I work at a popular sandwich shop. We get a new hire, and he’s not the greatest of workers. He tends to show up late, if he shows up at all, often with little to no warning beforehand. But it’s nothing too bad, and I start to think he’s an okay guy.

About five weeks in, my manager decides to have him trained to open. On his first day opening, I come into the store for the evening shift to find things are not going well. They ran out of bread earlier in the day and had to bake more. I just think it was super busy that day and the new hire didn’t bake enough bread in the morning. As things go on, I find out more and more.

Every day, the evening worker is supposed to put a certain amount of frozen bread in the retarder, which will soften the frozen sticks and make them faster to bake in the morning. One of the most important opening jobs is to bake all the bread in the retarder. The new hire didn’t bake any of that bread. Not only that, but he didn’t cut any of the vegetables, which is another one of the most important opening jobs. I also find out that when one of my coworkers came in for the midday shift, the new hire was sitting outside in front of the pizza place next door where his girlfriend works and ended up leaving an hour before his shift ended.

Amazingly, the new hire doesn’t get fired for this fiasco, though he does get written up and chewed out, and he is warned that if he misses another day or shows up late without warning, he will be fired.

The next Wednesday, he sends a message to our group chat asking for someone to cover his shift that Friday for him, but nobody is able to. The next day, he sends a message saying that his brother has been hit by a car.

Friday is Homecoming for the local high school, and this is a small town with not many places to eat, so when I come in for my afternoon and evening shift, I find the store packed with high school kids that have been let out of school early. The new hire is nowhere to be seen, so it is just my boss and me left to fend off about forty teenagers. I find out that the new hire didn’t come in for his shift and ended up coming an hour or two later just to tell my boss that he didn’t want to work Fridays and Saturdays. I guess his brother was fine if he was able to take the time to do this. He ended up getting fired.

But there’s still more.

That evening, I am working with the closer when the recently fired ex-coworker comes into the store and grabs the key: apparently, he thinks he’s still opening tomorrow. When he leaves, I quickly excuse myself from the line and send a quick message to our boss to let her know.

When I come back the next day, I’m told that this guy came into the store and started putting the key back in the safe. My manager was there training another coworker to open so he could cover the recently fired worker’s shifts. She asked him what had happened the day before and he nervously and quietly muttered, “My brother got hit by a car.” He was informed that he would not be opening that day or the next day, and my manager went back to training the other coworker. After staring at the register for about ten minutes, he left his store-issued hat on the counter and left the store. A few minutes later my manager got a text from him: “I quit.”

In the end, I guess he did get those Fridays and Saturdays off like he wanted. My manager says hiring that guy was her worst mistake.

I have a manager who, to put it frankly, is eviler than a Disney villain, and with far fewer redeeming qualities. She takes advantage of employees straight out of college and will often resort to manipulation and gaslighting them. She will often act like she is the only one who can save you from being fired by the “unreasonable” owner and then expect you to return the favor by giving her ideas to make her look good. And you can never actually call her out on her crap because she is vague enough about it that if you do, she will act offended and make you feel malicious.

On Tuesday, she gives me one of these vague threats toward my job. Unfortunately for her, after four years, I recognize the tactic and am indifferent. Armed with the knowledge that if they were to fire me, they would be royally screwed, I just stare blankly at her as she backtracks and tells me how she will “protect” me. She then launches into the next topic at hand: finding tasks for her intern who starts on Monday.

I shrug my shoulders.

Me: “What were you planning on doing, anyway?”

Manager: “I don’t know.”

Me: “I suggest that you talk to [Coworker] about it as she might have tasks for the intern to work on.”

My Villain never does and spends Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday asking me to come up with ideas for her. Obviously, I continue to ask her why this intern was hired and what sort of plans she had for them because, again, you don’t get to threaten a person’s livelihood and expect them to be a wealth of ideas and resources.

By Thursday, she knows she has messed up and sends me a nice note telling me how much she appreciates me and wants me to know I am a “valuable” team member. I ignore it, so Friday, she comes into my office and out of the blue says:

Manager: “I just want you to know I mean every word.”

