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.” 
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. 
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. 
Working at a machining/widget manufacturing plant on routing & part grinding. Generally do a good job of things for a couple months, good quality, good rate etc., the job sucks ofc but what are you gonna do (absolutely terrible for carpal tunnel & other hand/arm joint shit). Still, I get compliments on part quality, I get stuff done, and I at least make some (shit) cash. Management is starting to talk about mandatory overtime and all but yknow this is base level US manufacturing shit.
Now, to preface the real jokerfying event, this is the same job where I, as a lighter skinned black person with a fro get asked day one “So what are you? Must have some Indian in ya, wouldn’t guess by the hair though”. Same sort of question I have gotten at pretty much every job I’ve ever had though so I just file it away as another in a long list of the same shit in conservative hell USA. (anyway great guess dude! great grandfather actually was chickahominy - that’s 500pts!) Edit: in retrospect at least I didn’t get any slurs thrown at me that I know of, that’s the benefit of not looking exactly like what these chuds picture in their heads, they usually gotta ask first to precision target the slurs.
Had a couple black coworkers come up to me one lunch break a day or two later and say “oh yeah this place is racist as fuck, we gotta stick together here yknow?”. Good signs no red flags
Status: initialLater on, my section gets a new part order for several hundred of the same widgets we usually work on, but the shift manager says it’s high priority and to drop everything else and switch over to these. This is a pain in the ass when you’re in the middle of a 600 part order ofc but whatever, I shift the grinding machine over to working on these. I notice they’re the same parts but of noticeably lower quality metal than the usual, which we’re going to auto manufacturers iirc.
I didn’t see the specifics of the contracts unless I asked, and I was curious this time. So they tell me these are part of a contract with General Dynamics! Not only that, but a coworker, ancient old white dude (as it seemed 50-60% of the employees were), tells me they get those specific orders all the time, and they’re being used in M61 Vulcan rotary guns! This mummified fuck then claps me on the shoulder and says “How’s it feel knowing you’re helping protect a lot of people - or kill a lot haha!”
Status: terminalQuit when I learned that about 50%+ of their manufacturing was military contracted, couldn’t do it. I had to cite “deeply held personal/religious beliefs” when asked for form purposes lol. Ngl I’m still fucked up about unwittingly building parts to killing machines. Shit that’s been used since Vietnam for massacres and imperialist power grabs. Feel like I should’ve idk, looked at their contracts or some shit before taking the job?! But everything here is linked to the MIC, fuck man. Should expect everything in this hell country to be suffused with white supremacy and linked intrinsically to the slaughter engine but fuck was it concentrated there.
Still feel guilty but now I kinda laugh too, it’s just so evil here. Anyway big crisis of faith yadda yadda, I helped the slaughter engine and kinda hate myself for it yadda yadda, I am currently heading to Arkham in the back seat of the Batmobile. Fuck this country
Everyone is a cog in the great machine. Some are just closer to the heart than others.
Unfortunately true. I’d worked plenty of shit jobs but never had my hands so directly on the raw material that keeps it running. Didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know about this country, the state of labor, the MIC etc, but did learn a bit about my sense of personal culpability for being involved in it I suppose. Can’t abstract it away here
I quit one job developing a video platform because, as it turns out, that video platform was specifically for selling pseudoscience to practicing doctors. I quit another because I was making logistics software and it turned out their major clients were arms dealers. The first one wasn’t my fault because they laundered their client list very well. But after the second one I made sure to start researching the company’s clients beforehand as well as just asking during the interview. Turns out that hiring managers tend to know what’s unpalatable and downplay it heavily
I worked in a machine shop running CNCs. I started by working on parts for microscopes and electrical housings and made what felt like an army’s worth of assault weapon uppers before I quit a week later.
The only major factory in my state is owned by General Dynamics, much of my state’s economy depends on imperialism.
