I work as a beach lifeguard. I am ending my shift and signing out at the office for the day. Meanwhile, my manager is being confronted by a member of the public at the door. She looks livid.

Woman: “My boyfriend applied to be a lifeguard, and you said no!”

Manager: “We get a lot of applicants. What was his name?”

Woman: “[Boyfriend].”

Manager: “Oh, yeah. He was not… suitable for the role.”

Woman: “You failed him for his drug test!”

Manager: “I’m not permitted to—”

Woman: “I don’t take drugs! So you’re lying about that!”

Manager: “Wait… you… don’t…”

Woman: “He’d done, like, maybe a couple of joints the weekend before. It shouldn’t be a big deal! He used my pee instead for your stupid drug test, and it was clean, and you still said no, so you lied!”

Manager: “Ma’am, we didn’t reject him because there were drugs in his drug test. We rejected him because we knew he wasn’t using his own urine.”

Woman: “And how did you know that?!”

Manager: “Because it’s very unlikely that he is pregnant.”

The woman’s face goes pale. An eternity of silence passes between the two of them.

Manager: “Congratulations?”

Related:
¡Que Embarazada!, Part 3
¡Que Embarazada!, Part 2
¡Que Embarazada!

I was a manager at a fast food place for a while. You’d think my worst employee would have been some teenager who slacked off or didn’t listen.

Mind you, I’m only twenty. I was a manager from nineteen to twenty-one. This new employee did not like that I — a child, as she put it — was above her. She would constantly undermine my authority. And I wasn’t a micromanager, and I didn’t even get loud. My way was, “Hey, d’you want to check on the lobby?” Not demanding but asking nicely. That’s how I was trained by my manager.

I would get, “No, I don’t,” instead of, “Nah, but sure.” So, I started saying, “I spotted a few dirty tables. Could you take care of it?”

Eventually, I appealed to the owners to have a talk with [Employee] and me privately about her attitude and unwillingness to accept me as her manager. In the talk, [Employee] made it very clear that she would not ever accept a teenager (keyword) as her superior. I was twenty, but I do look younger.

When we explained I was well out of high school, her attitude flipped. Suddenly, she was like, “Oh! So, you are an adult. That’s okay, then.”

We still let her go for her blatant disregard for authority. That and she was a lazy s***, anyway.

I work in a restaurant. Certain people are just slow, and no amount of practice is going to change that. They just move at a pace that isn’t conducive to working a cook line. You can do all the coaching in the world, and it won’t matter.

There’s this one guy who moves at the speed of mud. His mouth is always slacked open, and he speaks in such a monosyllabic fashion that you’d wonder if it was a put-on.

We have Texas toast where I work. The procedure for dropping Texas toast is as follows. Pick up a piece of bread, brush garlic butter across the piece of bread, and drop it on the flat top for forty-five seconds. Flip for an additional forty-five seconds. Serve. The end. Simple. I can drop an entire loaf of Texas Toast in under twenty seconds, followed by the two forty-five-second cook times. This is a SIMPLE PROCEDURE.

[Coworker] just stands there with his loose jaw flapping in the wind, meticulously placing garlic butter on every square inch of each piece of bread, resulting in one f****** piece of toast being completely toasted by the time the next piece hits the flat top.

I’ve gone over to him and demonstrated time and again.

Me: “It’s a quick process. Brush, drop, brush, drop, brush, drop, brush, drop, hit timer. Wait. Flip. Hit timer again. Serve.”

He nods his head affirmatively and then proceeds to butter every square inch of the bread again.

He walks one foot per minute to the fridge to grab cheese sticks to drop in the fryer. He spends five solid minutes putting chicken on a plate.

He’s horrible. Half the time, I just tell him to go do dishes.

I keep making a case to lose him, but my manager always says:

Manager: “We can’t really fire him because, technically, he’s not doing anything wrong exactly; he’s just doing a poor version of the correct thing.”

Thankfully, we got a new head chef in who thought he was Gordon Ramsay, and while he was loud and demanding, he did not suffer inefficiencies, and [Coworker] was out of there quicker than… well… quicker than anything that slowpoke had probably experienced in his life.

He’s probably still slowly walking to the back to pick up his coat…

I was working at a Thai restaurant. I didn’t have a whole lot of experience, but most of the employees were from Thailand, and they needed a frontman who spoke good English.

One day, not many people were coming in, so one of the managers asked me in busted-up English to help cut chicken — medium-thin pieces, not much instruction. So, I followed the other sous-chef’s example. Apparently, that was too thick.

The manager came back in and lost it. She started by loudly saying they were too thick while holding up fistfuls of raw chicken and throwing a few pieces on the floor and in the sink like a four-year-old. I could see customers coming to the front, so I told her we’d continue this later, but she blocked the exit and continued to rant.

Next, she paced around the kitchen while grumbling and pulling at her hair with her raw chicken-covered hands, ignoring the line of customers. Eventually, she sent the sous chef, who didn’t speak much English, to the front, and demanded I stir a big pot of soup for the rest of the day.

As I was stirring the soup, [Manager] went back to chastising me in some language I couldn’t understand, pacing, and grumbling in a tone your parents may have used when you pissed the bed at age three.

She then looked at the chicken on the cutting board, turned to me, and said:

Manager: “We can’t let [Boss] see this.”

She then proceeded to pick up pieces of chicken, toss them onto the drain in the middle of the kitchen floor, and waffle-stomp them through the grate.

I angrily told her to stop it and grow up, but she shot back with, “Back to pot!” in a glass-shattering voice and continued to stomp the chicken down the drain. After she had stomped a bunch of chicken down the drain, it clogged, so she went over to the sink and started mashing pieces of chicken down that drain with her palms.

[Manager] harassed me for the rest of the day and kept coming back up to me with pieces of chicken in her hands, holding them inches from my face, and yelling about how thick they were.

As she started angrily hacking away at the rest of the chicken with a cleaver, she kept muttering:

Manager: “If [Boss] was here, he would say, ‘You’re fired!’ That is what he would say!”

When people out front ordered chicken dishes, I heard her apologizing.

Manager: “Oh, I so sorry the chicken so ugly. F****** [My Name] cut it so bad! I not know why [Boss] not fire him!”

Eventually, [Boss] came back, and here’s what he saw. The soup I was stirring was burnt, and none of the dishes were done. I had tried a few times to turn the soup off and start the dishes, but [Manager] would come charging back in, brandishing a rice paddle, and screeching, “Back to pot! Back to pot!” Also, the sous chef who didn’t speak English was out front having a terrible day.

[Manager] tried to cover her a***, but [Boss] went through the security footage and saw the whole thing. He told the sous chef and me that we could leave early, and we heard them yelling in some language I couldn’t understand as we left.

The next day, the health inspector came. Imagine his surprise when he walked in to the smell of rotting chicken, while two employees were fishing mangled pieces of chicken out of the floor and sink drain. The inspector nearly reported the restaurant. [Manager] was fired soon thereafter.

I get a call from my boss on my day off. I’m relatively new to my role and not very senior, but my boss seems cool and likes that I am a quick study.

Boss: “I know you’re off, but I really need you to come in. I’ll pay double.”

Me: “Wow, something bad must have happened.”

Boss: “[Manager] borrowed the company car last night, and by ‘borrowed’ I mean that he basically stole it because it wasn’t authorized. He got drunk and crashed our car last night and caused a scene. Almost killed the three passengers in the car with him!”

Me: “That’s crazy! But, don’t you have [Manager #1], [Manager #2], or [Manager #3] you could call instead of me?”

Boss: “Who do you think those three passengers were?”

Fastest promotion I ever had!