after school, unbundle the papers dropped at my house, fold ‘em, put ‘em in a shoulder bag, walk from house to house placing them on the porch and then, on Fridays, trying to get these well-to-do households to pay up. The pay was literally pennies a week unless someone took pity and tipped. I would’ve quit but “in this family everyone helps out by working.” Good old Depression ethos. The only compensation was the times one of the beautiful high school girls answered the door on tip day. Eleven or twelve year olds couldn’t pretend to ever speaking with one of these goddesses under any other circumstances. I heard one of them later hooked up with Hunter S Thompson, to her mother’s dismay, according to my mother. Anyway, there’s lots of unpleasantness in medicine but it’s still the best job in the world if you aren’t talented enough to be a Rolling Stone (oh, how we dreamed of that life when they fired Brian Jones).
Well, let’s see. In college I briefly worked a lunchtime shift in the ticket booth of a theater in Times Square that showed “adult films.” I remember being surprised at how well-mannered many of the businessmen were. Of course, that was balanced out by the ones who asked “how much?”
In grad school I worked evening shifts “word-processing” for law firms – those were the early days of computers, but before the internet. The floor supervisors, had they lived in the antebellum south, would have felt very much at home with whips in their hands. I often thought during job interviews they must have been asked “have you had previous experience being a driven, abusive asshole? You have? You’re hired!”
Then there was my first job doing home visits as a social worker. I remember my last home visit on a particularly rough day – I had gotten fleas and stank of cat piss from an earlier visit – and the elderly client came to the door with a large snake draped around his shoulders. Without even thinking, I barked “put the fucking snake away!” I immediately thought, “well that’s it, he’s going to complain and I’ll get fired.” But he was totally blasé, took it in stride, and just said “Sure. I know Rocco isn't everyone's cup of tea."
"Rocco isn't everyone's cup of tea."
Not only hilarious, but seems like it should be an all-purpose line for so many of life's situations.
It was! For years afterward whenever I heard of some unusual situation or bizarre mistake, I'd say to my husband, "well, Rocco isn't everyone's cup of tea, you know." LOL
My late brother worked in an adult bookstore - one of those places with the video booths where you fed quarters into machines to watch porn, back in the days before the Internet. I wish I could remember some of the stories he told.
Welp. Working an adult theater in Times Square certainly trumps my adult bookstore w/movie booths in Waterloo, Iowa! My regulars were always friendly and polite. The college boys? Not so much.
I think I only worked there for about 1 to 2 months. There was absolutely no amount of money that could have persuaded me to walk into the theater itself -- I went straight from the front door to the office to clock in and then to my locked booth. And I went down the street to the luncheonette to use the toilet, even though they had roaches the size of sparrows.
Much like your experience, there seemed to be two extremes: the businessmen who were extremely polite, and then the guys who were "how much to suck my dick" without any middle ground in between, LOL.
My old laptop won't let me post stuff as a new comment, so I'll tag along with yours. Sorry.
This is harder than I thought it would be. For one thing, I never worked in any porn-related venue, which seems to feature in some of the worst stories. But for another thing, there was always something that mattered about the experience, even if I had nightmares about it later.
My big regret was failing completely at restaurant work, because damn, you can get by if you're good at it. I couldn’t manage the pace when it got busy, plus I lacked the requisite dexterity.
I did some home health care work as a temp. One job was for an elderly woman, Joannah, who lived with her son, but he worked all day. She had dementia, but fortunately her affect was mostly sunny, if blunt. When I was introduced to her, she looked up from her bed and said cheerfully, “You’re not very pretty, are you?” I lied to her and told her “Well, my mom thinks I’m beautiful”, and she laughed and then we were friends.
I fixed her lunch, gave her bed baths, and managed her incontinence pads. She often thought I was getting her ready for school. So I played along with that, brushing and braiding her long yellow-white hair, and sometimes being naughty and putting lipstick on her, helping her blot it with Kleenex so her son wouldn’t encounter lipstick stains later. Joannah was okay.
