|
I worked nine days in a plastics factory. This place made bottles for off brand products, and I spent most of my time on what we’ll call the ‘Head And Shoulders’ line. At one end of a warehouse similar to the one at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ rested a gigantic hopper filled with bottles that looked eerily like Head And Shoulders shampoo bottles. These bottles were fed out of the hopper onto a humungous Rube Goldberg conveyor belt to a three colour printer that stamped a not-quite-trademark-infringing design on one side of the bottle. The printed bottle then continued its odyssey to a drier, about the size of a large r.v stood on its end, with hundreds of little baskets that move sinuously up and through the interior, blasted with hot air to quickly dry the recently printed item. At the driers exit point, a little doohickey* on the edge of the basket flipped the (now dry) bottle print-side down onto a new bit of conveyor belt leading to another printer, which then printed the reverse, led to another drier, and thence to a packing area. * The doohickey would occasionally (once or twice an hour) fail to flip the bottle over correctly, my job was to turn the bottle right side up when this happened. No music, no reading, no headphones. Ten hours a day with 30 minutes lunch and two smoke breaks. If you remain unconvinced that this is the most boring job in the history of the world, they had another job they gave to people who couldn’t hack the heady speed of the conveyor. You were taken to an interior room about the size of a shipping container filled to the brim with tiny generic aspirin bottles. You were given one (1) lid, a trash bag and a clear bag. Click lid onto bottle. If lid fits, put in clear bag. If lid doesn’t fit, put bottle in trash. When there’s one thousand bottles in the bag, tie it up and leave it outside the room, and ask for a new clear bag. A lengthy snipe.
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2019 20:18
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 05:36 |
|
|
I worked in a place that bigger companies would outsource to package various medical devices. My job was all the kind of work people assume is done by robots. Putting thousands of stickers on things, boxing those things, shrink wrapping those things, etc. The whole loving place was a clown show. They did a lot of job recruitment at halfway houses or something and it showed. The employees were a rogues gallery of weirdos and drug addicts. One lady was actually ducking into the bathroom durning her shift to shoot up in the bathroom and then she'd go back to her work station nodding off. She eventually got fired for this. Her job was to inspect artifical knee caps. What was really fun was that the guy running the place was a former Navy officer, so he basically wanted to run the place like a ship. It made everyone miserable and people were terrified of him. On days when he wasn't around the atmosphere was totally different and more work actually got done. Anyway, at that time I had long hair and big sideburns which he loving hated but he was a passive agressive dipshit so he'd just take it out on my boss instead of saying anything to me. The very first day I worked there I was introduced to him and he was all smiles and poo poo and then later he takes my boss aside and says "Why the gently caress did you hire him?". And so the fun began. My direct superior is probably the most vile person I've met in my entire life. Because of the aforementioned issue with my hair being too long he called me a "filthy fuckin' animal" on a daily basis. He was extremely racist and misogynistic. He was for sure some kind of pervert. He was constantly touching people. He called one of my coworkers the n-word behind his back several times. The nicest thing he ever referred to a woman as was "the skirt". There was this very overweight woman there and more than once he walked up to me and said "How would you like to have that to sit on your face and clap like a seal?". He made rape jokes all the time. One day he slapped a handful of change out of my hand because he thought it would be funny and then was all baffled when I got pissed off at him. I also asked him to stop touching me and he got offended. Just an all around terrible worthless person and there's way more to it than that but I'd rather not try and remember because it was extremely unpleasant even being around him. And it wasn't just him, he was the worst for sure but the whole atmosphere of the place was terrible. Everyone there was utterly miserable and severely underpaid and thery knew it. But they had no choice because these people had families and kids. I was just some 22 year old shithead so I didn't take the place seriously at all (and it really didn't deserve to be in the first place). But the majority of the work force was middle aged women busting their asses for minimum wage. People would cry when they lost these lovely loving jobs, which was often because the company liked the stagnate the wages by lazying a dozen or so people off every six months and replacing them with new hires at minimum wage. A lot of people just up and quit because the place sucked and it wasn't worth it for the money. A couple guys told me they were getting more money from unemployment than they were at this place. One of those guys quit to be a janitor in a middle school. The turnover rate there was insane. I really loving hated the place so I would just say "gently caress it" and call in sick a bunch. Eventually my boss came up to me one day and asked if I had any medical conditions I didn't disclose, which I did not. So he told me that if I called in sick again any time in the