Crystal:
A few years ago I had my dream writing job. The boss was a serious animal lover, and so the office was overrun by his pets. I love animals and so working in a zoo was fun … until one of the dogs turned against me.
The little bastard would constantly growl and bark, tear up my office and try to bite me whenever we’d cross paths. Knowing how lucky I was to have landed the job, I just put up with it – until one day the dog’s teeth connected with flesh, causing me to trash talk it very loudly, and at length.
To be fair, challenging a dog that wore a pink diamante collar to a duel was not exactly my finest moment… but I didn’t expect to be schooled over it. The boss summoned me into his office and accused me of provoking the animal, that the dog would never bite someone who didn’t deserve it and so I need to adjust my attitude. It was too much.
Not wanting ‘Quit Over Altercation With Dog’ stamped on my employment record, I waited a few weeks before resigning with an excuse about not wanting to be a writer anymore.
“And I said, I don’t care if they lay me off either, because I told, I told Bill that if they move my desk one more time, then, then I’m, I’m quitting, I’m going to quit. And, and I told Don too, because they’ve moved my desk four times already this year, and I used to be over by the window, and I could see the squirrels, and they were married …”
(Milton, Office Space)
Intern Elizabeth
My first job was as a Page at the Des Plaines Public Library. I was hired by my BFF’s mom, and for three years it was awesome. Then my boss got promoted, they put an incompetent chick in charge of the pages (she was nice, but bad at her job) and created a new position to look over everyone. The woman they hired, Susan, was NUTS.
Apparently Susan was hired ’cause she was “militant” and could therefore get things done. She’d recently converted to a very strict sect of Islam and chose to wear the full hijan. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with that, except when it makes you act crazy strict & unreasonable while working with teenagers and twentysomethings at a LIBRARY.
She literally sent people to spy on us in the stacks and drop in on us during breaks to drive us out faster. Her spies would tattle on us for every little thing, sometimes with ridiculous exaggerations. And these were *adults* with high positions in the library.
It was so childish and annoying. I didn’t want to deal with it (I was taking full time classes downtown, living at home in the suburbs and working 2 jobs. My fuse was short as it was.)
So one day I walked in, decided I didn’t want to/couldn’t be there anymore, crossed my name off all the schedules, wrote my boss a little paragraph, tossed it in her mailbox and left. Didn’t talk to anyone.
Left them one Page short for 8-hours on a Saturday and I didn’t care (so unlike me) and didn’t feel bad/guilty.
Then a few days later my former boss (the incompetent one) called and said that Susan wanted to know why I quit, what I was tired of, etc.
So I said, “Do you want to tell her it was because of *her*?!” And my boss friggin told that woman what I said!
So Susan kept calling me, wanting to talk. I refused. My mom took the calls for me, said I didn’t need to talk to her if I didn’t want to. I did feel bad about it eventually. Especially when I had papers to do for school and couldn’t find the books I needed elsewhere…
Also, I realized that they had taken the employee code off my card roughly the second I walked out the door and so I owed $20+ in overdue fines. Luckily the Clerks still liked me and cut the fine to almost nothing.
Tinkerbell:
I do not have to work because I am a dog and I don’t eat any food because I want to be skinny. I am so happy for recessions, because everyone I want to play with is at home, except for the people that have no homes so they have no newspapers. One thing is for sure that I will never go to college. All the girls I know who went to college have no jobs. All the boys I know who went to college have jobs. Most of the people I know who didn’t go to college also have jobs. Politicians have jobs, then they have sex, then they have no jobs. I’d like to live on a kibbutz or in a wigwam. What is human resources? Love Tinkerbell.
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I was working at a salon for like 9 months. I adored my boss, I was pretty much her bitch: someone needs to cover this shift. I’ll do it! Can you clean the salon before you leave tonight? (Keep in mind that I was not paid HOURLY, but 50% commission) Sure, I’m on it like white on rice. I’d entertain her 3-yo stepson when her husband brought him in while they replaced shampoo bowls, whatever. Occasionally I had a space cadet issue with forgetting to do my assigned chore before I left – but not all the time by any means, not intentionally, in fact when I remembered I’d do more than prescribed.