My first job as a teen was dreadful. I’m socially anxious and was incredibly awkward when I was younger, but I was always polite and patient with people. The real problem was my parents. They made me get a job, which you’d think is pretty normal for a teen, learn the value of money and all, but my step-siblings didn’t have to work and got new computers and cars from their other parents, so here I was with no car, expected to get to work and back everyday. I had to go to school, get dropped off from the bus at the church, cross two roads, and go to the other end of a stripmall to the dollar store I worked at. Then I’d work until dark and have to wait in the parking lot for them to pick me up because while they wanted me to have the job, they didn’t want to help me get a car, so they’d consistently come an hour late, pretend like they forgot, and act annoyed that they had to go out of their way to drive me home. And I didn’t have a phone to call and was too anxious to ask to use a phone. So then I’d come home and do all the chores in the house while my step-siblings just did whatever I guess. I was literally the red headed stepchild trope but without the red hair. And the real kicker was, I never saw a dime of the money I made working. My stepmom took the card I got paid on and I never got any of it. One day she accused me of getting a new card to access the money because she had somehow lost track of a few hundred dollars. My money that she lost, I don’t know how you even manage that, it’s on the damn card, you should be able to track where the money goes. Not that I would have seen it anyway. Eventually dealing with my stepmom had me so sick with anxiety and depression everyday I started messing up change and stuff and got fired.
Another time when I was older and not living with those people, I had a nightshift at a walmart where I’d get home, go to sleep, and be so worn out I’d only wake up just in time to go to work again. It was so bad that once they fired me for calling out too much I literally cheered in my car. I wasn’t sure how I’d pay for food or rent but I was just so happy not to have to work there any more.
Then there was a fast food place I worked, Sonic I think.
self harm
I got to a point where I just couldn’t take working these shitty jobs that didn’t pay enough to afford living. I took an entire bottle of sleeping pills with the intent to kill myself. I’m gonna get real graphic, but you imagine sleeping pills and you think “aww, just drifting off peacefully in your sleep, how romantic”. Nah. Your body isn’t stupid, it knows when it’s been poisoned and it doesn’t want to die even if you do. I didn’t know projectile vomiting was a real thing, but it came out like that scene in the Exorcist. I passed out in a literal puddle of vomit, woke up not dead, and then… I just went back to work. What was I gonna do? My entire body felt like how your limbs do when they’ve fallen asleep and are waking up, that prickly feeling but all over, for about three days after that.
Then there was the bakery where we were literally working 12 hour days 7 days a week, and I had a 40 minute commute living in a disgusting, moldy, rat infested trailer with my mom and her husband and getting giardia or some shit. When I saved up from the bakery I got my own place, but I couldn’t take working that much for long.
Then I worked at a Food City where I didn’t get paid enough to afford the food I was stocking. I was literally having to live off of 10 dollars a week for food.
I was actually at my wits end again a year or more ago when I lost my car and was coasting on Covid rent relief to not be homeless. Luckily, there was a place within walking distance where I work now. I don’t have to work too much, I don’t have to interact with too many people, I get to dick around a lot and my boss is pretty cool as far as bosses go. So who the fuck knows where I’d be now if not for pure dumb luck. I’m pathetically allergic to work and I know full well there’s no assistance for people here, so I don’t know what I’d do if this job stops working out for me.
Getting paid under min wage to develop and deploy software that if wrong could ruin people’s lives in a cowboy dev shop with no guidance or tools with a boss who proudly told me his teenage pass time was throwing bricks at cars from an overpass.
No automated deployment manual installing bug fixes onto 140 tablets one by one in a hotel room the night before the event, working the entire weekend unpaid and then being expected to turn up on Monday.
oh and long car journeys to said events with boss driving he demanded i sit there in silence no radio and can’t look at my phone for several hour drives. I learned how to lucid dream cos i was tempted to grab the wheel and crash us into something.
He radicalised me as well by writing down my wage and his wage on a piece of paper and telling me this is why I need to work for free over my weekends to deliver x because the money paid needs to cover his wage.
Permanent psychological damage.
He radicalised me as well by writing down my wage and his wage on a piece of paper and telling me this is why I need to work for free over my weekends to deliver x because the money paid needs to cover his wage.
Amazing shit. Truly a mindboggling strategy. “I am your boss. You must pay my wage with your work because my work is not worth my wage.” Bro how do you think that will go?
Thing is this guy was the antichrist. He didn’t do things for money he quite literally just liked watching people suffer. He did it to make me feel bad that was all.
So glad he’s dead now. Funnily enough died very shortly after retiring, I think torturing his staff is all that kept him going.
