In my late teens and early twenties, I worked as a marine and small engine mechanic at various marinas.

One marina I worked at had a real scammy boss and owner. The dealership dealt with high-end speed boats and snowmobiles in the winter, and it was a really popular place. I thought was going to be a good gig. I was newly married, naive, and a good but not great mechanic, but I loved doing that stuff.

It started off with me getting the job and being offered the small apartment above the store to live in. Accepting the apartment was the first mistake (besides taking the job). I soon found out that it put me on unpaid call twenty-four-seven, and it was minimum wage to begin with. I moved out four months later to a small apartment in the next town over.

There were five of us that worked in the shop: two helpers, the boss’s son who was the head mechanic, the boss’s wife who ran the store and did the books, and me. In the summertime, the boss would hire a couple of students to help out.

I was the lazy worker putting in only sixty to seventy hours a week. The two helpers worked eighty to a hundred hours a week, and the boss’s son came and went as he pleased, barely putting in forty hours a week. By the way, he hated me. The only thing I could figure is that I was a threat to him because he was a useless mechanic.

As always, at first, it seemed great. Lots of hours meant good money… for a while. Then, the novelty of working in a new high-paced place soon wore off. Come the wintertime, we were laid off to collect unemployment insurance, but we were still expected to show up every day and work for next to nothing “under the table”. It was a hundred bucks here, fifty bucks there, etc., as my boss said we were getting paid by the government, so anything he was giving us was pretty much a bonus.

About halfway through the second summer I worked there, things went really bad.

My boss came flying into the shop at around 9:00 am on a Friday morning in a frenzy explaining that he’d forgotten about two boats that needed to be ready for Saturday. (He rarely wrote anything down.) Rigging up these high-end speed boats from scratch is no short-order item.

All of us dropped everything and started working on rigging these two boats. At 4:00, pm the students left. Shortly after they left, the boss came in fuming and informed us he could put off the one customer, but the other boat had to be ready first thing in the morning. We worked past midnight just to get the boat ready. Even the boss’s son stayed until we finally put the boat in the water to fire it up and make sure everything was working fine.

We were all dog-tired and dragged our butts to our cars to go home. The boss yelled across the yard that he would see us in at 5:00 am to get the other one done. We thought he was joking from his tone.

Needless to say, every one of us rolled in at our usual 7:00 am the next morning, including the boss’s son. We were greeted with screaming in some colourful language about being lazy good-for-nothings. We were all too tired to argue with him and basically ignored him as we went to work on the second boat.

At not getting a rise out of us, the boss abruptly turned on his heel, marched over to the store/office, and told his wife, “They come in when they feel like it, then pay them when you feel like it!” She wasn’t much better than him.

The next thing I knew, my paycheques were getting later and later, to the point that I had to start asking him for gas money at times to make it to work. He would give me fifty dollars here and there. I was slowly starting to go into debt. I also heard later that he complained to the two helpers that he thought I was pissing my money away on booze and drugs.

It got to the point that I couldn’t afford to stay there, and I couldn’t afford to leave. Unemployment takes a dim view of quitting for almost any reason.

I finally quit. I had no idea of my rights. I explained the whole thing to the Unemployment Insurance Board. I guess they must have believed me a little because, instead of the eight-week penalty for quitting, I only got four weeks of no money coming in. I had a pretty lean couple of months before getting back on my feet.

Karma came not long after. Even as I was getting close to leaving, my boss, who was a shady character, to put it mildly, was looking to expand his business into manufacturing a copy of the high-end speed boats we were selling. How he got the American company to give their blessing, I don’t know the particulars. Anyway, he needed more capital and brought in a “silent partner” to help finance this new endeavor.

What my former boss didn’t realize was that the “silent partner” was an even bigger crook than he was, and my boss eventually got pushed out by his partner and lost everything — the boat manufacturing, the marina… everything.

This was forty-plus years ago, so I’m guessing he’s dead now. His son is a nobody marine mechanic at a tiny little no-nothing marina, last I heard.

Sadly, I got out of any kind of mechanic career after that and haven’t picked up a wrench since, but I’m close to retirement with no regrets about getting out of that.