Last August though she made some changes. Walk-ins were no longer distributed evenly amongst us, but would go in order of who that was available had sold the most retail product the day before. I suck at selling retail – pretty good at doing hair, but this is a mall salon, people don’t come in to spend $400, they come in for a $15/$20 haircut! Our cheapest bottle of shampoo was $13. Come on now.
The new girl butchered hair, but churned through clients and sold retail like nothing else. She could see 5 clients in 2 hours and sell them all something or two things, and she’d do it like this. “You need this.” Plop it on the desk. And the receptionist would dutifully ring it up. That’s gotta be illegal.
Anyway, new girl was hoarding clients and I was NOT COOL with it, so I began to look for another job. One of the places I looked felt it appropriate to call up the boss and let her know. She called me the morning of my next shift and told me, that since I’d basically quit without giving notice, I could pack my station that day.
I just said, “You’re funny,” and hung up on her.
I worked at Blockbuster for 2 weeks in high school. Standing for 8 hours to be rewarded with a 30 min break was NOT fun. Not to mention the $5.50/hr minimum wage. Now I’m all grown up and get sit with my feet up reading Autostraddle at work & I can take as many breaks as I want!
I was unfortunate enough to graduate from college this past May, right as the unemployment rates were getting totally redic. I have a degree that is quite marketable in an industry that is very big where I live, but NO ONE IS F*CKING HIRING!!! And those who are hiring, hire the older candidates with more industry experience.
So I live at home with my parents, in the middle of nowhere, in a town all my friends have managed to escape.
I’m kind of in the same boat as you, only I’m on the edge of Somewhere because a bus ferries people into town during the morning and evening rush hours.
I worked at the library at my school (Grinnell College) and my job was filing card catalogue cards…piles and piles of card catalogue cards. I hid in the stacks and read magazines instead and eventually stopped going to work at all. The assistant librarian finally realized that I wasn’t showing up (we came and went as we pleased) and demanded that I meet with her. I ran over to the library and told her that I was a terrible employee and that she had every right to be angry and to terminate me. I told her the job was boring and that I would likely have trouble doing it on a regular basis. I listened to her frustration and anger and her NEEDS and nodded sympathetically (clearly, I was meant to be a social worker). As a result, she asked me to stay on. She didn’t ask me back the following year, however, which was a blessing because my girlfriend got me a job in the AV center.
I, like Riese, could write a book about this topic. Here are the highlights:
~Worked at Discovery Zone. Did b-day parties and came in early on Saturdays to clean the place (thank g-d I never had to clean the ball pit). One Sat. morning, after a month of being there, I walk in to a crying manager and pissed off employees. She walked in to a note on the door. “WE were bought out by Chuck E. Cheese.” We were all “laid off”/not needed anymore. Fuck that mouse. About a year later, I get a letter in the mail from Chuck himself saying I was getting a special chance to interview for a job with them. No thanks, ratface.
~I gave away a free iced coffee at a donut shop I had worked at for over a year. I was a trainer, a team lead, and I gave my friends a coffee (we ALL did it ALL the time). They had set up a sting operation in the parking lot that night with a computer in the car that was synced to our cash register and saw everything that got paid for vs. what walked out of the store. They came in, asked me if I did it, I knew honesty was the best policy, so I said yes. I said sorry. They said leave. I cried and cried. I went back for the next week (though I was told not to enter the premesis again) and made little signs to put on the table asking the loyal customers to rally to have me hired back. The employees there assisted me with this campaign. I was told to take the signs down and to stop doing this. My mgr and district mgr liked me and finally told me that the CEO wanted me to take a trip to see him and apologize and he would personally decide if I could have my job back! Then they wouldn’t let me talk to him directly, they had to have his assistants hear me grovel and pass it on. So creepy. He let me back, but he had my dignity forever.
~Got my first restaurant gig in college as a hostess and, after 6 hours on a training shift with a girl who did not train me and just kept talking about what time she would get off of work to go party, I never went back. The manager called me for 2 weeks, and even called my mom’s house (my emergency contact) and spoke to her and told her to have me call and explain why I quit. After one 6 hour shift she said I “left her high and dry”! No call was made.
