Things My Jobs Have Had In Common (Part 2)

Shitty Bosses

I was a paid employee at an animal shelter for two years. My boss’s boss was a smooth-talking cat to the media and to potential adopters, but we got to see who he really was. He didn’t acknowledge my existance until I had been there for six months.

He was a mixed bag of fun: between doing things to deliberately fuck with our day:

Power trips from nowhere:

And random violent outbursts that made me fear for my safety:

...I look back on those days and wonder how the hell I managed to not punch him in the throat.

As an overnight lackey for another retail chain, I was subjected to odd treatment from day managers who had never worked an overnight in their lives but somehow assumed all who did were lazy, uneducated mouth-breathers who needed constant hand-holding. My friend and I were standing in an incredibly overloaded dock one night in a four-foot-wide clearing amidst the mess, listening to our “To Do” list from the closing manager.

We were unsupervised for the night so you can guess what got done.

Shitty Work Environment

Another retail chain, one that is most loathed by my husband and I. We worked together at this shithole during our college careers on opposite sides of the store. I stayed hidden in the dairy cooler to avoid people but my poor husband was in Electronics, and still had a work ethic that the managers sought to exploit daily.

My first night in a fast-food chain, I was given zero register training and the only other English-speaking coworker in the building at the time was leaving for the night. It was somewhere near dinner rush.

I was a shift manager for a convenience store chain in my hometown and bounced back and forth between two stores. This was my second job, so I still had plenty of leftover work ethic that earned me my title after just one short year there. Related to this is a medical condition I’ve never been diagnosed with (because I refuse going to the doctor unless I’m dying) but I’m pretty sure is hypoglycemia. If I don’t eat, say, on a lunch break, I get anxious, irritable, shakey, and eventually see spots and pass out.

My superiors just labeled me a bitch and kept me working through my episodes, and in attempting to prove them wrong by trying to be awesome at my job, I obliged. Inevitably, I ended up in trouble.

Really Awesome Coworkers

Probably the only reason why I still bothered to come to work in any job.

The shelter had an “I’ve been abused by the executive director” support group and frequently got drunk together.

I played baseball and had sword fights in a dairy cooler.

My grooming coworkers despise the human race as much as I do.

When the Eagles went to the Superbowl, my fellow shift managers busted out an old radio and set it up at the register and that’s all we did all day.

Stale roll fights.

Altogether, probably the most fun bunch of people I’ve ever met who I normally wouldn’t have if it hadn’t been for how much we hated our shitty jobs.

 

Things My Jobs Have Had In Common (Part 1)

Sectioned into Parts because Blogger is being beyond fucktastic the past couple days and refuses to load any more than about five or so pictures.

Minus inescapable poverty.

Shitty Customers

I cashiered one Christmas Eve and the store I worked for closed at the unholy hour of nine P.M. At 9:15, there were still people in the store, and my manager was trying to get everyone out. When my coworkers finished with their lines, they shut down their registers in a hurry and ran to the back to cash out and leave. Soon, I was alone with my final customer who would not leave due to a most dire situation.

My very first job was at a bakery that tanked nine months after I started working there. Sundays were usually slow enough that one person was scheduled for the day, and on my first Sunday alone, I was introduced to Retail As An Entity.

Waking Up - Not Dog Related

When I was in middle and high school, it didn’t take a lot to wake me up. I had an ancient, 1992 clock radio with an alarm setting that allowed me to set the radio to wake me instead of the horrid beeping most people associate with alarms. After many years of use, though, the radio stopped working and would project piercing static instead.

So I turned the radio volume all the way down, and the soft clicking of the alarm kicking on would be my wake-up sound for the remainder of my school years.

Fast forward to married life. For some ungodly reason, my husband needs to have his eardrums blasted with mortar to wake up in the mornings. Due to the positioning of our bed, our “night stand” is a long dresser that butts up to my side of the bed, and this is where our phones sit to charge.

 He also likes to experiment with different ringtones to see their different effects. While this is perfectly fine for him, he had to learn the hard way that scaring me awake at seven A.M. was equivalent to waking a pride of lions with those illegal fireworks you bought in Ohio.

For a span of a few weeks he used a song titled “Rite of Spring” which was a happy, upbeat violin and tambourine mixture that sounded like something from a Renaissance Faire. At a low volume, this song was irritating, but acceptable. The only problem was he could never remember to turn his volume down before falling asleep, so every morning I awoke with a joyful, Shakespeareian ode to springtime in my face, in the middle of a dark Pennsylvania winter.

After being forced to change the tone, he chose “Trillo,” which almost ended our marriage. “Trillo” is a solo violin playing all the high, shrill notes a violin can in rapid succession, and it comes on very suddenly.

My husband’s phone is a “smartphone,” said in quotes because I hate everything about it. When the alarm goes off, you have to solve a puzzle on its screen which under normal circumstances would be easy, but in a dark bedroom where you’ve just been awoken via heart attack and you’re in a panic to just SHUT THE FUCKING THING UP, you may as well have to solve a Rubick’s Cube.

After a few months of this, I forced him to change the tone again. Thankfully he chose something calming; I don’t think he could handle too many more scars.