World’s dumbest power move asshole. What a douche.
I have so many. I could talk about the time when I worked in ice cream. We had a dollar cone day, all cones (regular sugar and cup) were a dollar. Waffle cones were still like 4.50 because bigger cone more ice cream. Almost everyone understands this but I explained it anyway to every single person that came up to the window all day. So I’m like 6 hours in with no break at this point (I was clocked out for my break but told to keep working anyway). Some lady comes in with her family of 6 and orders 6 waffle cones. I start explaining and she snaps at me 'I know I know go do your job." Okay. 6 waffle cones out that window and that total is like 30 bucks or whatever. She hands me 6 . I try to explain again and she says it’s 6. So her response is to cuss me out, a 17 year old. And then throw her ice cream in my face. My manager did not let me go clean myself up, wrote me up for being rude to the customer, and then took the bill that lady just ran out on out of my paycheck for the day. Which was probably most of it because I was only making minimum wage back in the early 2000s.
My last day at that place I left an hour early, without doing any of the clean up tasks, with 6 pints of ice cream, some cones, and some scoops, to go to a party. I did not pay. I still have one of those scoops too real nice scoop.
I started that job a Rules Matter Republican and ended that job jokerified and fully believing that society was beyond repair and that it was specifically western governments fault for it. It wasn’t until like a decade later that I unlearned the rest of it through a host of other radicalization moments and realized oh huh I’m communist. But that was one of the first.
The manager absolutely saw him and the customer as the same class and you were a slave that embarrassed him wtf
They totally fucking do this it’s wild
jfc, i had a grocery store job for my first job that was mostly annoying but nothing really like that. i was also completely uninterested in doing the shitty job and would just walk around and eat cookies in the backroom.
CW: Death/suicide/violence against women
When I was in my twenties I worked at a 7-11 for several years, now the experience of being promoted to assistant manager was its own radicalizing experience, watching all the corporate training videos full of casual racism. But that is not what this story is about, this story is about my friend [redacted]. We worked together for a few months and bonded over growing up poor as shit, hating cops etc. I even went to her boyfriend’s house with her to help him harvest his weed plants. She didn’t smoke herself, because she had recently graduated from a rehab program. One morning I get a phone call from a former coworker/friend who’s aunt had come in to shop and found the store was empty, but the bathroom was locked. I lived across the street at the time so he asked me to go check on her, we both worried she had relapsed and maybe passed out in the bathroom.
So I go over there and there is now a cop who asks me if I can open the door, saying since there is no sign of foul play he can’t kick in the bathroom door without a warrant and asks me to open it. I check the handle and sure enough it is locked. I knock a few times and call her name, but don’t get any answer. So I give the door a firm shove with my should, it’s a shitty thin plyboard door with a latch that is fairly easy to force open. I immediately knew something was really wrong because I felt a weight on the other side of the door and it shut itself on me as I jerked back in surprise.
At this point a thick pool of blood flowed out from under the door and I immediately lost my shit and retreated from the back room, figuring now officer fuck face can actually do something and my mind just collapsing on me.
I would soon learn that an ex-boyfriend who she met in rehab and who didn’t graduate the program had come in and forced her into the bathroom and shot her and himself in a murder/suicide. Now here comes the exact moment when I decided I would dedicate my life to destroying capitalism: This happened at about 11:30 AM. The crime scene cleaning company was in and out in a few hours after their bodies were taken away and the store was open again by 8PM that night. My boss told me “you don’t have to come in tomorrow if you need some time away”. No offer of any counseling, no empathy for the poor girl that had been murdered in his store just hours before. That guy died of heart failure a few years back and I hope it was the most painful possible way someone can die of that. I hope it was fucking slow.
And on top of all that the cleanup crew didn’t even do a very good job, months later I went to fix the soap dispenser on the wall and it still had dried blood behind it.