Mostly I labored in retail in the early years. One shop in Sausalito, called Handcraft From Europe, carried a huge assortment of braid, buttons, and trim, all colorful and shimmery and lacy. The Austrian owners were old school. Only young women could work there, we had to wear skirts or dresses (and pantyhose, no exceptions), and we weren’t allowed to use cash registers or adding machines - that was simply not authentic. We carried around notepads and pencils to add up sales. One employee got fired when she arrived at work with soft pale green nail polish, something up with which they could not put. I was not unhappy to be laid off after the Christmas rush.
I also worked at the Bead Bag in Ann Arbor, selling craft supplies, next door to the handmade dress shop Get Frocked, which was downstairs from the head shop (with lots of posters) called Middle Earth, not far from the bath and lotion supply store called The Garden Of Earthly Delights. The shops were owned by two women, lesbian partners, and were very popular, having popped up before the big chain stores took over, like Bath and Body Works, or Lush, or even Hobby Lobby.
Retail is no way to go through life, IMO, unless you own the shop. The pay wasn’t great, and it was hard to do that and go to school, but sometimes it was fun, and I made friends, and I still have a few beautiful African trade beads. My subsequent retail experience was at a small independent bookstore, then a giant drug store (now CVS), and that was relentlessly vexatious, although I have a souvenir: an empty box bearing the logo of a container of Quaalude #500.
Later I made the leap from retail to office, and I thought I was on the move to bigger and better things. Oh no, I wuz wrong.
Well, you missed out on nothing at all working adjacent to the porn industry – except the kind of crash-course in men that breeds early cynicism, which was useful in its way.
And I was a wash-out as a waitress, too. On my second day working in a Bronx diner I dropped an entire tray of food, getting food all over myself AND customers. Although my dad loved telling the story for months afterward: “so these jerks give the poor kid a tray that’s too heavy for her to carry, like eight plates, cups, the works on there, she drops it, and scrambled eggs get all over the dress of a bridesmaid grabbing a coffee on the way to the wedding AND in the lap of a rabbi! She couldn’t have just hit a couple of bums nursing hangovers, not MY girl, she always makes a big splash!” Dad jokes from antiquity.
I met a lot of home health aides when I was visiting senior clients, it’s the hardest work, and they were some of the nicest people I’ve ever met on the job, so kudos for taking such good care of her. And retail, ugh. I knew I didn’t have the personality for it. I can’t pretend to be thrilled to see some stranger walk in when I know there’s a 50% chance she’ll be an entitled pain in my ass.
Jesus, women work a bunch of shit jobs, don’t we? And the worst part is they want us to smile while doing most of them.
The job I got right after finishing the 5-month, 9 thousand mile bike ride that marked the end of my carefree yout' was in the kitchen of a long-term assisted care hospital. Had the late shift so the rides home at midnight were very soothing.
The joint had a rule that the cost of a new dish was deducted from the wage of anyone who broke one. Ah, you say – whatabout MORE than one? Well, says I, yes, costs compounded accordingly, which was the reason why, on one whizbang Friday night, when my colleague ran the cartful of dirty dishes too fast round the corner and Every. Damn. Dish shot across the floor in infinitely small pieces, all she could do was sink to the floor, stunned, and then start laughing maniacally, causing me to get between her and the rest of the yet-intact dishes. A month's wages lying there...
Later, I was cleaning up after everyone else was gone, and was running the industrial disposal when it started sucking down the One Good Sponge and I instinctively grabbed the other end of the OGS and then felt my hand getting pulled into the drain.
I found a new job soon after.
Told you I don't have epic work stories. Almost all the jobs I ever had I really enjoyed.
OK, ok:
First day on the job at the state park. Nothing to do really – everyone just girding loins for the upcoming high season (if you aren't smirking yet, you should be, because at this park high season meant as many as 500 people in the park on a single day(!) Smirk away – I'd already worked in parks that had 50,000 visitors easy, so I was smirking too).