I feign a smile.

Me: “I appreciate that.”

I go back to work until she leaves, annoyed that I didn’t give her something more heartfelt in response to her insincerity.

Friday afternoon, my coworker I told her to talk to is complaining about how she is working on an intern task, so I tell her to email [Manager] with the idea. She is hesitant as [Manager] is also known to be volatile to new ideas, so I do it. 

The response I get back at 5:07 pm is absolute gold.

Manager: “Hello, all. I will let [Intern] and the team know that there are other tasks on the development team that need expertise. Let us know how critical or time-sensitive this becomes, as I don’t see [Intern] with downtime. But happy to contribute to the needs of the team. Thanks, [Manager].”

At this point, I was absolutely rolling at the audacity of this woman. She also copied her boss on it to show what a team player she is. I sent her back a note telling her it was all good; I’d only mentioned it since she’d asked for ideas. Again, I made sure her boss is copied.

Then, Monday rolled around. The intern came in at 9:00 am, and lo and behold, she had nothing for the intern! So, she texted me asking me to show them how to perform that task I mentioned on Friday. 

With great satisfaction, I told her I couldn’t do it today as I had nothing prepared; she had told me it was unnecessary. She wasn’t too happy about that. I cannot wait until she threatens to have me fired again!

My wife and I both work full time and we were finding that we didn’t have enough time to do more than a cursory clean of the house unless we wanted to spend all our weekends deep-cleaning. So, we decided it was in our finances to hire a cleaner to come around every two weeks to do a deep clean of the house. We set out looking for a cleaning service and found one that one of our friends had.

They came for a consultation and everything seemed to be in order. They looked at the house and gave us a cost estimate. We signed the contract, gave them the code to our front door, and scheduled the first cleaning appointment.

On the day of the cleaning appointment, the service called twenty minutes after the cleaner was supposed to be there to tell us that the cleaner was sick and they had to reschedule.

The day of the rescheduled appointment rolled around and nobody showed up. We called the service and they told us that the cleaner (a different one this time) was sick.

On the third attempt, nobody showed up and nobody would answer the phone at the service. Over the next couple of days, I tried to contact them but they never answered the phone.

At this point, I was very worried that this was all just a scam to get our door code and times when we would be out of the house, so I changed the door code and left a bad review stating that they just never showed up and people should be wary of giving them personal information.

They wrote back on the review, “How can you be upset with our service if you never even had us clean your house?”

We spoke to our friends who had recommended the service and found out that while we were going through this, they had fired the service because the cleaner had stolen an iPod from them.

This morning, I was in a fast-food restaurant. Another customer was at the counter picking up her food.

Customer: “Can I have some [sauce]?”

Worker: “It’s in the bag, ma’am.”

Customer: “Well, I don’t see it and I don’t feel like looking for it!”

I was so appalled.

I’m working away, fixing one of the rebuilds. I get it done and send it down the line. What should happen is the next one automatically rolling into the station, but nothing comes.

I look up the line and it looks like the line is full. So, what’s the hold-up?! I go to the previous station to ask the guy what’s going on.

Me: “Hey, what’s with the delay?”

Worker: “Yeah, I’m doing it.”

He isn’t; he is on his phone, just kind of spaced out.

Me: “Well, you should be two in front of me. Why are you so behind? Did something happen? I’ve got no work.”

Worker: “I said I’m doing it!”

Fine, whatever. He should know what he’s doing; he’s been here long enough. I grabbed a drink and went back to my station.

I waited a while — still no work. I headed back to the previous station again. When I got there, the guy was just standing there, listening to music. It looked like he hadn’t done a thing.

I let my manager know my numbers were going to be down and why. I didn’t see it happen, but the guy got dragged into the office, apparently stinking of weed, and he had no idea why everyone was annoyed at him.

He refused a drug test, refused any help, and refused to give up his car keys.

What was going to be a written warning and suspension turned into getting the police called to stop him from driving away and ultimately led to him being fired on the spot.