Wage slaves, unite!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

nudge pst. You. Hey, yeah, you. C’mon, I can see it all over your face. You’re one of us, aren’t you? Crappy job? Just in it for the meager paycheck? Fast food? Retail? Waiting tables?

Welcome, comrade. Let’s see if we can find the worst job amongst us. I’ll start.

Currently, I’m working at a “cinematic megaplex.” It’s a major movie theater chain that’s about to enter into some sort of corporate merger with another, to become even more globally dominating. There are 24 theaters in the sprawling suburban building. Us employees rotate through all the positions, though I’ve only worked the box office and concession stand. They both suck. The average shift is 8 hours, during which you get one unpaid 15 minute break. When you’re working, you’re standing, mostly in the exact same spot.

If it’s not busy, the lobby is big, empty, and echoing. The movie-theater-radio network fights with the bigscreen TVs which play ads in back. We get treated to the same cycle of five ads competing with the same handful of top-40 songs over and over and over and over again. There’s an American Express ad featuring Ellen Degeneres dancing to different ditties, which I now have memorized.

Customers - I’m sorry, “guests” - get irate over the prices all the time. Understandably; the matinee price is $7.00 per adult. THey don’t seem to understand, however, that it’s not our fault: us employees don’t set the prices.

Saturday nights, of course, it gets busy, so a couple local cops get ‘stationed’ in the lobby. They stand right by the box office and…loom. I found it immensely unsettling to have this cop just standing there, behind me, for a couple hours last night.

We’re not allowed to eat or drink while working, so if you want to not shrivel up and die, you need to be on constant alert for supervisors and managers. It’s entirely irrational to expect us not to need a drink, especially if we’re supposed to actually follow the looong scripts for how to greet customers, answer the phone, and so on. Plus, we have to harrass people to donate to some cancer organization.

The final indignity: We have to wear ties. And spiffy, ill-fitting, 100% polyester vests.

Next? Make me feel better about my job.

2

AFAIK you’re entitled by law to a half hour break if you work 6 hours and an hour break if you work 8. I am totally open to being corrected on that, but I’d like to think you should definitely be getting more than 15 minutes.

I’d like to know why you took/are keeping this job. If I remember, you’re in college, so is this just for the summer? Any perks?

3

I’m not sure how much better this will make you feel, but I’ll give 'er a go anywho.

You could always try cleaning the toilets in a campground. You really haven’t lived until you’ve cleaned feces off of the ceiling. Then there’s the fun of a power outage. Takes the water pumps out with it so toilet no flushy. You can’t close the bathrooms quick enough to prevent the crap parfait from forming (crap, tp, more crap, more tp, repeat with a splash of urine.).

I worked in a resort that couldn’t afford to pay their suppliers and had managers paychecks bounce. That was nice.

Then there is my current job as a deli clerk.

Customer: Can I get some sliced ham?
Me:I’m sorry, our meat slicers are being used on other customers. Can I get you any cheese or salads?
C: Okay, can I get some turkey?

Then there is the “Thicker/Thinner” game. "Too thin. Just a little thicker. A little thicker. Little more. :eek: That’s way to thick. :mad:

Next you have those who just don’t seem to understand that I need to ask them questions such as “Which ham would you like, How much would you like,” and “How would you like that sliced.” Just asking for “some ham” is not enough for me to do my job.

Then there is the fryer. Nothing like an arm covered in grease burns. The slicer protection gloves that have been cut through repeatedly are fun. All of our slicers are hand me downs from the meat department, so they work great. For some reason we have to brew the complimentary coffee. The manager didn’t get around to telling maintenence that we had a broken slicer blade for six months even though we talked to him about it every week. The distrubutors that don’t send us the items that are on sale for the week.

I could go on and on. Deli clerk makes me miss cleaning toilets.

4

I don’t know about the labor laws…I’ll check if I remember and get the chance (and can be bothered).