Anyway, I show up to the office and pretty much all the staff are there and they are all pretty cozy in the in-crowd sort of affable/sceptical way. One of the rangers says "I dunno, we're not quite ready for you this morning. How about just cleaning up a couple of the vacant offices first. We'll have some kinda task list by the time you're done." I shrugged and pulled together all the cleaning stuff. It was certainly a reasonable thing to do – the place was a mess. The kicker was when I uncovered a pile of old uniforms and rags and stuff and found a dead rat, but not just any dead rat – no, this rat's skin was boiling and heaving due to the maggot millions tearing its guts apart. I immediately decided this was a joke on the new guy, to see how I'd react. So I simply did what I would have done anyway, which was to pick it up by the tail (gently, because I did not want it to come apart before I was finished with it) and walk it thru every office merrily shouting "Check this out!" and thrusting it in people's faces.
From their reactions I realized that they probly weren't the nasty practical joke types I'd guessed them to be...but they definitely got an impression about me either way.
This could be a chapter in How to Win Friends and Influence People; "Take one dead rat, age with care..."
How to Spin Trends and Influence Sheeple is my next book.
The Grand Hyatt! When I say that I’ve never seen or been in a Trump property that wasn’t hideous or worse. The Grand Hyatt, besides the hideous exterior, also had awful public spaces -- the first floor event space, the claustrophobic bar... And don’t get me started on Trump Tower.
Anyway. Unspeakably awful job: essentially running the practice of a disengaged, disinterested alcoholic narcissist. An awful human being. Only happy day on the job was the day I walked away from it.
Damn. Now I think the happy hour’s going to start real early today.
Haven't those been turned into Spirit Halloween stores now? 😉
If only.
That Hyatt was a hideosity for sure -- reflecting the soul of the proprietor. But at night they had a quite good little combo playing standards in the lobby, and now whenever I think of several songs like "Lady Be Good" and "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" I think of their renditions.
“Nice Work if You Can Get It” would’ve been a good selection.
I like beer!
I've spent forty years in the admin game. I gave up the supposedly 'prestigious' role of executive assistant sixteen years ago after five years working as admin to a religious official that went a long way toward making me the atheist I am today. 😜 I worked a lot of restaurant and retail over the years to piece things out, but I'm grateful I knew how to type and didn't have to fully support myself on service jobs.
Probably my low point was in my early 20s, in the late 1980s. I was late on my rent, I had no car, no phone, and I was surviving on temp jobs for a year. Ever tried to be a temp with no home phone? I don't recommend it. 😆
Didn't you have an answering service?
No. I would call all the agencies I was signed with on Friday and whoever got me work first was who I worked for the next week
My sister did temp work at a university, secretary to professors whose staff had left, until they could find a permanent replacement. In every single one of these cases, "staff had left" meant "the Prof's an asshole" and "find a permanent replacement" meant "never" because all the full-time secretarial staff were on to Fact #1.
One headcase she worked for, a professor of Library Science, was exploring new realms of micro-management, a pioneer in the burgeoning new field of nano-management. The Prof was moving her office, so all her stuff needed to be boxed up. Prof insisted that her new office address be written on every box, "just to be sure nothing gets lost." OK, address was written, but then what if the box is turned sideways or upside down and the movers won't be able to see the address? Write the address on multiple sides of the box! Just to fuck with her, Sis wrote the address on all SIX sides of some boxes before the prof decided that was probably overkill.
The emeritus dilemma!
Oh, I’ve got a nym to go with my state of workplace hell survival. I’m lucky to be retired long enough that it’s all vanishing rear-view mirror images. But micro- and nano-management sure takes me back, as does the thing with retired professors who will not go away.
Back in the days of yore and word processors, there was the office where I was under the eye of a woman who lived only to storm from her desk to berate me over some imagined transgression. Once she listened to my end of a phone conversation and went apeshit over how unprofessional I was. When I’d asked the caller if I could take a message for someone who was out, he said in a jokey tone, “Oh, are we gonna play phone tag again?” I recognized his voice and joked back, “Well, could we *try* leaving her a message?” “Oh, well, let's try that...” I could sense he was smiling as we hung up, which was when my outraged supervisor flew out of her room. She gave me a bad performance review because two of the higher level staff had the same first name and, “You put a letter for Liz A in Liz B’s slot”--exactly one time for each Liz, but fodder for a bad review. She never deviated from the time she took lunch, so her adult children were sure to call when they knew they could avoid speaking to her. When lunch was over I was the target of her bitterness over her kids. I’d checked “called” on the While You Were Out memo, which rated a furious, “Well, did she COME IN, or did she PHONE?” Uh, I guess I never thought of those notes as having a Called Upon box; seems like in that case, a calling card would have been left with the servant. Following that outrage, every message pad in the place was hand altered for the Called box to say something like Came In. It was a laugh that she was nuts enough to do this herself, to feel secure in the wording of messages from the son and daughter who were avoiding her.
