It wouldn’t surprise me if she didn’t know about the official form either, until she notified HR at the last minute about your day off. Some people just can’t admit they screwed up.
She knew. She’d been there for something like 8 years, and the other people I worked with indicated that she knew about the form, and expressed surprise that she hadn’t told me.
During my senior year in college and for a year or so afterwards, I occasionally worked evenings as the model for drawing and painting classes in various community colleges in the area. I needed to save money for a cross-country move, and it seemed like a reasonable part-time job. (Not at my own cheap-ass State College, mostly because the pay was much lower, although not running into anyone I knew was a benefit.) After the first time, taking my clothes off in front of a group of strangers became no big deal (well, I wouldn’t do it now, but I was thin and lovely and 21), and the hardest part of the job became dealing with the boredom of being forced to stare into space for hours on end – and, for painting classes, dealing with discomfort of holding a pose for 3 hours. But the instructors were all very nice, and the community college kids were friendly and seemed happy to be there – they always wanted to show me the work, and made small talk before and after.
Towards the end of this career, I took a job doing the same for a Fancy Ivy League University. The pay was about equal to the community colleges. The instructor I was assigned to, however, took particular glee in putting me in contorted and embarassing positions and then surrounding me with random, uncomfortable objects. She spoke to me like I was a brain-damaged pet, and would refer to parts of my body in a very off-putting way. She’s wasn’t insulting, it was just inappropriate and made me uncomfortable, and this after I’d done it on other classes maybe 50 times. And, to make it worse, the students never made eye contact or spoke to me at all. I found the whole experience very disturbing – it sort of skirted the edge of public humiliation – and I quit after the second class.
I work-studied as a student assistant to the nastiest woman in the world. She was the trophy wife of a guy getting his MBA, and I guess she’d assumed that she wouldn’t have to work after marrying him. She constantly complained about how working is so stressful and backbreaking…and what was she doing for a living? Planning alumni events. Yeah, sending out mailings (that I stuffed envelopes for) and booking a caterer now and then.
I wasn’t spared her lectures on how the Tax Man is evil…apparently, her salary all went to taxes every year. “Why?” I asked. “Because my husband and I own property in Manhattan,” she pouted. They had received it as a gift from his family. She still managed to buy expensive horse accessories (fancy saddles and crap) off ebay–while at work. And how did she afford those Prada shoes? Hmmm.
Worst of all, she treated me like a retarded 8-year-old. I was a 21-year-old college student, and she was a 26-year-old bimbo, but she referred to me as “my student.” She told me I wasn’t a good “project manager,” but all I ever did was stuff envelopes. When I did take initiative and do some things for her without her asking, she freaked out because she assumed I’d done it wrong if it was more complicated than folding paper.
I ended up getting laid off because she left the job when her husband got his degree. I asked where they were going, and she told me they were moving to Greenwich, CT and that she “wasn’t going to work anymore.” I can only hope he dumped her for a younger model and that she’s packing meat or cleaning bathrooms or telemarketing now.
Then I got nothing; the only motive I can think of is spite.
Heh. My standing theory is that everyone needs someone to shit on, and I was her shittee. :eek:
I was a white-van-man for exactly ten weeks. Supposededly I was fixing cash-registers (aka electronic point of sale machines), mostly it involved sitting in London traffic listening to radio 4, which was the OK part of the job. The crap part of the job was being expected to fix/maintain these machines from day one with no instruction at all. The boss (who was a lying weasel) seemed to think you was born knowing how these things worked. The first day on the job he spent a lot of time explaining that I would be liable for any parking fines, this seemed to be very important to him. Having your new engineer know how to operate a cash register (let alone fix one) didn’t enter the picture. Basically I was given the van keys and a list of customers who needed their tills fixed.
I may be able to offer a reason why white-van-man can always keep up with you. My van appeared to have the wrong gearbox in it. It would top out at 100mph* but would get there suprisingly quickly.
I left with an expenses overhead of 45p or so. They sent me an invoice. I sent a cheque, which they cashed.
*not in the London traffic obviously, you can walk faster than London traffic.
Wait. You left owing them money? 
I’ve liked my adult jobs – I love clerical/administrative work and can take joy in it even when my bosses aren’t all that great.