next three or four months I would be terminated. So really I was like "Thanks for the out, fucker". I waited about a month, called in sick on a Monday, and got fired the next day. I just wanted them to fire me so I could collect unemployment. And I did. Immediately before that I worked in an auto body for my brother's (now) wife's brother. My own brother was working from him at the time driving a tow truck, this guy was also his landlord. A great setup all around (Why yes, it did end badly!). My brother basically ran his whole towing business because he was a loving deadbeat, which comes heavily into play during my employment. So I got a job working in his shop mostly doing the bitch work they didn't want to waste the body guys and mechanic's with. Basically cleaning up around the place bringing poo poo to the dumpsters, answering the phone, etc. On my first day I was cleaning up a bunch of trash behind the building and found a jar of what I think was phelgm. I also found a few used syringes. The owner got really into drugs at this time so he was out wrangling prostitues (He brought a different girl in there just about every day, although not all of them were hookers) and doing blow all day. Incidentally he was the only one who could do estimates on jobs, so I was basically turning away customers every single day. One day he brought an actual crack whore in there who was walking around the shop saying a bunch of weird poo poo and yelling. I asked him what the gently caress was with this lady and he pretended not to know her. Oh, by the way he has a son and girlfriend. It was just a whole bunch of dickery, terrible conditions, rear end in a top hat coworkers, and working in 90+ degree heat. The last straw for me came when I found out he was taking money out of my check for income taxes and just pocketing it. I told him that if he wasn't going to send it in for taxes then to just give it to me. He asked why I was being a pussy who wants to give all his money to the government. So later that day he called from where ever the gently caress he was and offered me my new wage of under minium wage untaxed. I just hung up the phone and left right there and then. A few months later he lost everything up his nose and had to move back in with his parents for a while. I was for sure exposed to a bunch of different carcinogens at that job. Good times.
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2019 20:19
|
|
|
I worked in an inner city Walmart right when cell phones came out. You could get a Sprint or Nokia phone. I didn't even have a cell phone because I was in college and in poverty. People didn't understand why I had to do a credit check since cell phones were just starting to take off. People would have to pay something crazy like $500 down to have the privilege to then buy the $800 phone, not even counting the calling plan. Even worse was when people would come in with issues and expect me to fix it. I would usually say, as nice as possible, "I can't even afford this, this is the first time they've let me touch a real one, I don't know what to do."
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2019 20:19
|
|
|
Reading this thread reminded me that I worked at a furniture assembly plant one summer during high school. I took the job way too seriously and I ended up on an assembly line full of recent Chinese immigrants that didn't speak much English. We had to communicate by pointing and grunting. I remember the day we really gelled as a team, the older and lazier guy on the line came in super sick and I ended up doing both of our stations since he worked right next to me, and he just kind of sat around clocked in making a show of doing something. This went on for two days, on the third day the leader yelled at the old guy in Chinese, just reamed him out for not working and making me work double. After that we really got along as a team and we consistently had the best numbers. We'd haul rear end until lunch time and then after lunch to close we took it real easy. They were genuinely good guys. Anyway, the next year I worked for an urethane molding factory run by the owner's son, they injection molded a bunch of stuff for the furniture made in the other factory. The owner of both factories was a second generation Mennonite immigrant who drove his lovely truck and wore the same clothes as his workers despite being a millionaire. The guy's son came in on about 2 days a week in his convertible, reamed out the foreman and then hosed everything up before leaving. The foreman was an rear end in a top hat who sat in his office all day. They had someone hand-build the urethane presses. The conveyor was a DIY tank-track thing made mostly of wood and added like 800lbs to the load. Originally the design had been a rolling press, two conveyors squeezing the mold while moving slowly. The lovely controllers and motors they used made it so that the thing ran too fast and was always overloaded because of the wooden conveyor. So you could load a maximum of 5 molds into the press, roll them in and then shut it down for 3 minutes while the urethane hardened. Then you restarted the press, took the pieces out of the molds and did it all over. It was crazy boring. The factory had some deal with the Mennonite Central Committee where they would get Guatemalans or Paraguayans to come and work. These guys were rad in retrospect but I remember getting mad when they would overload the press on purpose to get more breaks, or simply shut the thing off and lean on a broom until the foreman came and then they'd say it was broken again. It was the most boring job I've ever had because most of it was standing around waiting for the urethane to harden.