Of course, that office couldn’t keep secretaries because of the supervisor’s antics. I learned she’d once been sent to HR classes–“How to Handle Difficult People,” as if she would have taken the hint about herself. The overall administrator had a good cop-bad cop regimen going. She cast herself as reasonable person saddled with an unreasonable lifer. Her micro-management was as obsessive as the supervisor’s, just done in a calmer manner. After she had proofed letters, I’d have to retype them if the smallest trace of correction tape had been detected. Once, I noticed an infinitesimal brown paper flaw in a page I’d just finished. I decided to turn it in as an experiment. It came back signed, but I could see eraser traces where the brown had been. That gave me the faint pleasure of picturing her looking around furtively, followed by a frantic, “Out, damned spot!”
During the six months of this I had to wait out to be eligible for transfer to the next set of crazies, I would compare notes with the secretary in a unit across the hall. She told me about working in a one-man office where the guy pulled a gun on her. If I'd ever wondered how bad a situation needs to be to draw unemployment for "voluntarily" quitting, she was able to get it.
My mom worked as a school secretary for decades, long enough to see a few School Superintendents come and go. One guy she particularly loathed (the school later bought off his contract just to get rid of him) got it into his head that he should have a cup of tea mid-morning, prepared by his secretary, of course. First day two teabags go into the cup, steep for a while, then come out and the tea goes to the boss. Next day three teabags, same routine, then four, then five. I think it was at five that he stopped asking for tea.
Tannin overdose to the rescue!
Admirably proactive secretarying!
Some bosses require more training than others.
It took me so long to figure out work-arounds. Like one time I was on the check stand during a busy sale day and a mean guy came through wanting to buy a checker board. It didn't have a price sticker (way before scanning) and was probably something he broke out of a set. I kept calling for a floor manager for some kind of price check, but they were up in the office laughing at me. The man got so angry. Now, of course, I'd simply whip out my box cutter, slash the board, and tell him, "Sorry, sir, this item is defective. Next!"
The How To Handle Difficult People class should have had a big mirror propped up in front of her seat, with a sign on it saying "calm the fuck down," LOL.
At my Fed the "How to Handle Difficult People" class was always for GS-9s/11s and below. Never, ever for anyone in a supervisory position or Senior Executive Staff, the people who most needed to be there.
I often visit the Ask A Manager website, because after all these years I'm still fascinated by the horror stories.
I've heard Manager is who every Karen wants to see. What must it be like to be so desirable to (certain) women?
Yes, micromanagement is so insulting.
So many to choose from, both I guess I’ll go with Fish Processing Boat in Alaska. 16 hour shifts, sometimes 24, hard, repetitive physical labor with many genuinely stupid and/ or crazy and/or violent people. One of the first things I noticed when I got to Alaska was that a lot of people were missing teeth, and I was to see several examples of why. But I think the best anecdotes concern how I rose rapidly through the ranks. My first job was the lowest of the low, which was grading fish from 1 to 3 and putting them in different pans accordingly. This process was overseen by a specialized from the Japanese buyer boat that was always tied up to ours. The morons I worked with who had been doing the job for a couple days were constantly arguing with the Japanese professional about how to grade fish and you could see his frustration steadily grow. Unfortunately, it was I who caused him to lose it, not because I don’t respect him, but because I hadn’t slept for several days. He yelled at me shaking the mid-graded fish in my face, tossed it up in the air and stormed away. It came down on my shoulder and I didn’t want to, but in that situation I did the only thing I could do, picked up the fish and threw it, hitting him in the back of the head. Everyone thought I’d get fired, but I was treated as a hero and promoted. Then the man came to me with the Japanese boat captain and very formally apologized. I truly felt like shit. I could go on (and on) with examples of how shitty that job was, but suffice it so say, it was shitty.
