all 26 comments

[–]FLCL 14 insightful - 2 fun14 insightful - 1 fun15 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

Probably seasonal at Target when I was a kid. Had a crap manager that let the senior/full-time workers do whatever they wanted, and blamed me for the mistakes. The guy that worked the electronics desk before me would forget to hang the phone back up so the battery died, and he would leave the place a total mess. So then the manager would come up at the beginning of my shift when I was already swamped and give me shit for it. I also was in the electronics/toy section so that was an absolute nightmare during xmas time.

Good thing is that it gave me some empathy for retail workers. If my girlfriend or I decide we don't want something we don't just throw it on a random shelf, I walk that shit back to where we got it from.

[–]theFriendlyDoomer[S] 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

If my girlfriend or I decide we don't want something we don't just throw it on a random shelf, I walk that shit back to where we got it from.

Nice. Same here. I worked both in fast food and some time at Walmart. I never want to make their lives more difficult.

[–]marmorsymphata 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

we don't just throw it on a random shelf, I walk that shit back to where we got it from.

It drives me fucking CRAZY when my family does this. Even as a little kid I knew it was fucked up to create more work for someone for literally just no reason.

[–]Zednix 14 insightful - 1 fun14 insightful - 0 fun15 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

I worked at a huge industrial/commercial distribution seller last year for a few months. They had such strict rules it was poisoning to work there. Everyone snitched on everyone. If you were there long enough they made you become an "investor" in the company. Not investing was a fast track to being fired. All the investor employees are required to report on all employees doing things outside the rules. Required to. They don't allow you to listen to music anywhere. Not even outdoors when you are working on landscaping. I was in the maintenance department, so our job covered a lot of random stuff like the normal building maintenance to landscaping and patching potholes on their properties.

Breaks are mandatory, if you miss the assigned timeslot for a break you can't have one. So, if you are busy with something and you miss 15 minutes of your lunch time, you only get whatever is left and get written up if you take your LEGAL amount of time for the break.

You get written up for having your phone on you. Written up for having your phone out, even if you are searching for part information on an item you are repairing.

Greggs Distributers is a horrible company to work for, unless you drink the cult koolaid.

[–]theFriendlyDoomer[S] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Oh my god. That sounds like a complete nightmare. How'd you get away?

[–]Zednix 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I got lucky and had a job offer come up for something adjacent to my trade. I booked it as soon as I could. That job turned out to be a dud and slowed down. Managed to find steady job last Nov.

Greggs is cancer, everyone who I have talked to about working there thinks that place is crazy.

[–]aThievingStableboy 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

adfgbaedsf

[–]teelo 9 insightful - 4 fun9 insightful - 3 fun10 insightful - 4 fun -  (4 children)

Working in politi... oops uh I mean: teaching english in South Korea. You think people are racist towards white people in America? You aint seen nothing.

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

South Koreans don't like White people?

[–]teelo 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Apparently not. They won't admit it, but it just took about 3 months of lessons for me to realise they were calling me names right in front of me everywhere I went, expecting me not to understand them.

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

What kinds of things did they say? In what contexts?

[–]teelo 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

They have various cursewords for white people / foreigners. Kinda hard to translate, though. Most of them don't have direct english translations that would appear insulting in English. Korean is a language where words are different depending on whether you are talking up to someone, like talking to your boss or teacher or the president, and different words for talking down to someone like your child or someone you think is less than human. English doesn't have that so none of it makes sense in English.

[–]PurpleAmathea 8 insightful - 2 fun8 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

I did an internship in a small advertising office in high school, which taught me that I definitely did not want to go into that field. It was intensely boring. (yeah, I recognise that advertising probably also has exciting flashy jobs but there's a lot of market research and even the exciting creative bits were just... Not for me.)

By contrast, waitressing and working on a farm were both enjoyable, albeit not remotely the direction I went for long term (engineering...)

[–]aThievingStableboy 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

adfgasdgf

[–][deleted] 6 insightful - 2 fun6 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

24 hour convenience store in a small town. The manager was a lazy asshole. People would always just not show up for work (huge staff turnover) and I'd end up stuck there for double shifts. When I finally quit that place I just locked it up and left at like 4 in the morning when yet again the morning staff didn't show up. People have lives outside of low level jobs. The job would have been fine without the shit manager and resulting problems.

By the same token the least demanding job I ever had was the one right after that. Video rental store on the morning shift (9-4 weekdays). Nobody went into those places at that time of day, so for the most part all I did was screw around watching movies all day and got paid for it. A few regulars did come in, but they were all weird folks and fun to talk to anyways.

I went through all sorts of crazy positions before I was an adult, those were just the best and worst.