Bathrooms, particularly public ones all smell like that place on that day to me now.
spoiler
ugh. i feel for you. i never had to deal with finding a friend like that before, but ive been active in the local trans community long enough that ive had many people die on us and its always heart wrenching to see such kind people die to shit like this. its always worse cause usually when one suicide or bad thing happens there is a big spat of them that ripple through and you gotta be very vigilant. i dont wanna be too detailed because ive already had enough things on here to identify me, but fuck cops and fuck how they handle anti-trans violence. i regularly think about how many intelligent, kind, thoughtful people die or are traumatized so early in life and how that effects social progress. death to america.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
I think of this quote by Stephen Jay Gould often.
yep, thats the one. it haunts me
That quote stays with me more than most other quotes.
I truly don’t know how to properly respond to that; that kind of experience is very personal and life defining.
I had a similar one that has lead to some of my own strong opinions, no matter how trivial they seem on the outside.
Without going too far into the details, (CW: death, some morbid details)
spoiler
I had a close friend, a coworker actually (tying this to the topic thread, if only somewhat) take his own life, only minutes after I thought he was fine when the call ended, and I was very, very wrong and failed to see the signs. I was there when the noose was cut on the freeway overpass. He was a tormented, hurt, but wonderful young man that had nothing at the end but those that cared about him enough to show up but we were all too poor to put on a funeral, instead doing an impromptu vigil on the spot before the county coroner took the body away.
Later, I had to watch several people die that did not want to go, were not ready, and would probably never have been ready, both in pain and afraid. They did not have a cinematically touching final few moments, only wails of terror and labored rattling breathing until the breathing stopped. I then had to clean up what their corpses expelled not long after that, bowels emptying out as a matter of course. The smell never fully left those rooms.
That’s a big part of why when someone tries to play internet tough guy and say something I watch for entertainment is “for babies” because there isn’t enough death or killing in it, underneath it all, I sort of envy them because I wouldn’t wish them the experience of scrubbing fecal matter and lung fluid out of wallboards, nor the smell of already-decaying flesh wafting out where the flies can get it, or for that matter the unforgettable stench of bowel-sludge, black as tar, no matter what pompous asses such Vincent Adultman tryhards sound like to me.
Life’s brutal and cruel and most of all indifferent for many at the end, many that are forgotten and ignored because that reality is frightening to those that still have time left and they avoid the actually dying no matter how “mature” they otherwise claim they are. For that reason I don’t derive much pleasure from cynically gratuitous death/killing spectacles on screens.
Yeah another more recent thing was when I was at work and a local unhoused guy was buying some food, and began to have a major seizure. I accompanied him out to the bus stop outside the store and sat with him watching his convulsions get stronger, until I was sitting on the sidewalk after he started to slip off the bench and just did what I could to make sure he didn’t smack his head on the pavement.
I asked if he wanted me to call him an ambulance and he managed to get out the words “can’t afford”. So I sat, and I waited, and I made sure it had passed and that he was safe for the moment before I had to go back inside.
I’ve volunteered to do org work for the unhoused.
Being untrained as an orderly and trying to pull an old man having a seizure out of a bus while his limbs were each individually fighting me and my team was unforgettable.
I didn’t know his full medical condition and perhaps never will, but all he wanted when he came to and was hydrated enough to be stable was his pineapple-shaped plastic drinking vessel which still reeked of the little bit of booze still sloshing in it. Fuck it, I gave it back and lied about its contents because he had gone through enough.
I asked if he wanted me to call him an ambulance and he managed to get out the words “can’t afford”. So I sat, and I waited, and I made sure it had passed and that he was safe for the moment before I had to go back inside.
I’m drifting off of my own topic, but that reminds me of one more moment. One unhoused woman cried, I mean wailed, because I actually stopped and listened to her while working for the same org and gave her an extra pair of socks and helped her fill out some replacement paperwork for what had been destroyed by some fratboy assholes that wrecked her shopping cart and left her and her stuff stranded when she couldn’t drag it any farther. To paraphrase what she said that night, she said that was the first time she felt human in a while.
I asked if he wanted me to call him an ambulance and he managed to get out the words “can’t afford”.
In the future, you generally only need to pay for the ambulance if they take you somewhere. It is usually gonna be helpful to have a paramedic assist you even if getting to the hospital is going to be an issue.
Starting my first job ever, as a server, on my first day, there was a huge blow up because the manager, who was also married, had been sleeping with two different servers and they both found out at the same time. I guess not really jokerfying but I was like oh damn there’s a real power difference here
The power difference was fucking nothing happened to that manager, I assume.
