The very first real job I ever had (besides delivering papers) was at a fish-and-chips chain restaurant, and the franchise was owned by a husband and wife. I started out as a dishwasher and ended up working on the line as a cook within about five months due to the high turnover.

With my departure from the dish pit, we needed another set of hands. A friend of mine dropped off her resume and was hired on the spot — great! Due to further turnover, she too ended up in the kitchen, and an older man was hired for the dishes. For reference, I am also female.

To my friend and me, this was an amazing arrangement, and we felt really special. From the outside looking in, it was illegal in so many ways; we were fourteen years old and essentially ran the entire kitchen from 3:30 pm to 10:00 pm every night, including school nights. Our parents were both very old-fashioned and believed this hard work would be good for us, so they also were none the wiser about the legalities of it.

One day, we were scheduled for our regular shift, but midway through school, I was called to the office and dismissed early from school. My grandfather had fallen down some stairs, broken his hip and knee, and been rushed into surgery. He survived and was fine, though he now walks with a permanent limp, but in that moment, it was incredibly scary, and due to his medical state, the doctors were extremely concerned.

On the way to the hospital with my mom, I texted my friend that I’d be either late or absent, and I called the restaurant owner to advise the same. He said it was no problem, to take the night off, and he would cover for me. My friend said the same, and it ended up being a super slow evening anyway; Mondays always were.

The next day, I went to school and work as normal. It was Tuesday, which was All You Can Eat Fish & Chips Day — INSANITY every Tuesday. We would not get a break or any relief between the 4:00 pm early birds and the 7:30 pm late diners; it was constantly hectic between those hours. The only relaxation we had was when it slowed down around 8:00 pm. The dishwasher no-call-no-showed, so my friend and I were pulling double duty by keeping a constant flow of food and clean dishes.

At 8:30, the owner came up to me.

Owner: “[My Name], pop in the office, and let’s chat.”

Me: “Is everything okay?”

Owner: “You lied to me.”

Me: “Sorry? About what?”

Owner: “Your grandfather didn’t go to the hospital; that was a lie. You no-showed to work to go party.”

Me: “Um… what? No, that’s not true! You can even call my mom!”

Owner: “I looked at your [old, obsolete social media website that no longer exists], and you posted a photo of yourself with a bunch of teenagers last night.”

Me: “You mean my cousins? At the hospital?”

Owner: “It doesn’t look like a hospital.”

Me: “It literally is. Look!”

I showed him the photo on my phone and pointed out the hospital chairs and window behind us.

Owner: “No, you’re a liar, and I don’t employ liars who make up such vulgar fibs to get out of work.”

Me: “I have never missed a single day of work! Ever! I’m always here right after school and stay until after closing to finish my work! I’m sorry, but please call my parents and ask them!”

Owner: “I’m going to have to let you go.”

I started to cry softly and went back into the kitchen. In my inexperienced and childish mind, I had to finish my shift and duties… so I continued doing dishes!

After about twenty minutes, the owner walked over.

Owner: “I fired you! Get out!”

My parents took an hour to come to pick me up as they were busy when I called, so I sat behind the restaurant in an alley crying. My friend quit the next day after hearing what had happened; she thought I had gone home early to spend time with my grandfather.

The restaurant declined severely in quality and service, and it ended up being sold to a new owner a few years later after the previous one cited “staffing issues”. I wonder why!

I work in an office building owned by a moderately sized tech company. In our employee café, we have two vending machines that have some operational issues. The machine doesn’t seem capable of doing math properly and will commonly say you have “Insufficient Credits” after buying a single $1.00 drink, even though you are pre-authorized for $5 when you swipe your card. This makes it rather hard to get more than one drink if you are trying to get something for yourself and your coworkers.

One day, I walk in just in time to witness [Employee #1] at the vending machine.

Employee #1: “NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON!”

She slams her forehead into the machine, I assume not knowing how thick the glass is. This causes her to fall backward. She ends up hitting a low bench and falling backward over it, taking out the bench, several potted plants, a rather large Christmas decoration, and one of the table-and-chair sets. She sighs, lying in the results of the chaos, and I walk up. 

Me: “Are you using the machine?”

Employee #1: “Oh, no. Please, go ahead.”

Me: “Do you need help?”

Employee #1: “I’m good down here.”

Me: “Do you need… mental help?”

Employee #1: “Don’t we all?”

Me: “What did the machine do to you?”

Employee #1: “I swiped for $5 and got one bottle of water. Then, it said I had insufficient credits to get another one. Then, I swiped again, and it went into cash-only mode, so I put a dollar in it, but apparently, when you use cash, there’s a fifty-cent upcharge. And then, it wouldn’t give me my dollar back.”

Me: “Ah.”

Employee #1: “Yeah.”

Me: “How has the rest of your day been? Been okay?”