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2019 22:02
|
|
|
i worked 18 hour shifts for a month straight no days off at a "mining startup" at an air access only site in the middle of nowhere in alaska and i didn't even qualify for overtime because they had under the minimum number of employees for that to be a thing they had to pay for. the main problem was lots of injuries partially due to the fact that I was getting 4 hours of sleep every night and working with heavy machinery and toxic chemicals. the other problem was all the bears
Sing Along fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Jun 15, 2019 |
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2019 23:08
|
|
|
I honestly refuse to believe a mining startup is anything but some kind of intricate shell game where a megacorp funds a tiny "startup" to somehow take advantage of poo poo like overtime rules and startup write-offs. Or was this oil and gas in alberta ten years ago?
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2019 23:14
|
|
|
considering mining as a business in the US is already an externalities shell game where taxpayers are the rubes, a mining startup sounds hilarious
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 00:35
|
|
|
one of the founders had previously worked for a now defunct multinational mining corp that had been doing surveying in the region and he had paperwork from the 80s the showed a pretty significant ore body. they raised money from friends, family, and local angel investors to purchase the land and begin proving the grade of the deposit. it was literally a mining startup
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 00:53
|
|
|
Honky Dong Country posted:I'd continue to work in human poo poo on broken sewer lines right now if it meant I didn't have to read your posts or have you quoting me. Great to hear! (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 01:08
|
|
|
Pewdiepie posted:Great to hear! god you suck
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 01:30
|
|
|
Honky Dong Country posted:Exactly. Even if your nation/society compensates you fairly for your labor a lovely job will always be a lovely job. And there will always be awful loving management. Eh lovely labor isn't really that garbage, I temped in like a food processing warehouse once and would stack like 20k pounds of frozen potato products a day but the supervisors were nice, we got our breaks, and the pay was okay. You make the pay better and the breaks more frequent/less hours in a day then it really wouldn't have been a bad gig.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 02:20
|
|
|
I worked with poop
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 02:36
|
|
|
Skeleton Ape posted:I worked with poop Same, it's lovely.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 02:43
|
|
|
 
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 03:05
|
|
|
When I was 19, I worked for three days at an auto towing and impound lot in the middle of the desert in the middle of July cleaning out cars in the open lot. On the third day, my always angry supervisor gave me a roll of plastic and a roll of duct tape and yelled at me to tape up any window on any car that had been parked with the widows down. Didn’t matter if the car had manual windows and I could just roll them up, nope. Had to tape ANY open window to keep me busy in 100 degree plus heat PLUS continue cleaning out new arrivals to the lot because why not? I ran out of tape and plastic covering up as many open windows as I could and reported back to the office where my super was. I then proceeded to get screamed at in my face about how I either misplaced the tape and plastic or plain dumped them somewhere so I wouldn’t have to do the job and say I did. I interrupted her scream fest to tell her to go gently caress herself, walked out, and never returned.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 03:28
|
|
|
communism bitch posted:Years and years ago I had a good job that was marred by a poo poo boss. I was a registrar for a museum, which is the role responsible for doing the administration associated with taking care of artwork. If a painting or tapestry or statue o whatever needed accessioning and cataloguing, we did it. If it needed insurance, we arranged it. If it needed to go on loan, we did that, and if it needed conservation we kept the records. Basically a slightly glorified office job, but interesting because there was a side order of art history and you got to go to interesting places and see interesting things. Couldn't you have turned him in or something?
