this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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I thought of this question because someone joked about double-dipping their hands in the chocolate fountain at Golden Corral and boy did that invoke one of my least favorite paying-for-college memories.

Yes, someone did dip his hands into the chocolate fountain at the Golden Corral. Worse, he was a repeat offender, a man that was at least in his 30s if not older slurping it off of his fingers and all, sometimes while making eye contact with me or my coworkers. Worse, there was no enforced rule against doing so, at least at my location, so my manager just told me to let him do it, don't make a big deal out of it, and hope he doesn't bother anyone else.

That same manager once insisted on me making the place extra clean a little before Christmas, so they insisted that I use double the amount of cleaning bleach in the same bucket. I explained that's not how cleaning works or how OSHA compliance works. I got a write-up. I said that wasn't an offense that qualified for a write-up, and what they said was "thanks for the tip, I'll find something that is. Your word against mine." sus-torment

That same manager punched me out early without telling me, because the place wasn't perfect enough before I left over an hour late, missing my family waiting to pick me up outside by that long to go out to do holiday stuff. I did call that in on the supposedly anonymous tip line later, but you can guess what happens when an anonymous tip about wage theft is called in on a manager that already knows who would call in that tip in a "right to work" situation. joker-amerikkklap

That same manager was fired a week later for embezzlement, and not the cool kind. They were writing up and firing people for months for money missing from the register. I found out when collecting my last check and noticed someone new. ok

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I've had a boss start referring to himself as my grandfather and once asked me to literally kiss a ring on his finger. When I refused he took me into the conference room, brought my manager, and called me a narcissist for about two hours. He told me he had to sell his truck to start the business and it cost him his marriage, told me I should be grateful I'm not homeless.

One time I worked at a library, my manager was a fundamentalist Christian type. She chewed me out for about an hour because a guest asked me for help with a book on human history. Asked me to define words like neanderthal and fossil. She told me to either accept the earth is 6000 years old or to lose my job. I was like 20 and had no other job options, so I sat in her office and proceeded to convert to whatever weird kind of Baptist she was.

One time I got nearly fired from a grocery store cashier job because I dropped a nickel and got accused of stealing it when I couldn't find it. 5 cents.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

All of them are equally worth of contempt. I hope you are doing better nowadays!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

No I still work at the same job lol

Also one time my boss snuck into a coworker's house and started beating him with a belt. Some kind of argument over if the guy was rude to the boss's daughter? And the coworker didn't press charges and just showed up to work like normal the next Monday

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I work in Healthcare. It is wild what gets money and what doesn't. It used to bother me that there are entire industries around keeping braindead patients alive and making money off their slow deaths. It is still wrong but I can't bring up the energy to hate it anymore. Millions of dollars in costs to people that can't enjoy it, and likely suffer most of the time. Life support, dialysis, feeding tube, waste tubes, housing, nursing, transport, medicines. The staff aren't well treated or respected either. It is just literally grinding down the sick and the old to take the tax money from the poor and give ot to the rich.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago (1 children)

When I worked in healthcare I noticed pretty quickly that "big name" diseases got a lot of funding and subsidies but stuff people suffered every day in larger numbers got next to nothing.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

And that, while terrible. Is still rational. People who don't know or care about Healthcare decide spending and they go for the big charismatic names. Everyone e wants to cure cancer. Even though heart disease is a bigger threat. Understandable human emotions though. It feels like every week I learn some new horror. We just had a lady that fell and will likely die because she was going blind and the insurer wouldn't approve the surgery to fix it.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The death panels were already there, and the lobbies made people scared of death panels so the death panels would maintain their power.

astronaut-2 astronaut-1

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

It was always ridiculous. Thr best way to controll a narrative is to make it up. There is reason they always pick issues that are fake. That way there are no existing facts to contradict them. I had a coworker say something about those once. I was too stunned to speak. We have to change thing singularly based on the whims of insurance people and they were so deep in ideology that they couldn't compare the two

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

It's nothing compared to some of these stories but my first job out of college: two STEM degrees and the only place I can get any sort of offer from is Target, opening boxes. Spent the next year sending out hundreds of job applications with nothing to show of it, slowly getting more depressed. They had me do fulfillment during the holiday season and I have a vivid memory of looking for a specific article of baby clothing at like 9pm and suddenly feeling an overwhelming sadness. Like all I wanted to do was fall onto the floor and never move again. They stole overtime from me, gave me shit hours, and a whoooole host of other shit, but that moment was really defining. Eventually made it out, but goddamn. Retail was soul-crushing.
I gained some perspective and started reading legitimate theory eventually. I think if I had to do it these days I'd tolerate it better, but I just had nothing to hold onto to give me any hope of getting out of that situation.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I've worked as a substitute teacher, and once my job was to basically follow around a girl in the fourth grade and make sure that she got to her classes on time. She was nice, cool, wonderful, and seemed to do okay in class as far as I could tell, but she had major issues with transitions. She would have these crazy meltdowns, like screaming and crying for ten or fifteen minutes straight, when it was time to come inside from recess. It absolutely fucking sucked because as a dude, I am not allowed to touch the kids and I couldn't touch her. I wanted to hug her and pat her back and tell her that it was going to be okay, but I couldn't.