~Finally, I’d worked at Applebee’s for 6 years, 3 of which were as a manager after a promotion prompted by my district manager. I moved to Seattle and wanted to stay with the company, so I went to work for a franchise (as opposed to the corporate store at home). It was g-d awful and the GM was so rude and greedy, after many things tipping me off that he was not a good man to work for (he supported the way his mostly Hispanic kitchen treated women poorly because he said “it’s there culture”)I finally had had the final straw. I told him I was on 5 closing shifts in a row and that he had promised it would never be more than 2. His answer was “there is no one else to do it, and I could do it, except the next day is my day off and I really don’t wanna waste it by sleeping in after being here late.” I was awestruck. That night I finished my shift, wrote a strongly worded letter (printed up and left in the “mgr log”) for all to see, and also emailed a letter to my gm’s boss to let him know what happened. I gave examples, but said that I would walk away and not fight for this job, that it wasn’t worth it. I never went back. They tried to contact me for months to find out all of the things I alluded to in my letter, but I didnt even want to revisit that experience.
Now I work for a non profit and read autostraddle all day…
“No thanks, ratface.” LOVED that part.
“No thanks, ratface” might be my new favorite phrase to say under my breath.
Your stories are a lot like my stories! I love the letter technique. It’s like you can quit or be fired and still totally get the last word to haunt them forever.
I once was hired from Dairy Queen because they thought I was autistic. Looking back, I probably could have sued for discriminatory practices…because I am not autistic…I was just a 16 year old with social anxiety disorder, ha!
***FIRED
maybe you ARE autistic?
I feel so bad for all you guys.
But, Riese! Wow. Just wow. For living through all that you deserve endless hugs and toasted marshmallows.
I know right? Instead I have $15K of credit card debt and a lot of pasta nights. But also — a lot of hugs!
jobs ARE overrated. I got ‘laid off’ ( i prefer fired, its more dramatic) from my fave job so far in Feb because of the bastard recession and haven’t been able to find one since so I’m poor and unemployed, but its defo ok because I’m honing my N64 skills to expert level. May be becoming malnutritioned from only eating cereal though.
i agree about word usage. where i work when someone was fired they called it “termination” which I thought was waaaay more dramatic than fired. legal agreed the terminology was too strong so now they call it “separation” which just sounds like the company is divorcing them and taking the kids. whatever happened to good old fashioned firing?
Me and Mario Kart 64 are pretty much besties. Banjo Kazooie is also pretty high up there.
i love mario kart!its much better than the new wii version. also goldeneye is played a lot in my flat and is useful for deciding who takes the rubbish out etc too. you can tell we’re all unemployed!
When we were growing up my brother, sister and I would play Goldeneye on slappers only mode to decide who would win arguments. We figured that if we weren’t allowed to literally beat each other up feeding each other virtual bitch slaps in 64-bit glory was the next obvious solution.
I had a job I loved working with people with traumatic brain injuries. I was supervisor of the overnight shift and loved being there so much that I worked extra shifts at least twice a week. Yeah, I know.
The trouble started when I noticed a girl on another shift and began a relentless “pursuit of the straight girl.” Eventually, I won her heart and she switched over on to my shift so that we’d be able to have more off work time together, aww. But of course, it was against company policy to date subordinates. However, I saw several of my fellow supervisors in relationships with other staff so I continued on with my relationship, but with a little added effort to keep it under wraps.
One day, after an administration meeting, the boss called me into her office and asked if I knew this girl and what my relationship with her was. I told her we were friends. It was then that I found out that she had been anonymously informed of our MySpace profiles and had seen them and the mushy comments we had left each other. She sent me home, telling me I couldn’t work until the situation was resolved. The next day I heard nothing. The day after that, she called my girlfriend and asked her six different ways if I had sexually harassed her. The following day, I was called in and fired. Come to find out some time later, the person who ratted me out was my friend and room mate at the time.
Now, in retrospect I wish that I had called her out on discrimination because all the hetero supervisor-staff couples weren’t ever in any trouble. Or at least spilled the beans that I wasn’t the only one doing it. But whatever, I suppose.
that’s the sexiest reason to get fired ever.
I’m on the jobhunting trail at the moment. I printed out loads of CVs to send out and then noticed on the last one that printed that I’d put my old phone number on it and had used up the last of the ink in the printer.
I have no money to fuel my Muller Rice addiction.
and kudos on the American Beauty quote.