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 03:29
|
|
|
Retail version. Throughout my late high school and early college years, I worked for RadioShack as a ground pounding drone. I hadn't worked retail before, so being a gullible teenager I figured, hey, the clean and nice tech store has to be a bit above the standard wage slave experience, right? gently caress off. As I would learn later, RadioShack took the loving cake in lovely retail experiences. The pay sucked, first of all - we were effectively on commission because if you didn't sell enough poo poo you made minimum wage, but the amount of money you made for selling basically anything was absolutely sad. I made 6% on "parts, batteries, and accessories" and 3% on everything else, so I had to clear hundreds of dollars of merchandise an hour just to make commission. And when I say I, i mean I personally. RadioShack drones effectively marked their territory to the other reps in the store by greeting you when you came in, and then we'd walk you through everything. So if I had someone who was indecisive or confused, it would ruin me because I'd get written up for abandoning a customer if I dropped them. That is, unless I sold cell phones. If you went into a radioshack in the mid 2000s, you absolutely could not get out of the store without some plastic-smile rear end in a top hat like me feeding you a line to get you talking about cell phones and cell phone services. The managers trained us by calling it "HOOA" - Help, Offer, Offer, Add-on. Yes, we were literally told to help you, and then offer whatever special sale bullshit that was not remotely relevant to your initial request. And then after you told us to go gently caress ourselves, we were supposed to try bringing it up again after a short cool-off. Then once you told us to go gently caress ourselves AGAIN, we could talk about battery packs, warranties, and other bullshit that might go with what you actually bought to maybe hopefully squeeze another couple of dollars out of you. Even as a 17 year old punk, I knew this awful, but everyone did it anyway because selling a cell phone was the only way you made any loving money at all at RadioShack. If I sold a cell phone, I made 15% of the price of the phone (before discounts for the 1-year contract or whatever), plus a bonus of 15 dollars for a voice plan, 20 dollars for a voice and data plan. We had to literally call Sprint or Verizon in the store and activate the customer while we were with them at the point of sale, and their processes were always excruciating, so this was a 45 minute process. Still though, I'd usually be able to count on $30 from a cell phone sale, so you'd better believe I annoyed every customer that walked in despite the fact that I got told to go gently caress myself pretty much every day. So just walking in the door, to make money you had to make peace with the fact that you were a walking stereotype of annoyance and desperation. On top of this, because the stores were small, there was never any back room help and we were expected to stock, price, clean, and construct/tear down ads and displays on our own. Managers would have this done during work hours to make the store look hip and busy even when it wasn't (because it's loving Radioshack), which gave the managers an easy way to be lovely to people. If you mouthed off, came in late, or just happened to cross your boss's path when he was in a bad mood (which they frequently were, because being a store manager also blew rear end - the company mandated a minimum of 55 hours a week for store managers), you'd get busted to maintenance duty and wouldn't be able to sell anything at all. Potentials for abuse like that were common. If the boss didn't like you, you'd get every poo poo job in the store until you realized you were never going to get another sale and were forced to quit, and that never blew back on the abusers because they could just show the rep's sales numbers to regional. If they weren't making commission, that itself was cause for termination in their minds. Inventory was also done by us regular reps, though that had to be after hours in any store that was in a mall or any larger building, which almost all of them were. Naturally, they counted as regular hours, no bonuses, so you'd be stuck counting gewgaws at 10 and 11pm for minimum wage, because regional said so. And then some poor sap would have to open the next morning, too. Naturally, they talked about none of this in the onboarding process, it all just sort of got added as an 'oh-by-the-way' later on, even though the training materials would not shut the gently caress up about how your job as a sales associate was to sell. The impediments were just too drat bad for you. I realized something was fundamentally off in the summer after my freshman year, when I got commended for being the sales associate of the month for making what amounted to $23/hr. This was for the entire sales region, and I lived in a metro area with millions of people and dozens of stores. I did the math and realized that if I won that award every year for the rest of my life, maybe I could be poor instead of destitute. Two weeks later, I overheard a co-worker who had been there since spring applying for food stamps and it really sealed the deal. The other summers I worked before getting a job that matched my major, I bounced around other lovely retail places and was astounded that, while I had no chance of making $23/hr, my responsibilities were less than a third of what they had been at Radioshack and the potentials for abuse much, much fewer. Which should probably really rock back anyone who's worked retail, because you know how rife with abuse a stereotypical store is. Radioshack was just that much worse. I might have made less money, but I was guaranteed to make what money they were offering me, and I went home with enough mental energy to do something besides stare at the ceiling and bathe in the dread of my next shift. I could study and try to push forward to a day when I didn't need that lovely retail job anymore. That was never a possibility with RadioShack, they would take everything you had and give nothing back. It was systemic shittiness at an impressive scale. I broke out the whiskey the day that lovely loving company went bankrupt and closed down for good, even though I hadn't worked there in many years at that point. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Coolguye fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Jun 16, 2019 |
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 03:46
|
|
|
I worked for 2 years in San Francisco at a call center for phone sex operators and phone psychics. It actually wasn't a terrible job, but there are always stories that stick out in my mind. One of them was a call I got from one of the psychic "operators" who asked me the following in regards to the website being a bit slower that day: "So is it the servers, or just negative spiritual energy?" Just really absurd situations almost every day. The phone sex operators were obviously mostly women and they were my favorite, because they knew exactly what they were doing and many were making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year doing it. They were always nice, and all business. The customers, of course men, were the worst, aside from the occasional wife/girlfriend calling us and asking what these charges were that she just saw on her card. I was likely a conduit or cog in the machine of a couple just dissolving due to the horny dude in the equation.  The psychics, though, were a mixed bag. Some thought they were actually psychic, while others were more frank and grounded about the work they were doing. Surprisingly, one of the highest earning psychics on our site was a dude. He made about 9 million dollars a year with us and lived on a native american reservation so that he didn't have to pay taxes (he himself was not native american at all). This site just churned out millions of dollars a year reliably and consistently. I was surprised that the phone sex/phone psychic scene was as active as it was. There are oodles of fun stories from that strange and wonderful part of my life, if ya'll would want to hear them. Seems like an Ask/Tell thread but no one goes there on this dead gay forum. I always like threads like this, so please keep 'em coming, while also attempting to restrain from creating droning derails about the evils of capitalism, please. I already get ground to gristle every day to feed the shuddering, dying machine of late stage capitalism and I do t want to think about it. 