Funny, everyone I knew heretofore who worked on Alaskan fishing boats just talked about the good money.
Fishing boats yea, fish processing boats not so much, and then only because you get so much OT and have nowhere to spend it. Though at least two people I knew lost it all playing poker and got off the boat with nothing.
One of my colleagues earlier in life spent a summer doing the Alaska salmon thing, sending the proceeds home to his wife in Puerto Rico. He returned home after a backbreaking salmon season to find the power in his apartment turned off and an eviction notice on the door. Wifey had spent the summer’s earnings on a round of parties and bar-hopping, in the course of which she met a nice guy and moved in with him.
Now THAT's the blues!
She left him the dog and the pickup truck, so it's not Country.
And not even his boat!
My old high school buddy (who I visited today – 1st time in over 15 years) spent a short while on our chemistry teacher's fishing boat one summer, until the boat ran aground on the one place along that stretch of Oregon coast that is not rocky shoals and cliffs.
That was the prof's second fishing boat – the first one sank in the harbor while he was christening it.
Also I’m told the human mind is very good at suppressing very painful memories. That could explain a lot.
I don't know how we're supposed to compete with getting hit with a chair by a mobster, cross-dressing as a tomato or Quiche and Tell.
Friend of mine was a store manager for PetSmart. We were hanging out one night and I started bitching about how I've been trying to save up a down payment up for a larger house but in Bush the 1st's America, a guy just couldn't get ahead. I had a pretty good job - marketing director for a Hyatt Hotel - but shit, between three kids and real life I just couldn't get ahead.
He says I got a good part-time job- I need bather/ brushers in The Grooming Department. You can make 10 bucks an hour with tips.
I've been a dog owner all my life. How hard could it be? 10 bucks at the time was OKmoney
The first dog I worked on drew blood. An Airedale scratched my face so bad I had to go to the emergency room. My buddy called me up to see how I was doing and to make sure I was coming to work the next day because it was going to be really busy.
I learned right away that most dogs really hate going to the groomer. I only worked 2 days a week. Every week something got nip or scratched. The money was actually okay but before long I was to the point where I couldn't sleep the night before a shift I dreaded it so bad.
One of the things we had to do was trim the dog's toenails. Dogs really fucking hate that. For the big dogs we had rings on the floor where we would tie the leash and work on them. I got talked into coming in for a Sunday. I usually did the dog grooming on weekdays. The hotel kept me busy most weekends. The night before I was supposed to come in I was at the hotel for a very large banquet. It went well and we celebrated with drugs and alcohol out in the parking lot for most of the night. I went home slept for an hour, got up and went in to take care of some dogs.
First dog that morning with some kind of Bull Mastiff German Shepherd mix that needed his toenails trimmed. I tied his leash to the ring on the floor, picked up his front paw and proceeded to trim his nail. The instant nail was cut big dog lunged at me and tried to bite. He missed my nose by an inch. I was in a corner of the room. I scuttled up against the wall, just out of reach of the dog. I couldn't leave the corner without going back within his reach.
He would lunge at anybody that came near. I was stuck in the corner for a half hour with Cujo barking in my face until the city Animal Control people came in with their Hatari lasso rig and dragged his viscious ass away.
That was my last day as a bather/ brusher.
Just one? Hard to pick but one memorable day in hell was doing telesales for Lincoln Center, which compromised calling lapsed subscribers to re-up... after a few hours of having The Greatest Generation hang up on me with disgust after hearing their assorted, toothless rants about what a putz James Levine was I walked out without even trying to get paid for the day. Elder abuse in reverse!
"It was old age havin' a bash at youth" -- Alex DeLarge
I've only ever heard the name James Levine on Public Radio, presented with all the respect that a public-radio-announcer-voice can muster. So "what a putz James Levine was" made me laugh.
In their defense, James Levine *was* a putz: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-56433328
The Olds were way ahead of the curve on this one, I had that job in around 1988!
I had so many shitty jobs in my first 20 some working years that it’s a tough assignment just to pick one. Like Roy’s, most of them paid barely enough to scrape by. (I used to wonder what the word “career” meant, but then I was also unfamiliar with “college dorm” and “spring break.”)