When I was a kid though, the best-paying jobs were field work. Real fields – corn and soybeans.
For some reason I’ve never understood, during the hottest, most humid part of the summer, some corn develops “tassels” which have to be removed. Not all of the tassels, just some of them, in certain rows. (Something to do with pollinating, I think.)
It feels like there’s no air to breathe down in those rows with the corn two feet taller than you. Then there’s bugs and spiders and huge fat white worms. If you grab a corn leaf along with the tassel that you’re pulling, you get something like a paper cut, only worse.
You can also ride on a machine to do this. It has platforms that ten or twelve kids can stand on and it puts you at a level with the top of the corn, but you breathe diesel exhaust all day.
Working in the beans was better. The beans are only about two to three feet tall, so at least you can breathe, and look around and see where you are, and how far it is to the end of the row.
You’re given a machete-like knife, and you bend over and chop out the weeds and hope you don’t miss and take off a toe. I think they use Round-Up now.
But it was good money. We’d get 50 cents an hour for walking beans, and $25 an acre for corn. Not $25 a day – $25 for taking care of that acre for the 2-3 weeks in summer when the tassels needed doing. But you could work your own hours – like early a.m. or evening before it got too hot.
Ah. Good times. 
Yup. I got cash in hand for expenses, when I left I was 45 pence up. Which they saw fit to bill me for. I did not leave on good terms.
I worked for a Staples Warehouse once. They had this huge section in the middle of the warehouse that was 5 levels high stacked with runways inside which ran about 150 yards long. It was nicknamed by the people, “The Rat Cage”.
An employee goes into the cage and gets their own section of shelving. The shelving is full of Staples product and beneath each product there are strips of lights. For 10 hrs a day you had to walk back and forth in a 50 yard section with these little *%$(^##@! lights flashing on all day. You pick the product and put it in a box and throw it on the conveyor belt, which mind you, had an extremely irritating squeeling noise to top off the blasting soft rock stations through the crackling speakers.
–
Ironically, another worst job i had, some would cherish. I worked a three day a week 12 hr shift in a warehouse. 6pm to 6am. I drove a forklift around. It was just me and my buddy and we were basically the clean up crew for the day shift which meant we had about 2 hours of work a night. The rest of the time was completely mind numbing and boring because we had nothing to do and no internet. We eventually resorted to alcohol.
I only worked 12 days a month but my sleep schedule was so screwed up that i couldnt really figure out a time to operate. Dreamiest year of my life.
My grandparents owned a wheat ranch in Southern Utah and as a kid I spent summers working for them moving sprinklers (the giant kind on wheels). They were too poor to afford automated field sprinklers and every four hours my cousins and I had to push the sprinklers to another section of the fields. The amusing part was avoiding stepping on the rattlesnakes that liked to curl up in the wheat.
As a teenager I worked in our town’s cherry sorting factory. Cherries would come in from the fields and would be run down a conveyor belt. My job was to pick out dead birds, rocks, worms, snakes, etc before the cherries went to the processing plant.
Right after high school I worked as a bus-girl slave at the Grand Canyon. The kitchen was in the basement and I schlepped very heavy bus tubs up and down 18 steps for two months before my body and soul gave out.
I’ve had other shittacious jobs, but they were office-based and the snakes were human.
A local promotions company posted an advertisement on my graduate school’s bulletin board for one day jobs. It looked like easy, fast money, so several friends and I applied. We were hired on the spot and told to report at 8:00 am on April 15.
Turns out the job was dressing up in cow suits, standing at the post office, and handing out Chik-Fil-A coupons to people turning in their tax returns.
Not a horrible way to earn spending money, but other friends took pictures which still resurface from time to time!
Lets see:
Temp jobs while in college:
Cardboard Box Factory Worker - every day my hands would be paper cut to shreds and I would be covered in paper dust
Pitney Bowes Postage Meter Tester - I spent one day locked in the bowels of a PB building sticking envelopes in a postage meter and said fuck this.
High School Cafeteria Dishwasher - Thank god it wasn’t my high school
Warehouse picker/packer - Spend all day “picking” product off the shelves and packing them in boxes for shipment.
in high school:
Plant Nursury Worker - Basically lugging tree balls and 50 lb bags of shit back and forth all day for some ex-jock meathead douchbag (who I’m pretty sure was gay and didn’t want to admit it).