Employee #1: “Absolute bulls***.”

She proceeds to tell me about her day, project deadlines, a manager who needs a foot up his a**, bad clients, and unhelpful IT representatives, as we clean up the mess she made and I evaluate her for injuries. 

Apparently, her manager has been overloading her. Every time someone can’t finish something or he doesn’t trust them to do it, he forces it on her with no extension of deadlines and no increase in compensation. As a result, her work quality and speed have obviously dropped, and that same manager is now threatening to demote her, fire her, or cut her pay.

She says she demanded that everyone take back their work and that the load be redistributed, but the manager replied, “That’s not within the goals of the department,” and, “Your coworkers are comfortable where they are; it would be unfair to increase their workloads.” She says it’s possible that he is playing favorites, and when she called him out on it, he threatened to fire her again. 

Somewhere around the end of her story, another employee comes in and goes to the vending machine. 

Employee #2: “Hey! Free dollar!”

He takes a dollar out of the bill accepter. We have no idea when it was dispensed. 

Me: “Oh, that’s hers!” *Gesturing to [Employee #1]*

Employee #2: “Finders keepers!” *Laughs*

Employee #1: “Is that what [Secretary] said when she stole you from your wife?”

There is dead silence in the room. [Employee #2] is very much still happily married. He silently returns the dollar to [Employee #1] and leaves the room without even buying his drink. 

Me: “Who the h*** was that?”

Employee #1: “That was my manager.”

Me: “Oh. Oh, no.”

Employee #1: “God, that felt good. I’m going to go up there and quit. F*** this place.”

I have no idea what happened when [Employee #1] went upstairs, but she didn’t quit. Rumor has it that she went up to her office, decided, “F*** it,” and phoned the owner of the company. He was shocked to learn about her gripes.

The owner then went to [Employee #1]’s manager’s manager, and they looked into everything together. Whatever they found triggered an investigation that spread throughout the company and led to a restructuring.

[Employee #1] is now in her previous manager’s position, and ever since her promotion, the second-floor employees have all been much happier. The owner of the company is now also around more, switching from a nearly pure work-from-home schedule to being in the building four out of his five working days. 

The vending machines are still there, though. 

I never got to ask [Employee #1] why she shouted, “Neil deGrasse Tyson!” before headbutting the machine, but I have a meeting with her soon, so maybe it will come up.

I’m a professional chef, and I have been for a few years. In Australia, apprentice chefs are trained in a sort of college where we learn about 150 recipes. Many of the recipes are provided to the students in bulky, finicky booklets that you wouldn’t really want to take anywhere with you, so I started writing some of the recipes in a separate notebook along with some other recipes I’d learned from coworkers or family members. I created a sort of pseudo-cookbook, and I would often bring this book into the kitchen so I would remember ingredient quantities and cooking times. Eventually, I would leave the book in the kitchen pretty much around the clock.

I soon found out that some of the other chefs in the kitchen were using my cookbook to check official recipes for the restaurant we worked for (as typically the head chef would have to tell them and this got annoying for everyone). This restaurant was a part of a popular sports club in the area, so consistency was extremely important to management. Therefore, having a written record of the new recipes or changes to long-time recipes was very important.

As it turned out, management had stopped making changes to the official club recipe book a few months before I even started, so my book had become the de facto official recipe book. For a while, this was no issue to me, and I kept adding new recipes to it throughout the next few years.

However, after my third year working there, I finished my studies and became fully qualified as a chef, so I suddenly became more expensive to keep on as a staff member. Therefore, management started looking for any reason to replace me with a new apprentice.

Eventually, they found someone to replace me and gave a half-a**ed reason for firing me and told me:

Management: “Take all your things and leave. You can no longer offer what we are looking for.”

So, I took everything I owned — including the notebook with all the club’s recipes — and left.

For a few days, not a whole lot happened, but slowly, the club’s reviews started complaining about bland food, dry cakes, inconsistent classic recipes, and every other food-related thing you could think of. At one point, there were fifty negative reviews in a single day. For our town, that was a massive amount in one day. It felt pretty d*** good since I felt they deserved it and left me unemployed on short notice. However, I was quickly offered a new job by a smaller restaurant whose owner knew me from the sports club kitchen.

After about a week, I received multiple calls. I answered one, and it was one of the higher managers from the sports club.

Manager: “Could you return the recipe book? The kitchen needs it back.”

I laughed but replied firmly:

Me: “It’s my book full of my recipes, so it isn’t going anywhere near you. I’ll remind you that you told me I ‘could no longer offer what you were looking for.’”

The manager clearly began to panic; he offered to give me my job back and “just let bygones be bygones”. I already had a new job, so I completely brushed off this offer and ignored him. I hung up pretty soon after that.