Finally, the end of the day rolls around. Her parents are supposed to pick her and her younger sister up, but nobody arrives. The buses come and go, the walkers leave the school, and nobody comes to get these two girls. Am I just supposed to hang out with her and her sister by the entrance until someone arrives? The principal tells me she'll take care of it (I actually hated that principal but this was a good thing she did) and that I can go. Without even thinking about it, I drive straight to the grocery store, pick up some wine and cheese, go home, and just destroy it. I was stress-eating and stress-drinking and didn't even realize it until I had finished. Generally I drink maybe a glass of wine a month so this was weird for me.

Later I found out that her parents were addicted to some kind of illicit drug. AFAIK her grandmother, who seemed to be more functional, adopted the kids and they moved away. I really hope they're doing better.

Just thinking about how this girl was living in such a shitty environment that was really damaging her emotionally and that she had done nothing to deserve any of this (does anyone really deserve to be abused? wouldn't we rather re-educate even the worst reactionaries if we had the resources to do so?) was extremely upsetting. I mean, I encounter all kinds of weird shit basically whenever I venture into any environment which requires me to spend time with large numbers of Americans, but this was pretty extreme. All of America's hatred of the poor and total disinterest in making anything better for anyone who isn't at least a millionaire really came down hard on this one girl. Thinking about her still upsets me. This was a year or two before the pandemic.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

I had an agreement with the one coworker I was actual friends with to push carts inside while he bagged groceries (both stuff I wish customers would do themselves) but our middle-manager wanted our tasks to be the other way around. He got into an argument with her, resigned, and she told all the other employees that he was to blame for it all.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

No one incident comes to mind, but my last job saw me working in a lighting and furniture outlet. At least half of our customers were some manner of petty boug - homeowners, landlords, AirBnB owners, and the like.

They would come in to get furniture and fixtures for cheap, sometimes in bulk, which left us busting our backs and sweating our asses off in the un-air conditioned warehouse or out in the hot sun, loading hundreds or even thousands of pounds of merch into their expensive trucks, Land Rovers, or G wagons. Even the ones who rented transit vans or Uhauls tended to own Mercedes or BMWs as their personal cars. Oh, and Teslas. Lots and lots of Teslas. I saw more Teslas at that job than anywhere else in my life.

These people would almost never tip, and we weren't allowed to accept them even if they had, since parking lot service of that kind was company policy - it was expected that we would break our back lifting sofas and fountains and stone and marble tables and whatever else, so it would be inappropriate of us, they said, to accept gratuities (we did anyway, fuck em).

The worst, though, was how they always seemed to be looking down their noses at us. Talking down to us. Treating us like scum, like field hands. I knew even before I started that service work was inherently demeaning and undignified and soul destroying, but this job really made me feel it, made me viscerally understand in a way that only direct experience can. I hope I never work customer service again, but if I do, I know the hatred I felt for customers will come right back to me.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

God damn do I have a lot.

I worked at McDonald's when I was a teenager. It was around the same time that History Ended. I vividly recall being punished with a 12 hour shift exclusively running the deep fryers because I dared to complain that, hey, making kids who are barely teens stay until 1 AM was a teeny bit illegal.

I worked a 20 hour shift at a big box store the day after Christmas. The "sales staff" (read: the manager's friends) made enough in commissions to buy new cars. I handled about a quarter million dollars in cash that day. I was paid less than $100.

I had a client pick up and throw a computer monitor at me, giving me a concussion. The regional manager waived his outstanding bills for this terrible inconvenience. I received a negative performance review and was put on probation for "not having a customer-first attitude".

I took parental leave when one of my kids was born. Management started calling me "Mr. Whipped" during the lead-up to their birth. I was laid off during my leave.

I could go on.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

I have my own story but it's longer, maybe I'll post later.

A woman I worked with was like, super into this job, took it very seriously and kind of also thought of herself as really good at the job and felt kind of self important or whatever. She had been there a while, longer than almost everyone else.

We had another worker get hired, same position as all of us, and she started off making quite a bit more than I started off making. I got hired for 13, she got hired for 16. She sucked. So. Bad. Less than zero productivity, literally only creating more work for other people. We couldnt tell if she was sandbagging or actually really really dumb, for real. For some reason management refused to even slightly do anything, and it just screwed us over again and again. Her dad probably knew the psychotic owner or whatever, which wouldn't be the first nepo hire there.

By that time I was making 17 or 18 bucks. A couple of us gossiped to the first woman in the story, that it was so annoying to have to work with the new hire, etc. We also told her the nepo was making 16 bucks, and how crazy that was compared to what we all started with, but we told her in a way that it was immediately obvious that we were already making a little more than 16, not less. We weren't sounding pissed in the way you would if you were still making less than the dumb nepo asshole.

She tried to smile through it but it was total devastation - her face was literally twitching.

We immediately realized, with 100 percent certainty, that she was still making less than 16... and knew we were all making more... including the nepo dumbass... despite her putting tons of energy into the job for longer than any of us...

JOKERFIED. HARD. She left pretty quickly after that.

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