Most of my high school jobs were ok though. Basically, just hang out for a few hours a day/night, goof around with my friends, etc. Worked in a fast food restaurant which kind of sucked but my buddy worked accross the street at his dad’s liquor store 
and as an adult:
Dot-com Internet Consulting Firm - Like working for a religeous cult for crap wages 75 hours a week.
Wal-mart. I was a college student and all of the lifers resented the hell out of us. I guess they wanted co-workers that were lifelong employees.
PLUS
Wal-Mart cheer in the mornings, need I say more?
I’ll be bland
Dishroom worker at my dorm cafeteria my first year of college.
I only worked 2 hours a shift, but I was more physically exhausted than at any other job.
I was so happy to land a job as a monitor when the computer room opened.
Sitting and handed out software is much more pleasant than steam and dirty dishes.
I worked for two or three weeks in a place that made potpourri. My job was to sit at a drill press and make shavings out of pine boards. The shavings would then be dyed, scented, and mixed with flowers and other natural stuff and bagged. I was on the brand-new graveyard shift with five or six losers who had no interest in putting in an honest night’s work. A couple of them would often come in, decide they were too ‘sick’ to work and go home. Maybe they had someone else clock out for them at the end of these shifts. I wouldn’t put it past them.
One night they all went home or just didn’t show up, leaving me to work alone with our so-called supervisor…who left me to work alone while he found a cozy place for a long nap.
One or more of my co-workers also stole things, like office equipment. After the first week, the higher-ups announced that we could not use the breakroom, which was upstairs with the offices because of this. The upstairs was locked and we had to eat lunch where we worked.
That wasn’t all that bad. The owners were notoriously cheap and were constantly cutting corners, illegally if needed, to keep the business going. Trying to make nice, curly, smooth wood shavings with dull blades was more of a challenge than one might imagine.
And then there was the dying vat. It was a bathtub with a couple of immersion-style heaters. You’d toss a bunch of wood shavings in and after a while, scoop them out with a homemade fishnet on a metal frame. I was chatting with a co-worker while scooping out the first batch when I felt a jolt of electricity run though me. My co-worker said, “You just got shocked, didn’t you?” I nodded. He explained that the heating coils on the immersion heaters were surrounded with an aluminum shield to prevent burns and shocks and that there were salts in the dye that would eat through the aluminum, negating the shields’ usefulness.
I wasn’t hurt but the next night when the swing shift supervisor (before she left for then night) asked if I would do the dying again I said, “No way!”
The tub was filled as needed by taking a bucket into the men’s room down the hall and filling it at a janitorial-style faucet. One morning, the day shift was coming in and the regular dyer stuck a bucket under the running faucet, went to do something else and forgot all about it. I was just leaving, having to do so by that same hallway and noticed the floor was covered in water. I went in the men’s room, turned off the faucet and, as a matter of course, unplugged the extension cord that ran back down the now-waterlogged hallway to power the immersion heaters and God-knows-whatall. I figured the guy would clean up the water and plug the extension cord back in. Nope, that’s not the way things go there. After I told him about what happened, he went and plugged it right back in. I know that those things are well coated to guard against electical shock but still, it seems rather unwise.
Extension cords ran like spider webs overhead and underfoot all over that place. I knew that the fire department took a dim view on them because just months before at my other, real job, a fire inspector gave us a little lecture for using just one.
So when a second gas-powered dryer was installed, I had pretty good reason to believe that the gas was connected illegally, without a professional installer and without the proper permits from the city. I called the fire department to voice my concerns and was rewarded by the fact that the person I talked to was appopriately concerned too. I should add that if something did go wrong with that gas connection or if a fire started in that area, it would block our only exit from the building.
I don’t know how the fire inspection went because shortly thereafter, the graveyard shift was eliminated. Heck, I was the only one actually working, though they probably didn’t know that. All they knew was that six people weren’t producing nearly what they should be. I was asked to work the day or swing shift but since I was already working days at my real job I told them I’d pass. I couldn’t get from it to the swing shift in time and I didn’t care to work there any more anyway. Good bye.
But the story doesn’t end there. Fast forward a year or so. I saw an interesting article in the paper. Seems this company moved. I’d like to think it may have to do with my call to the fire department and difficulties resulting thereof. In part, at least.