It wasn’t the shittiest, but the scariest job I ever had was as a driving instructor for a school in Brooklyn that had seen better days. It was risky, but at least I had my own brake pedal. I swear I took people out on lessons who had clearly never even been in a car before. Like one of my first students, a young guy from someplace in the Caribbean, who put the car into Drive, got it up to 40 on a residential street, and then asked “Where the brake at mon?” And I almost got killed the time I was looking down to light a cigarette (those were the days ) and looked up to see we were about to plow into the front grill of a Mack truck.
Then there was the poor young woman who suffered from strabismus, where one one eye looks straight ahead while the other drifts off to the side. I felt really sorry for her, because having two separate vision inputs would sometimes confuse the hell out of her brain. One day, she was making a simple left turn when this confusion occurred. She completely panicked, spun the wheel in the opposite direction while hitting the gas pedal and headed for the nearest parked car, whereupon the tires squealed as I slammed on the brakes. There we were, inches away from the parked cars and perpendicular to the sidewalk, when a Brooklyn gentleman walking his dog looked at me and said, “Jeezus, pal, that’s some fuckin’ job you got.”
LOL. I was friends with a guy who worked as a driving instructor for about 6 months. He was in his 20s and he always swore his hair started to go gray from that job.
I hold fond thoughts of the driving instructor assigned to me when I was a lad in Bridgeport. I remember him rubbing his eyes in frustration after each of the many instances when he had to hit the brake.
I had a part-time gig teaching driving lessons. It was OK. The guy that taught me to teach said, "You're gonna know by feel when someone is about to step on the gas instead of the brake. Just slide it into neutral" I was dubious but wouldn't you know, I always seemed to get it in neutral on time!. Of course, I quit once I got promoted in my main job.
Not my job. But I was in the back seat when my student colleague started racing round the curves of Pt San Pedro Rd, faster and faster, then finally hearing her yell "I'm braking! I'm braking!" To which the instructor calmy replied "You're clutching. You're clutching."
“Where da brake at mon” made me laugh out loud thank you!
I too have done hard time in restaurants but I’ve blanked a lot of it out. Perhaps because when the shift is over, it’s over. Unlike corporate gigs, in which you can be tortured with the same project for literally years.
So here’s one from the wonderful world of advertising. Sitting in a pre-production meeting for a shitty commercial for a giant consumer products company. That company had a Head of Production, which I think was a made-up job for some emeritus executive they couldn’t push out the door. He came to all of these for the chance to get out of Cincinnati, and to lord his tremendous power over the agency folks.
My co-worker sitting next to me got bored (PPs are dull) and starting passing me notes with “funny” cartoons. I could see it was being noticed and did not react or respond.
Couple weeks later co-worker and I were called into the office of someone many levels up in the agency. Big trouble. Head of Production wanted us fired for “mocking him” at the PP. (None of the jokes were about him, and he could not have seen them anyway.) In order to save our jobs we would have to call this guy and grovel; if and only if he accepted our apologies, we could remain employed.
Co-worker went first. After the call he reported that Head of Production wasn’t a bad guy at all, in fact they had a great call, lotta laughs, what a sense of humor.
My turn. Head of Production ripped me to shreds. Can’t remember all the deets, it was brutal. But I’ll never forget his closer: he knew I — whom he’d never met before — was going to be a problem before the meeting even began because I had “a weak handshake.”
He granted that I could keep my job, but I left pretty soon after.
Funny the stories that came to mind first when I saw today’s REBID all involve shitty white men drunk on power. (Although I have waited on Madalyn Murray O’Hair, and lemme tell ya, that’s an experience.)
I've had similar experiences where there was some perceived misconduct, and my male co-workers would get slaps on the wrist but I'd get raked over the coals in true "Now let me make myself very clear, young lady..." style.
Relishing the role of petty tyrant with women is a definite Type Of Guy specific to some white dudes.
At my last job I had a male, PhD co-worker who couldn't get an academic job so he'd constantly try to pull rank or bully me. It was a pleasure to annoy him by returning a blank, level stare and then ignoring him.