My husband lost a bet and had to grow a beard for three months. It didn’t suit him and it made him look a lot older. He’s thirty-four and I’m thirty-three, but now it looked like we had a huge age gap. A bet is a bet, so [Husband] wore his ugly beard and started jokingly calling me his young trophy wife. 

It was all good fun until a new neighbour moved into the next-door apartment, a woman in her early twenties. She must have seen [Husband] and me together or maybe even overheard us talking in the corridor. And from what she saw, she concluded that ugly old [Husband] must be rich enough to attract a gold digger. 

From that day on, she appeared in full makeup at all times. When [Husband] went to work in the morning and when he came back, she’d always happen to be waiting for an elevator which [Husband] then had to share. Sometimes I was there, too, but it didn’t deter her. She’d make small talk in the elevator, touch her hair, and take deep-chest breaths, and the top button of her blouse would just happen to be open, etc. It was comical to watch how she threw herself at him.

After two weeks of this, shaving day arrived. [Husband], I kid you not, put on a suit and tie and went to the barbershop to have his beard taken off in style. He came back looking like his young, handsome self. Our lady neighbour didn’t recognize him. She saw him enter our apartment and, believing he was a different man, went to spread rumors about me allegedly having an affair. 

Somebody must have enlightened her in the end and told her that it was the same man. She stopped wearing so much makeup after that, and the elevator rides were also over.

I work at a grocery store in the pick-up/delivery department. When a customer arrives, they’re supposed to park their car up front, call the number on the signs out there, and tell us which parking spot they’re in. We then use the parking number to find them when we bring out their order.

Today, we had a customer call in. I’d already called her in advance to go over her substituted items, and she’d asked that we swap one for something else, which I’d gone to fetch before she showed up. However, when she called us on arrival, she decided she needed something completely new added to her order, so despite how busy it was at the time, I had to run out to get it while my coworkers kept loading other orders.

That would have just been a minor annoyance not worthy of dwelling on if not for the next part. When it was time for her order to be loaded, my coworkers noticed that both the orders they were loading were written down as being in parking spot number four. We also didn’t have the right amount of cars lined up. So one coworker had to go out to check each car and figure out who was missing, and of course, it was that same customer.

With people waiting and no idea where she was, we were forced to leave her entire loaded order on a cart and just work around it. Sometime later — though honestly, not too long, at least not compared to how it could get during a rush — she called again, giving us her new parking spot.

My coworker went out to load the order into her car, and when he got back, he relayed what had happened. Apparently, she’d decided to drive to the gas station while she waited for us, without informing us of it at all. And despite sending the order out as soon as she called the second time, what with it already being loaded, skipping the line of others who had shown up since she first arrived and left her place in the queue, she still complained that it had taken too long!

The organization I work for has files on mostly everyone in the province, myself included. Accessing one’s own file is absolutely forbidden and will invariably result in being very promptly terminated.

I had someone transfer a call to me (which automatically made me access the relevant personal file) from a man who shared my first and last name and my year of birth.

I nearly had a heart attack before it occurred to me that it wasn’t possible for a colleague to have pulled up my file and selected me specifically to receive the transfer — and that the full date of birth was different.

I work in a sandwich shop. One Sunday, our slow time, I was on with only my manager. A large family group came in: about seven adults, a couple of teenagers, and a toddler. Everybody ordered specialty hot subs with one or two sides each, and then they went into the dining room and immediately pushed several tables together, grabbing chairs from all over the room. They also grabbed tons of napkins and proceeded to pass things around, and they let the toddler just take whatever he wanted. Of course, about half of that ended up on the floor, and he started finger-painting with the ketchup. They all pretty much ignored all of that, and we could see the dining area we’d just finished cleaning right before they walked in turn into something like a war zone.

And then…

When they were done eating, two of the adults picked up all of the trays and the trash scattered on the table, discarding the trash and stacking the trays on top of the bins. The toddler’s mother went into the restroom and grabbed some damp towels, and after cleaning up her child, she wiped down the table. The rest of the adults moved all the furniture back where it had come from. One of the teens asked to borrow a broom and proceeded to sweep up all of the fallen trash and toss it. In all, it took them something like two minutes to put the dining room essentially back the way it was before they walked in.

We offered them coupons for free sandwiches, which we actually had to convince them to take. They didn’t even know why we wanted to thank them.

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