Yep lol he got to stay and two servers were fired
I am a software dev. My first company was a dumpsterfire that I continued working at for way too long due to being young and high on impostor syndrome. What drove me to finally quit was a one-two punch of bad experiences.
I was being paid significantly below the market average for my position and seniority. Company gets a big contract and the owner calls a big meeting with all hands when he boasts about how amazing it will be for our growth. Manager on my section has a meeting with me and my teammates telling us about how our next raises will be significant and how our division will have a booming expansion. In a 1 on 1 meeting, calls me their top performer. Two months later my raise comes in. It ends up being smaller than the one I received the previous year and still puts me way below average.
Context for part two: my company was doing outsourcing. I am also a woman who up to that point had somehow avoided the general shittyness of the tech industry towards us.
creep behavior
I have an interview with a new client. This was at the start of the pandemic, we had just switched to permanent work from home, but my company issued laptop hadn’t come in yet. I connect on my desktop PC to the meeting, explain my situation and apologize for not having a webcam. HR lady says it’s fine, they are also in the process of adapting to the whole online interviews thing and we chat for 10 minutes about my experience before the technical interviewers join. One of them immediately insists I turn on my camera, HR explains my issue, he relents, and we begin the actual tech interview. I pass the interview and get assigned to what’s essentially a junior front end dev position while I am a mid level back end dev. I ask my company HR about this and they say they’ll clarify the issue and get back to me. One week later the PM on my assigned project takes me aside and asks me how I got put on front end work when my recent job experience was all back end. He also reveals that the people I had my interview with had boasted to him about how they “found Jobasha’s Facebook account and she is a bombshell” and how fun it will be with me on the team, some time before the interview took place. I realize this is why they insisted on turning on my camera at first and also that they stalked some poor random woman’s Facebook profile, because I didn’t have one. I also find out that my HR did basically nothing and the PM contacted me on his own initiative.
I quit at the end of that month and almost doubled my salary.
I was about to ask if I knew you but then the last line :/
Not a radicalizing moment for me, that had already happened long earlier, but the moment I went full joker and never returned was during the beginning of covid. I watched a Walmart employee grand slam slug a chud dipshit with a plastic Wiffle bat at the door for trying to shove him and an old man out of the way and run into the store without a mask. Watching that sack of shit flop like an overpaid soccer player and hit the fucking concrete like, well, a sack of shit was like seeing the face of god. I finally knew the dictatorship of the proletariat would be realised beautifully by arming retail workers.
Worst job I ever had was in high school during the summer at a catering business in Chicago. I had to work in a walk in refrigerator opening boxes of raw chicken and toss the pcs into a large stainless cement mixer then open a bag of breading toss that in and run the mixer for 10 minutes. Then I had to reach in and pull the chicken parts out of the mixer and put them in stainless steel baskets and put them on a shelf in the cooler. There was a puddle of chicken blood on the floor and after the first hour of my shift my gym shoes and socks were soaked in blood and I could feel it squishing between my toes. By the end of shift my pants were also soaked with chicken blood and raw chicken juice and I had it all over my arms up to my pits. All I had on was a t-shirt and jeans so I would freeze my ass off for 8 hours and then I had to walk 2 miles in 90 degree summer heat and by the time I got home I smelled like a bio hazard.
jesus fucking christ
Not sure if this counts but just LOOKING for a job and ALWAYS getting told “no”, if not ghosted.
No one wants to hire anymore. You’ll see “now hiring signs” everywhere, but they’ll snobbishly blow you off if you actually apply. Who the hell are they looking for? Jeff Bezos to step down and work for their shitty bank franchise for 15 an hour pushing papers? Since when did finding something I literally require for my survival have to be such a big deal? Why are jobs only for a small elite of overachievers these days?
It feels so dehumanizing just to apply for job. You’re a piece of meat and you have to market yourself.
Finally getting a job after being ghosted for basic entry-level positions for months…
And then you find out they were lying about the hours, tips, and responsibilites.
Basically happened to me right now for my seasonal job.