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 04:01
|
|
|
Nurglings posted:Couldn't you have turned him in or something? The director sounds like the real winner in the story. Cushy position, sleeps all day, takes credit, fucks it all up, but suffers zero consequences. Meanwhile OP is just stressin' and shuffling paper like a sucker.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 04:54
|
|
|
Coolguye posted:Retail version. Sup Radio Shack buddy, I had a lot of fun working for them once I hit Store Manager and ran my store so well that my DM stopped giving me poo poo for the changes I made (I ignored planograms and arranged the store in common-sense ways that jacked up my associates' numbers - like moving the fun Arduino/robotics section out from the back dungeon to right by the window). Even when I was an associate, I was lucky enough to have a manager who recognized what I was good and bad at, so I spent most of my time on logistics/maintenance, and he would toss me his cell phone sales to keep my paycheck up. It kind of owned because our store was like a regional leader, despite the fact that the DM would never in a million years admit that it was because we did things different from how corporate wanted us to. Cleaning and organizing is extremely soothing to me broken sad brain, so that kind of thing was far, far preferable to dealing with customers. I also learned some fun and creative ways to keep my associates' numbers up with minimal effort, so they could focus on actually helping people out instead of having to push warranties and poo poo: My favorite was, there was a point where they were giving these $5-off-no-minimum-purchase coupons on the receipts that printed out. Any time a customer didn't want their coupon we would hoard them. I would then transfer over a shitload of clearanced/discontinued inventory from other stores. This would end up being stuff like RC toys or discontinued headphones, etc. - stuff that was clearanced out to <$2-3. Because Radio Shack was dumb, these clearanced items would still have warranty plans available. So, once a week, I'd have my employees do a bunch of individual transactions where they'd ring up a $2 toy, add the $3 warranty (the warranties were based off the original item price), and use a $5 coupon to zero out the transaction. Bam, everyone has warranty attachment rates above-average, and everyone gets a bunch of random free crap to do whatever with. Overall, it was a typical lovely retail job, but I did it for so long (4ish years?) and was in such a weird place at the time that I just smoked shitloads of weed in the basement stockroom and did the best I could to have a good time with it whenever possible.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 05:15
|
|
|
man i worked 6 different stores over the years i worked there and every last one was an abusive circlejerk where the system encouraged everyone to poo poo on everyone else. but you could never stay mad at someone for making GBS threads on you for too long because you still worked together and the system would probably make you poo poo on them right back next week. i'm glad SOMEONE had a good store in that rear end in a top hat organization because holy gently caress i just didn't think it possible after my time there.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 05:35
|
|
|
all the stories from companies on their way down sound similar to me, same cannibalism self-immolating bullshit from regional VPs that have no good ideas for turning the business around and are just preening for congratulations from higher up by slightly improving quarterly report numbers when the business is doomed and most people know it
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 05:40
|
|
|
A good friend of mine worked for Radioshack around the 2008 recession and he made an absolute ludicrous amount of money in commission from cell phones alone during the holiday season for a barely 20 year old. He's also an absolute shark so it makes sense that he thrived in a lovely environment like that, and I don't remember any horror stories about his boss or the DM.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 06:48
|
|
|
Snow Cone Capone posted:Cleaning and organizing is extremely soothing to me broken sad brain, so that kind of thing was far, far preferable to dealing with customers. Ha, that reminds me of the time I briefly worked refitting an old semi-abandoned factory complex for a lovely secondhand store that was going to open on the site. They'd dragged their heels finding a new location and didn't find anything until after their old lease had expired so they'd begged their old landlord to let them store their giant collection of moth-eaten crap for an extra week and then trucked everything over to the new site in a desperate rush and just shoved it any old where, and it was at that point that I joined the cleanup crew. Turns out they'd been in such a rush to get everything moved they hadn't bothered to have the place cleaned or even get the electrics fixed so my job was to scrub a filthy industrial complex that was caked in decades worth of factory grime and then had homeless people squatting in it for a while ("Water got turned off? No problem, just keep making GBS threads in the toilets, flushing is for snobs!") and now had giant mounds of moldy broken furniture piled haphazardly everywhere. All of which was actually fine, what made it an annoying job was that the manager was a micro-managing twit and all the other cleaners on the crew were incompetent to the point that if any of them were helping me on a task it'd actually take three times longer than if I'd done it by myself. At one point I volunteered to go clean the filthy toilet block on my own because I knew no one else wanted to do it and I'd get a few days of peace and quiet.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 07:22