I started putting the recipes from my book on the new restaurant’s menu, and it began to attract a few regular customers of the sports club, so I quickly found myself with more and more responsibility and command within the kitchen. It got to the point where about a third of the menu was from my book.

This slow trickle of sports club regulars picked up speed after about three months and led to several high-level managers from the club deciding to visit the restaurant I’d helped build. They basically demanded I give them my cookbook, claiming it would be much more beneficial for the community if they had it. My head chef laughed in their faces and told them to piss off.

It’s been about two years. My head chef and I have a very positive relationship, and the customer base we have at the restaurant is better than ever.

We didn’t take every customer from the big club, but it was enough damage to their profits to scare a few investors away, and it caused a decent bit of damage to one of the higher managers’ reputations. Furthermore, the recipe issues and negative reviews led to the majority of the kitchen quitting. According to one of my old colleagues, they cited the lack of support and organisation from upper management as the final reasons everyone was quitting, and this led to an even larger dip in the quality of the restaurant food.

I also get paid significantly more at this restaurant than I did at the sports club.

CONTENT WARNING: Gross

This guy at my last job was hard to be around; even twenty feet away from him, you could still smell him. Thankfully, I didn’t have to sit anywhere near him, but those who did complained all the time to the floor manager. His body odor was so bad. I don’t know if he just soiled himself and kept wearing the same underwear or something, but he constantly reeked like he had just gone swimming in a feces-filled toilet.

It probably didn’t help that the guy’s car was literally filled with garbage; fast food wrappers and trash filled every part of his car except for the driver’s seat. It also probably didn’t help that he ate like a pig — literally. He would literally hold food in his hands and eat from them like he was dining in a trough. He’d get food all over his face and hands, and then he’d wipe his face and hands on his shirt to “clean” them off.

His keyboard was greasy; we could actually see the grease buildup on the keys from all of the crap he ate. The microphone headset he wore was physically turning orange from all the Cheeto dust he’d get on his hands, and it would transfer onto his headset from him handling it so much.

It gets worse.

His cubicle walls were covered in snot and boogers; he would wipe his finger on the walls after digging in his nose while he was on calls with customers.

Human Resources had to talk to him multiple times about his lack of hygiene. Usually, after the HR lady spoke to him, he would at least stop coming in and smelling like he had soiled himself, but that would only last for so long.

Management kept him around because he was good at his job. (He really wasn’t; he just found easy ways to pad his numbers for the help desk.) Once a proper floor manager came in and created a proper metric system, this guy couldn’t pad his numbers anymore, and they fired him.

After they fired him the floor manager and the maintenance team disassembled his cubicle, and they threw out the walls because of how much snot and boogers were all over them.

Now that I think about it, they actually threw out everything that was in his cubicle because of the health hazard that it was.

Back when I worked at [Video Rental Chain Store], we would often cover other stores in our city — whether it was just because they were short one day, needed help with inventory, etc.

Another location was having their holiday party and obviously wanted all of their employees to be able to attend. They contacted our store to see if we could spare three people to cover their store from 6:00 pm to midnight. We sent one assistant manager and two regular employees. They got the keys and all the codes and were prepared to handle the evening.

Over the next few days, we started hearing chatter from the other store about something going wrong on that night. It was difficult to keep anything secret between the stores as a lot of people started at one location before transferring to another, and most of us remained friends outside of work.

It turned out that the assistant manager had made some changes to the receipts. We had the ability to add a message at the end of the receipt without approval from corporate — usually to advise of some promotion or something like that. For whatever reason, she typed in some rude message directed at customers. It was nothing blatantly offensive but definitely not something you’d want them to read. She meant it to be funny, but under those circumstances, it wasn’t.

The chatter was that this was a serious offense and that [Assistant Manager] knew there were going to be consequences, even though nothing was said by upper management.

Soon afterward, the store manager and district manager were there one day and wanted to know when [Assistant Manager] was scheduled. It was to be in another hour. They told us that they were leaving but to tell her to not clock in and to stay there until they came back. 

[Assistant Manager] showed up about fifteen minutes before her scheduled time, and we advised her of what the store manager and district manager had said. She saw the writing on the wall and just decided to quit instead, not wanting to get yelled at and fired at the same time, and just left.

The store manager and district manager showed up about a half hour after when [Assistant Manager] was supposed to clock in, wondering where she was. We said that she’d just quit and left. They both were stunned that she wouldn’t stay around at their direction.

I get why [Assistant Manager] had to be fired, but the amount of time between the incident and her quitting was about a week. Of course she was going to figure out something bad is coming. At the very least, they should have stayed around in the store if they needed to fire her.

One other employee got basically a slap on the wrist since he was aware of the changes to the receipt but wasn’t in charge. Nothing happened to the third employee since he was out on the floor the whole night instead of behind the counter.