Unfortunately, there never seems to be any shortage of guys throwing their weight around who remain oblivious to the fact they epitomize the saying "god grant me the self confidence of a mediocre white man."
I perceive no bias here, when managers are going by purely objective and gender-neutral measures such as "strength of handshake."
I'm 5'2" and at the time my weight didn't crack the third digit. So my handshake probably wasn't bone crushing.
Wait! Isn’t she the “in your face” atheist? I want to read that story.
Yes. At that point in time (and maybe always) she was a mean, angry lady who enjoyed abusing anyone who crossed her path. She came into our restaurant a lot (sometimes with her stunted middle-aged very strange son) and we took turns waiting on her. Relished being a nasty person, never tipped. Hard to believe she was ever taken seriously as a "leader" of any kind of movement. (Maybe that was the deal? Promote her as the face of atheism to discredit?)
Thx for your story. Such behavior doesn’t help her cause.
Not a shitty job, but definitely the shittiest day at work I've ever had:
Back when I was writing/editing a magazine on aircraft maintenance, I used to work for a maintenance shop that specialized in a certain kind of twin-engine airplane. Each engine on these things had two turbochargers, and it was a regular thing to change them out because they were worn, broken, etc. So one afternoon, I changed out two of the four turbos on one airplane--one turbo on each engine.
A week later I'm driving to work. It's snowing hard and traffic is crawling. On the radio, I hear a report that the cause of the backup is a plane crash. Since the shop was on the way to the office, I stopped there to wait out the traffic and maybe find out more about the crash.
I walked into the shop and could instantly see that everyone was shell shocked. The airplane that crashed was our customer, and the very same airplane I had worked on a week earlier. The pilot had reported that both engines had quit. There were no survivors.
I spent the next year wondering if I had killed two people. It wasn't until the accident report came out that I learned the pilot had managed to starve both engines of fuel by doing something the flight manual specifically said not to do. But until that report hit my desk, well, that was the worst and longest day at work I've ever had.
And THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is why I don't work in aircraft maintenance.
"Hey, who left their car keys in the wing?"
Actual things found in wings and other areas of aircraft I have worked on:
An old flashlight in a fuel tank.
Screwdrivers in various places.
A factory bucking bar that was left inside a tailplane.
Various sockets and wrenches.
But no car keys. Yet.
Well, how am I gonna see inside the fuel tank without a flashlight, huh?
Easy, just flick your Bic.
And that, my friend, beats yer damn 3ft of copper wire all to hell and gone!
You pussy. You let one bad story scare you away?
I believe I can speak for everyone here when I say "OOF!"
Jesus Christ
It puts all my other bad days in perspective.
Fuck--I wish there was a “condolence” or a “thoughts & prayers” button: it feels too cruel to “like” a post like this.
A year later, I quit aviation altogether and went to edit fishing magazines. It took another 30 years before I got back into working on airplanes.
"In some ways life’s easier when you don’t give a shit."
Gold.
I got stories (not epic) but I'm late to life today.
Carry on, carry on...
Think I'll go with a grad school story, since no one else has tapped into that particular well of suck. I spent a year basically inventing an instrument to measure shear deformation in high-temperature composite materials, when the asshole professor I was working for fired me (Can you get fired in grad school? Well, I sure could.) Let's just say we had interpersonal issues, which means I hated him and didn't make much of an effort to conceal it.
Anyway, the instrument. The day after my firing, he tells me to put the instrument in a box and give it to the lab manager before I go. So naturally I disassembled the thing, down to the tiniest screw (and this thing had a LOT of parts to it, as a designer I tend towards overcomplication.) All the parts go into a box, then shake vigorously.
The next day, he asked me if I had put the instrument in a box. "Oh yeah, it's in a box, alright."
You want more sugar with that?
I took a job as a telephone solicitor (I know, I know...). In my defense, it was for an actual worthwhile arts organization in the DC area, so I figured that it might not be so bad. (Pause for dramatic effect.) I worked one day, left my money on the table, and never went back. Worst. Job. Ever. And I had once spent an entire summer crawling under houses killing termites.