|
|
|
Nurglings posted:Couldn't you have turned him in or something? I didn't care that much. Its just the massive legal risk he exposed everybody to for the lack of a bare minimum of effort that pissed me off. I kept copies of all the paperwork at home in case anything went down but it never did, so fuckit.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 09:13
|
|
|
my first ever summer job out of school in my small town was doing vegetable prep for a restaurant supply business. We'd peel/chop/prepare stuff by hand because the owner was too much of a tightass to buy any mechanical stuff like potato rumblers, and vacuum pack it to sell to food places nearby. We worked out of a refitted shipping container in the yard of the owners produce selling company, which was just sheet stainless steel fitted to each inside surface and some fluorescent lights. I've never known misery like chopping and dicing 100 kilos of onions by hand in that loving unventilated metal box in the middle of summer.
kecske fucked around with this message at 11:24 on Jun 16, 2019 |
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 11:21
|
|
|
kazr posted:A good friend of mine worked for Radioshack around the 2008 recession and he made an absolute ludicrous amount of money in commission from cell phones alone during the holiday season for a barely 20 year old. He's also an absolute shark so it makes sense that he thrived in a lovely environment like that, and I don't remember any horror stories about his boss or the DM. In this case he didn't experience it personally, because the horror story was his manager and the DM discussing how he will never, ever get promoted from entry-level because he's too valuable as a cell phone-selling peon. thatguy posted:all the stories from companies on their way down sound similar to me, same cannibalism self-immolating bullshit from regional VPs that have no good ideas for turning the business around and are just preening for congratulations from higher up by slightly improving quarterly report numbers when the business is doomed and most people know it Radio Shack was a special case though, it was almost a privilege to have worked there at the very very end when they started getting desperate. At one point they took their house brand stuff (Auvio/Enercell) and redesigned the entire packaging designs, TWICE IN ONE YEAR. We had products where there were 3 entirely distinct packagings for the same product SKU. At one point I was convinced it was an elaborate scam to launder money through the design companies.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 13:23
|
|
|
I worked a summer at Busch Gardens in tampa when I was 16. All they had were the poo poo manual labor-ish jobs that had crazy high turnover: parking lot attendant, trash sweeper and the skyride. I didn't want to stand around in the incredibly hot sun pointing at parking spaces or dodging all the tank-sized strollers to sweep up the trash, so I went with the sky ride. There were 3 jobs that we rotated between - loader (the worst), unloader and the middle station where you just check the door locks and shove them along (the best). The long hours (I had to do open and close, ~12 hour shift) a few days in a row during the 4th of july event for example) and weather were bad enough, but the people were what made it a truly bad job. The guy training me was a pudgy middle aged guy who was extremely creepy. He was always trying to "hook me up" with girls which was just awkward for everyone, and taught me "his trick" when stopping the carts to tilt it a certain way that lets you see up girls' skirts. It was pretty gross in general but it went to another level when I saw him doing it to young (talking like 10-12) girls too. The assistant supervisor was a dick too. There was an unspoken practice that when the ride was shut down (which happened a lot, basically any time there was a slight gust of win or it started drizzling) and you were in the middle station out of sight of all the guests, you could take a nap in the carts. The first time this happened to me I thought they were just trying to trick me, so I started cleaning off the carts (gross - mostly bird poo poo). The head supervisor happened to come by unannounced and asked me where the assistant was, so I told him he's sleeping in the cart over there. He got laid into verbally for a while, saying he should fire him etc. After he left the assistant said it was my fault for making him look bad by working when he wasn't, and if I didn't "fall in line" he'd see to it that I'd be fired. Basically all the older employees were dicks, which isn't suprising since they're working one of the worst jobs at a theme park in their 40s/50s. They all took advantage of me and the other teenage employees by taking 45+ minute breaks when we were teamed up with them (it was supposed to be only 15), making us do all the dirtiest work (bird poo poo, puke hosing etc), and just generally threw us under the bus at every opportunity. About a month before summer was ending, after 3 open+close shifts in a row I called up the supervisor and put in my 2 weeks notice. I called him the next day and said "actually can I just not come in" and he said "i don't give a poo poo" and hung up on me. So I didn't go back. e: also the music they played was just a loop of like 10 songs. "Love Shack" gets really loving annoying after you hear it so many times in a day. I still can't listen to it without having flashbacks to that lovely job. yeah I eat ass fucked around with this message at 13:54 on Jun 16, 2019 |