They were now situated in a warehouse directly behind the Immigration Building. Someone there in Immigration noticed a lot of foreign-looking types going in and out of there and got to wondering if they were all in this country legally. An investigation proved most were not. The company’s owners got into major trouble and, I imagine, had to pay huge fines. Can’t imagine a nicer people it could happen to. Heh, heh, heh.
Waitressing at a pioneer themed restaurant. Wearing full length dress with puffy sleeves and a WHITE apron that we were expected to keep “clean and neat” at all times. The other waitresses had all been there forever and had formed quite the little clique. They went out of their way to snub me and the hostess (who they felt was beneath them and they resented sharing tips with her). I lasted about 2 weeks.
The uniforms looked something like this , but without the hat. Try carrying a tray full of food and drinks for 8 people on one hand while trying not to trip over your skirt or get anything on you white apron.
It’s nothing compared to meat packing or telemarketing, but it still sucked.
I worked in a sawmill when I was 16. A big open saw blade 2 feet to the right of me and a big open saw blade 2 feet to the left of me. I had to pull 16’ 2"x12" roughcut green boards off the line and stack them. The footing was treacherous and I knew I’d eventually trip and possibly slide into one of the blades. That lasted a day.
At about 25 I worked as a resident manager for about a year while I went to school. Nothing like having to get up in the middle of the night to let drunks in who had forgotten, or couldn’t figure out, how to use a key. Cleaning up apartments after people moved out was the worst part of the job. Yes, people lost parts of their security deposits if they didn’t clean things properly, but I never got a penny of that money. Yet I had to do the cleaning before the new tenants moved in. Being still rather naive I started out by using environmentally safe products to do the cleaning of things like stoves, walls, floors, etc. By the time I finished I was looking for stuff that actually worked. You know, the stuff banned in 30 countries type of shit. After that cleanups were easy. Still a suck ass job, though.
My worst job was issuing parking tickets for a local parking company. I got paid by the ticket issued, so I had to move quickly between parking lots. There was always the threat of violence if the person who owned the vehicle showed up while you were on the lot. I’d had enough when I was working Christmas Eve. It was -10C, snowy, and windy. I was putting a ticket on a new BMW when this guy comes running out of the building pissed right off at me. He actually called me ‘Scrooge’. Yeah, buddy. I’m out here in the freezing cold because I actually like doing this shit, so go back to your nice warm office and next time remember to put another fucking quarter in the parking meter. Excuse me while I get into my 15 year old AMC Eagle Wagon rust bucket. Sorry, buddy, I just find it rather amusing that you’d call me the Scrooge when you probably had his money while I lived like Bob Cratchit. And to top it off the company cut the commission we made on each ticket because we were writing too many of them. We got $1.25 and they cut it to $1. Each ticket was for $30.
Jeepers, folks, just reading this stuff practically makes me want to commit suicide.
I’ve somehow managed to avoid ever having a really hideous job, although I’ve worked for a few assholes here and there. A friend of mine had probably the single worst job I’ve ever heard of: dispatching several hundred diseased pheasants, which was accomplished by going into a huge pen, chasing them down one by one and twisting their heads off.
My personal worst, pretty mild by comparison was my very first job: caddy at a local country club. I was 12 and my parents had decided it would be a good way to teach me responsibility and work ethic. There was no actual pay, only tips. I had never been on a golf course; hell; I’d never even held a golf club before.
Every day for about a week one of the 'rents would drive me about ten miles to the club at 5:00 AM, where I would then wait at the caddy shack for my turn to go out. That turn never came. Caddies went out by seniority, and there were more caddies than golfers who wanted them, so I’d sit around doing absolutely nothing until about 4 PM, when one of the 'rents would pick me up again. At least the weather was nice most days.
Finally, Saturday rolls around, there’s a tournament and for once all the caddies are needed. Even then, it’s mid-afternoon before I go out on the course, which I am now seeing for the first time. On the first hole the guy whose bag I’m schlepping asks me what club he should use for his approach shot. I shrug my shoulders and tell him I haven’t a clue. It pretty much goes downhill from there.
When we get back to the club house I get my one and only tip of the entire week: 50 cents. After that my parents finally threw in the towel, and didn’t make me go back out there again.