My very first job was a phone job getting people to come to pitch meetings for a real estate scam in Florida called Rotunda, created by the Cavanaugh Corporation and associated with Ed McMahon, of whose preprinted-autograph photos we had many. We were instructed to say "you're under no obligation" but I got smacked in the head once for adding "to buy." Cavanaugh finally went to ground years later: https://casetext.com/case/adams-v-cavanagh-communities-corp-2
Did you at least win a set of steak knives?
I worked in a restaurant - one of those Big Boy places - for maybe three months the fall after I graduated high school. It convinced me a career in food service was not the best choice for me, culminating in burning a quarter-size patch on the back of my hand with oil from the fryer and having the manager try to convince me to finish cleanup before seeking care.
It was a fitting start to decades of being screwed over by capitalism. The coup de grace came in 2019, when at 67 my job changed from a contract position to one done by an in-house employee. I suspect my age had something to do with why I was not offered the job, as had happened in previous instances. But they did the same thing to three of my co-workers, of various ages, giving them cover for dumping me.
Can't entirely blame them - it would have been expensive to buy out my contract for the three years left before my planned retirement at 70. Damned inconvenient though. The extra Social Security money from working until 70 would come in handy these days.
So: beginning to end, my employment history involves a lot of getting fucked, or at least having the attempt made. I suspect my experience is far from unique.
I was in college during the first of Reagan's economic downturns and needed to get a job. Unfortunately, John Deere was on strike (or there had been massive layoffs, I'm not sure which) and I couldn't find anything in fast food and nothing that would fit my schedule of classes. Then a gay friend recommended I apply at an adult bookstore out on LaPort Road. Long story short (and I still remember lots of stories, the place had movie booths with glory holes)-I got the job. 1am-9am. One night, after the 2am bar-closing rush, I was at the counter when a guy grabbed a Debbie Does Dallas blow-up doll off a display table and headed out the door. I immediately ran out after him and was in the middle of the parking lot when the voice in my head woke up and screamed WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING? YOU ARE GOING TO BE SHOT DEAD FOR A DEBBIE DOES DALLAS FUCK DOLL! I did a ridiculous crouch and weave scramble back into the building and called my boss. She said Call The Police. So I called the police. The police arrived, they were giggling assholes, and I was a sleep deprived college student. It didn't go well. I stuck to my determination to file a police report because I had to have one filed for The Company (which was mob-owned, but that's a few other stories). The doll had Vibro-action and was over $50! I did not have to go to court, thankfully, because they never found the guy or his expensive new girlfriend.
And then there was the guy who came in with his very drunk wife and insisted on buying me as a birthday gift for her...
I know this was traumatic for you, but I am literally rolling on the floor over "you are going to be shot dead for a Debbie Does Dallas fuck doll."
I don't doubt for a minute you have far more entertaining stories about the mob-owned sex shop than I have about my brief stint at the adult theater. At least at the movies, there were no thefts -- unless you count stolen dignity, LOL.
I LOLed at "his expensive new girlfriend."
Vibro-action! State of the art!
Seems... unnatural
I worked at the bookstore for just short of one year, I think. I needed to eat (and drink!). Part of my job was to drag a bucket of clorox water and a mop into the back and swab out the booths before the early morning rush. Looking back, I have no idea how I managed it.
"Beats mopping up at Show World" was a thing we used to say to one another back in the day.
My worst job was my first, newspaper delivery boy. Every day after school, unbundle the papers dropped at my house, fold ‘em, put ‘em in a shoulder bag, walk from house to house placing them on the porch and then, on Fridays, trying to get these well-to-do households to pay up. The pay was literally pennies a week unless someone took pity and tipped. I would’ve quit but “in this family everyone helps out by working.” Good old Depression ethos. The only compensation was the times one of the beautiful high school girls answered the door on tip day. Eleven or twelve year olds couldn’t pretend to ever speaking with one of these goddesses under any other circumstances. I heard one of them later hooked up with Hunter S Thompson, to her mother’s dismay, according to my mother. Anyway, there’s lots of unpleasantness in medicine but it’s still the best job in the world if you aren’t talented enough to be a Rolling Stone (oh, how we dreamed of that life when they fired Brian Jones).