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 13:46
|
|
|
yeah I eat rear end posted:e: also the music they played was just a loop of like 10 songs. "Love Shack" gets really loving annoying after you hear it so many times in a day. I still can't listen to it without having flashbacks to that lovely job. Yeah I also associate specific songs with specific lovely jobs. That cruddy job I mentioned earlier in the industrial estate where my shift ended well after the last bus ran always had the radio tuned to a lovely station and turned up so loud you couldn't escape it anywhere on the floor, and Mambo Number Five had just hit the top of the charts so I had to listen to it at least once an hour.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 14:19
|
|
|
communism bitch posted:I didn't care that much. Its just the massive legal risk he exposed everybody to for the lack of a bare minimum of effort that pissed me off. Now I'm envisioning this guy just slapping a bunch of stamps on a Picasso and jamming it into a mailbox "My work here is done!"
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 14:21
|
|
|
Snow Cone Capone posted:In this case he didn't experience it personally, because the horror story was his manager and the DM discussing how he will never, ever get promoted from entry-level because he's too valuable as a cell phone-selling peon. RadioShack stories are always fascinating. Jon Bois had a great write up a few years ago: https://www.sbnation.com/2014/11/26/7281129/radioshack-eulogy-stories
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 14:28
|
|
|
I used to sell windows door to door. I literally wanted to kill myself every day.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 14:39
|
|
|
Robokomodo posted:I used to sell windows door to door. I literally wanted to kill myself every day. How often did you come across some sad lonely person who invited you inside and asked a million questions because they wanted the company (but had no intention of buying anything)?
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 14:43
|
|
|
Snowglobe of Doom posted:Yeah I also associate specific songs with specific lovely jobs. That cruddy job I mentioned earlier in the industrial estate where my shift ended well after the last bus ran always had the radio tuned to a lovely station and turned up so loud you couldn't escape it anywhere on the floor, and Mambo Number Five had just hit the top of the charts so I had to listen to it at least once an hour. i worked in a mall over the Christmas season at a Gamestop. i now hate any and all christmas music
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 14:44
|
|
|
I worked at Disneyland during college summers and holiday breaks. It made me realize at an early age how horrible the general public is. I was routinely yelled at, told I ruined the vacation they saved up for years (by telling someone their child was too young for a ride due to safety but whatever), and was once literally hit with a cane by a woman who tried to board a ride from the exit ramp. I also learned that tired parents used strollers as ramming devices to get thru a crowd. “Stroller ankle” was a term and legit. I spent three summers with bruises all over my ankles from routinely being hit with strollers once loving Fantasmic! ended. The job did have its perks. I worked with amazing people. Being on the jungle cruise forced me to not be afraid of public speaking or making an rear end out of myself. It literally has given me the position I have today and my entire career. But I will never forget the entitlement people have and how lovely I was treated because I was seen as not a person. One lady personally yelled at me about how since she bought a corndog that day I was able to make my rent payment. I. Went. Off. I said something to the effect of “I’m working because I want to. My parents would actually prefer I not. I go to (insert really good college here) and don’t need your corndog money. And how dare you think your admission ticket gives you the right to belittle and demean anyone.” And that was my last holiday break working at Disneyland.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 15:05
|
|
|