I have no good answers. It’s like screaming into the abyss
Shortly after Covid started, my warehouse got a new manager, and he gathered everybody from every part of the warehouse together in the break area and gave us all a speech about how much he cared about our safety. Everybody was right next to each other and nobody was wearing a mask, while the TV displayed information about social distancing. The same day, they informed us about a new call-out policy where if you’re sick, you still have to come in and they’ll decide whether you’re sick enough to go home, because “too many people are faking.” Only job I ever quit with no notice, I remember telling my supervisor “People are dying,” and she replied, “I have a business to run.”
My only regret is not setting the place on fire.
I dedicated a lot of time to a small, local answering service because I cared about the actual business - connecting patients with care outside their doctors’ office hours - but eventually realized that the only people that got holiday time with their family were either personal friends of the owner or just straight up said they would quit if they were forced to work overtime on holidays.
This was my lesson: local and small doesn’t mean it’s good for the community - sometimes they just haven’t found enough people to exploit yet to be an obvious bad guy.
Having to take in my estranged dad for two years because he had nowhere to die with dignity. Worst two years of my life and literally no one gave a shit.
And Libs in my life who witnessed those two years to this day keep telling me people’s retirement should be a personal choice even though they know most people’s fate will mirror my fathers.
Yeah. Let’s party.
Bonus mini-story!
There was one time where a full blown boomer, making exactly this face
didn’t like that he had to be waited to be seated during a combination Sunday/holiday rush hour (ask any restaurant worker about how fucked up Sunday tends to be when local churches disperse their flocks).He waited, relatively calmly, no yelling for a change… but with his entire ass planted against the register, legs dangling off the counter like a little kid. He just sat there, maintaining the
face, for about 15 minutes, even making small talk to the still-incoming unseated people about what terrible lazy people worked there because he didn’t get to get seated until someone vacated their seat.I only worked fast food kitchens but had friends in sit-down restaurants and OMFG the after-church people are the worst, everywhere.
Nothing entitles the average ungrateful shithead like the Love Of God.
Maybe we need more fire and brimstone sermons, put the fear of Hell back into these people
I mean, if the whole do unto others, log and speck, “what you do to the least of these, you do to me” stuff didn’t stick, it probably will actually require fire and brimstone to get the point across
I would like to challenge that idea, as I am certain they are getting those sermons, but the people they claim are going to hell are those who deserve it least. Which gives them their superiority complex, as they see their dickishness as part of the punishment for the people God hates.
They act how they think the left acts: “I am good, and you are bad. Therefore, as a reward for me being good. I get to do bad things to you as punishment for your crimes of being you.”
My first job was working in fast food when I was 14 years old. My parents had applied for me thinking it would be a good way to make some money and get independence. None of my experiences are as bad as some comrades here, but they’re burned into my brain.
It was exhausting work for an out of shape autistic nerd, having to run like mad all day in a hot, loud kitchen. I got a dressing down once because I would clean the grease off the flat top between cooking using two hands until the halfway point, then switching to one at the end. Procedures and rules said two hands the whole time, but I regularly burned my knuckle on the clamshell top and wanted to avoid it. This was an official writing up that contributed to me losing my job, and I could not understand it at the time.
The worst of it was that everyone knew I was a kid and had school, and yet I would often get closing shifts during the week. It wouldn’t be so bad except closing didn’t have a set time. We were open late, and closing was officially at 1 in the morning, but you stayed until the job was done. You were paid for the work, but the end time would change.
Despite being 14, I would without fail be tasked with being the last there, scrubbing all our equipment out, sweeping and mopping the floors, while the managers sat in the back doing book keeping. My mom would sit in the parking lot, waiting, knowing she also had to work in the morning, until I was allowed out. Usually this was about 2, sometimes closer to 3. I didn’t know enough to stand up for myself, and I couldn’t effectively anyway as a literal child, and nobody backed me up. I never had a closing shift where a coworker said “hey, I’ll take this one”.
So I’d get driven home and crash sometime around 3. I’d wake up three or four hours later and go to school, tired as fuck and unable to concentrate, and then go do it again that evening. I vividly remember how my hands just always smelled like onions and cleaning agent, no matter how often I washed them.
It’s nothing like what other comrades experienced here, and lasted only three months before I was fired, but I can still vividly remember how shit my first job was, and how early I learned capitalism will fuck you over.