[–]Riva 5 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

Mac's milk convenience store. Midnight shift. Drunks and much more. I was not paid enough to put up with that shit.

Also working overnight serving customers is not natural.

[–]aThievingStableboy 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

aergqweafds

[–]marmorsymphata 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

My first though was Mac from IASIP. Fight milk!

[–]theFriendlyDoomer[S] 4 insightful - 3 fun4 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 3 fun -  (0 children)

Mine was coaching debate. It's a big reason I'm not that interesting in having any debates with anyone.

[–]Delia 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

16 at a Commercial laundry, I just could not cope and the pay was terrible.

[–]marmorsymphata 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I haven't had a lot of jobs, but the dog washing one was pretty bad...

You wouldn't believe how badly people treat small, show-esque dogs. These people deliberately give their dogs (who have long, hairlike, easily stained fur) cuts that involve stupidly long feathering along the tail and hindquarters that get in the way of the dog using the bathroom and then just don't clean them-- they just dump them off on groomers instead. So the average day washing dogs would be almost 70% just detangling dingleberry knots and stale piss-soaked mats. No matter how much whitener I used I couldn't get the refuse stains out.

It's repulsive, repulsive behavior. I couldn't imagine subjecting my late dog to that. Even when she was incontinent for the last few months of her life, I would wash her off whenever she made a mess. Because, you know, she was a living being...? And I loved her....?

Oh, and I didn't get gloves because weeding out the minute shit particles was apparently too hard with them on. Fucking hated that boss. We worked in the same room so he was over my shoulder almost 100% of the time.

Eventually he fired me without even telling me, and I didn't know until I called demanding to know what was going on because it was contract work. When I requested my last paycheck he ghosted me.

[–]theFriendlyDoomer[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Wow. Makes me scared for how those people would treat their kids.

[–][deleted] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Working the lobby of a fast-food place. Constant physical work, on my feet all day, nobody to talk to, cleaning disgusting toilets, getting shit from the manager who hated me on a personal level, taking sass from customers who considered themselves my better... shit money and unpredictable shifts. The day seemed so endless. Mopping up a stranger's vomit for minimum wage might have been character-building, who knows.

[–]piss 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

My first job was on the support phones for an online bank. It was pretty much used as the only place that would take people who either had too poor credit to go anywhere else or were new to the country and did not have paperwork required for normal banks. The job itself wasn't anything tough but it sure was emotionally taxing. The people who used it were pretty much the worst off people in the country yet our fees were so much higher than other banks, re routinely had problems on our end that made people lose money through no fault of their own, and just generally screwed people over. I would say the aim of my job at that time was not to solve people's issues - I had been warned about spending too much time helping people, but moreso just to get them off the phone. The only statistics that mattered were how many calls you got through and whether you remembered to say the company mandated call opening line, closing line and a few bits in between. How well you solved issues simply didn't come into it. A large part of the job was pretty much just being a wall for people to yell at - they would call up, have a problem that is clearly our fault, I would tell them I can not do anything, let them get angry for 5 minutes and then revert back to company approved procedure where we pretty much just tried to get them off the phone and eat the losses and stop calling.

It was very disheartening to see the people who needed assistance the most getting screwed over the most, with nowhere else to turn really. That isn't even mentioning how terribly the staff were treated, how much unpaid overtime there was through no fault of anyone working there (servers going down etc.), the poor hours where you would start wildly different times each day, regardless of what time you finished the previous day (often finish at 10, back in at 7 - it was just luck of the draw)

[–]NorfolkTerrier 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Outbound call center. Uggghhhh. Even when you're working for a big company doing "legitimate" business from a database of people who specifically gave your company their number and agreed to receive calls, there was still a ton of utter bullshit.

  • They'd recycle the same bad leads over and over again because someone hanging up on you before you can rebut them 3 times doesn't count as a real "not interested."

  • If someone managed to have enough patience to get through the call, the "not interested"s would cycle back into the system after a couple months anyway.

  • If someone said "Take me off your call list," you weren't allowed to put them on the do not call list. They had to specifically ask to be put on the do not call list.

  • When someone was mad enough about the umpteenth followup call, I'd just put them down as "wrong number" in the database because that was the one way to stop the calls that didn't fuck up your percentage. As far as I was concerned, it was the "wrong number" for us to be calling.

In the interview they said it'd be all inbound. I think I said that stupid script more times than I've said "I love you" to my family and friends. Fuck that place, I quit without even having anything else lined up. Lasted a few months and that was more than most people.

[–]theFriendlyDoomer[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

In the interview they said it'd be all inbound.

I've done inbound before, and that was bad enough. I can't imagine outbound.