yippeekiyaymf posted:It made me realize at an early age how horrible the general public is. I was routinely yelled at, told I ruined the vacation they saved up for years (by telling someone their child was too young for a ride due to safety but whatever), and was once literally hit with a cane by a woman who tried to board a ride from the exit ramp. That reminds me of the time I accidentally smashed some kid's hand between the door and the cart when I was letting them out. He was fine aside from the initial pain, but the mom stood there berating me and demanding an apology. The training guy whispered to me not to apologize, so I didn't and just kept repeating that all guests are warned to keep their hands and feet inside of the cart at all times etc. She made me call the supervisor down and about half an hour later he comes and just asks her "did the employees tell you to keep your hands and feet inside the cart" and she huffed and called us all idiots and she'd complain to corporate (she didn't, as far as I knew). It was super awkward unloading people while this angry person kept saying "watch out, this guy likes to crush hands" and similar stuff while she waited. also when loading the carts, I dreaded every time a fat family came up. The policy was 4 people maximum per cart, 3 if any of them are fat. Asking four fatties to split up never went well. They'd argue and try and get in the cart anyway, which lead to backups which lead to having to hit the emergency stop button when we ran out of room to unload carts. Families of 5+ with small children were terrible too. They always had the attitude like "oh come on, it's not a big deal" - yeah, try telling that to my boss.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 15:42
|
|
|
Working at the Simpsons ride at Universal for over two years had some terrible moments, but was pretty good overall. Gotta love the guests that will look you in the eye and lie to your face, then get all indignant and red-faced when you call them out and tell them to get back to the start of the line. Also the time I was handed a warm bottle of urine with a nonchalant "Hey I found this"
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 17:44
|
|
|
I used to work in the laminating section of a factory that did all manner of passports and id cards and such. I ran two machines at the beginning of the line, one that would punch holes in these paper sheets and another that would stick little plastic windows in them. In between was a table with a soldering iron that was used to stick a sheet of plastic to the paper sheets. My days consisted of opening the door of the first machine, sticking in a sheet, pressing two buttons, waiting maybe 30 seconds, then opening the door and replacing the sheet. After repeating that some hundreds of times, I'd take the sheets to the table and solder the plastic to them, then move the pile to the second machine which worked more or less like the first. Then it was back to the first machine to repeat the whole process. You couldn't bring in any electric devices, meaning no phone and no music. Our ear protection did have built in radios, but at least in my little nook the reception was garbage. It was also impossible to carry on any kind of a conversation. Oh, forgot to mention that I worked 12-hour shifts. 12 hours of sitting in silence, doing the same three repetitive tasks. The pay was pretty good though so I stuck there for half a year, but it was the most soul crushing thing I've ever done. Worst job though is one I actually quit before doing it. Temp agency offered me a gig at some industrial laundry place. Didn't exactly sound great but I needed money so what the hell. When I get there, some manager type of dude meets me at the door. As he's leading me through the place he explains that I won't be working on washing the textiles, but some boxes. I figure it's boxes for transporting the laundry to and from the place so whatever. When we get to my workstation, it turns out to be a room with two huge sinks, some high-pressure hoses, long handled brushes and whole lot of garbage cans. A sticker on a nearby can reads "Please dispose of used diapers and sanitary towels in this container". Told the manager that the agency lied to me about the job and I wouldn't be doing it. That got a half-hearted "you sure?" out of him after which he shrugged and escorted me out. Never heard from that agency again.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 17:48
|
|
|
Pewdiepie posted:The rich pampered teenagers who type full communism now into a web forum won’t have to do any lovely jobs after the revolution because they will have been summarily executed by the state. I will personally ensure this.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 18:00
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 05:36 |
|
|
bloom posted:Worst job though is one I actually quit before doing it. Temp agency offered me a gig at some industrial laundry place. Didn't exactly sound great but I needed money so what the hell. When I get there, some manager type of dude meets me at the door. As he's leading me through the place he explains that I won't be working on washing the textiles, but some boxes. I figure it's boxes for transporting the laundry to and from the place so whatever. When we get to my workstation, it turns out to be a room with two huge sinks, some high-pressure hoses, long handled brushes and whole lot of garbage cans. A sticker on a nearby can reads "Please dispose of used diapers and sanitary towels in this container". Told the manager that the agency lied to me about the job and I wouldn't be doing it. That got a half-hearted "you sure?" out of him after which he shrugged and escorted me out. Never heard from that agency again. pressure washers are fun as heck. i'd have blasted the hell out of those diaper boxes. you missed out
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2019 18:17
|
|