There are definite perks, such as free movies (me and up to five friends once a week), and free food. The schedule is mostly evenings/nights, so that frees up my my days for the internship I’m doing and the class I’m taking. Also, it pays fairly decently, all things considered - $6.50 an hour, plus bonuses for certain combos at the concession stand. Plus, since school vacations coincide with their busy seasons, I’m pretty much guarenteed a job when I’m home on vacations in the future. Also, they were the first people to offer me a job this summer, so I took it, as I desparately need money.

5

I work in retail, but I’m sorry, I have a good job, in spite of the customers. The business owner will throw people out for being rude to the staff, he gave us all bonuses, hamemade pottery, and chocolate for Christmas, and every Sunday is time and a half. Oh, and I got two raises in five months. :smiley:

Oww! Stop hitting me! Does it help that I’m still impoverished?

6

I once worked in the office at a factory where:

  1. There was no heat (and this was in Indiana, where it gets downright cold in the winter)
  2. No running water. Meaning the toilets didn’t work, but people used them anyway. Until they overflowed, and then they kept using them. For months. Enough said.
  3. Wait, there was running water. It was the roof outside my office door, where the rain and snow leaked in, so I had a little tiny skating rink to navigate every morning.
  4. The VP of the company had some anger management issues, so I heard “You gd-damned stupid fcking c*nt, why isn’t the blah-blah report here? Oh, what, Mary had it? Never mind.” At least three times a week.
  5. Same VP told me to fire some guy because he had too many child support garnishments on his check.
  6. My “paid” holidays? Sure, I was paid, but I was expected to go in and paint my office/strip and wax the floor/refinish the woodwork. (I was the office manager. Remodeling the office was not part of the original job description.)

And for this, I earned $7 per hour. I stuck it out for nine months, and my boss (oddly, a decent guy – don’t know why he worked there) told me I’d outlasted every previous manager by about six months.

7

Working in a theatre is great. Well, if you worked for me it was unless you wanted your weekly paychecks to clear on their first try through the bank.
But the popcorn. You can go home smelling like popcorn! THat’s a plus. And free movie posters. You’ve got to love the free posters. Those can be pretty sweet. And besides you may have a cop standing behind you but you are NINJACHICK. Who needs to feel afraid in that situation? Not you.

8

Not the worse, but, here goes.
I work in a production environment.
Typical work week, 10 hours a day, Mon - Fri, 8 hours Sat. Turns out, we need 5 more people on days, and 5 more on grave, to stop working Saturdays. I found this out when my supervisor was telling me how he probably couldn’t, on day shift, accommodate my doctors note that I can only stand 5 hours per shift, and would probably have to move me to grave. I’ve worked grave before, I can’t handle it. Luckily, I think I found a way of staying on days.
There’s no heating or cooling in my department, although the no heat isn’t too bad, just wear a jacket, the no cooling sucks. Even thought I, with my own personal money, bought some fans, if you’re not standing directly in front of one, it can get pretty miserable. Of course, when I brought it up to management, I was told it would be too expensive. The temperature can get well into the 80’s, and I’m trying to think if it gets into the 90’s or not. I’m not sure.
My department is split up into two sections, and for a while, each had a lead. Then, we were reduced to one lead. At least, officially. I have one coworker, who still makes lead pay, and gets to boss us around, even though, officially, he’s supposed to be a regular operator like the rest of us. Of course he got to keep his lead pay and authority, because he’s management’s puppet. All his major decisions, especially the bad ones, were never his fault. Nope, his hands were tied. He HAD to do what he did. Although to be fair, as a person he’s OK, he’s just a lousy lead.
And then there’s our supervisor. To those of us who aren’t buddy buddy with him, he nice when he feels like it, but just don’t go to him with any problems about company decisions. After all, we’re only here voluntarily, and if we don’t like it here, we should get a job somewhere else.
OK, this is getting long, so I’ll just end with 32 hours of sick leave, which, since I work 10 hours shifts, is 3 days and 2 hours a year, which, starting this year, we can no longer roll over year to year

9

I don’t have the worst job by anybody’s standards, but I hate, hate, hate being a wage slave. Can I join?