There is no “extra 14 cents a mile”. They didn’t get to deduct what they didn’t pay you, you know.
Cheap-ass shit includes cheap TP, the kind with little bits of wood still in it, :eek: and "hand dryers’ instead of paper towels. :mad: Generally, I find that companies that go cheap-ass in the bathhrooms are headed for trouble.
As a fellow card room employee…HOLY SHIT??? :eek:
As for my old digs, the day shift was relatively laid back. Not many customers, those that DID come in were either retired or on their lunch break so were pretty laid back. As such, our owner didn’t want to pay a security guard come in for the first 2 hours we were open.
So how did we move money around without security? The owner wanted to license one of the WAITRESSES as a security guard. That’s right, so she can move money around the pit in between serving drinks and turkey sandwiches.
Great thread.
I think we have a winner.
I love this story. What CFO wouldn’t be proud to have turned his office into a maximum-security prison, with paper clips instead of cigarettes?
Coda to that story: The CEO managed to get himself a soft landing by securing a new midlevel executive position at a large company in another state before the board could complete their involuntary termination proceedings. (Or they dragged their heels and gave him an opportunity to get himself out of there in order to save headaches and publicity.) Later, word came back that the ex-CEO was no longer in his new gig, that after a year or so they’d bounced him, finding him too weird and skeevy to handle. That company? Enron. That’s right, our CEO was apparently too corrupt for Enron. He has since reinvented himself as a movie mogul, running financing for Bollywood productions. Somehow, this is the perfect ending.
Not legally, maybe. But you know it happens. Especially with the cheap-ass outfits.
Nah, sometimes they’re just dumb. I once got paid $27 an hour, 40 hours a week to do NOTHING for two months by a company that just wanted to make sure I’d be on hand for the editorial revisions of a catalog I’d helped put together. That company had the worst toilet paper EVAH! I mean, it was like fax paper – thin and not soft at all. Yech. Kinda made you wonder. I bet if executive bathrooms had the same kind of TP, there would have been an upgrade in no time.
I once had a job where I sent a letter to a house three doors down from where I lived. Someone noticed and asked why I didn’t drop it off while I was walking home so the company would save a 25 cent stamp?
I worked in a store that paid 12 cents more an hour than minimum wage. When the minimum went up 15 cents, the owner refused to raise our wages , not by fifteen cents, but not even by three cents an hour. Not only cheap, but illegal. Somone had to report him to get him to pay us MINIMUM wage. It took us over six months to get this taken care of and when we got our retroactive wages, we all quit.
I have only had one employer that reimbursed for milage. When they tried to tell me that they paid less than the IRS rate because it was company policy, I promptly went to the IRS website and printed off the official rates (on my home PC). I then proceeded to tell them that they would pay me the correct rate or I would report them. They paid up. And I kept on top of it, too. Any time the rate changed, I informed them immediately.
The free airline meal was a curious thing- people bitched about the quality, and then bitched when it was eliminated- that food was disgusting, but if you don’t give it to me, I’m pissed 
And seriously, the longest non stop US flight is what four hours? People can’t go four hours without eating? All the free meal did was take up the stewardesses time, block the aisle while they’re serving when I’m trying to take a piss, and fill the plane with garbage that causes dealys in loading the food and unloading the refuse. No offense, but how hard is it to put a sandwich in your pocket before you walk out the door?
And I’m sorry, but if all you did is sleep in your hotel bed and you insist they change the sheets every day, that’s pretty selfish. it’s a huge amount of time making a bed, and the laundry at the average hotel is insane as it is.
Nearly 99% of restaurants I go to have the common sense to have you pay one price for a soft drink. After that the waiter will continually bring you refills when yours is running low or if it’s a fast food place your welcome to refill it yourself.
Why? Because when the charge you $1.25 for a soft drink and you drink 2.5 cups it still costs them about 20 cents.
So it really burns me when you find the one place in the 1% minority that serves soft drinks in the short glasses filled with ice and wants to charge you $1.25 for every refill. How cheap and money hungry do you have to be?
When places pull that crap they immediately go on my list of “do not patronize ever again- and tell all your friends”.
Boston to San Diego is 6 hours (Six looong hours, I flew it yesterday, and not a red-eye) which can be a long time to go for some people, esp if you have a blood sugar problem.
I actually perfer to buy the overpriced food in the airport and take it along with me - it usually is a better quality.
The longest coast-to-coast flights are around the 6 hour mark or maybe a little more. With check-in and other waits, it can push the 8 hour mark or maybe more with delays. That doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t plan for it, but the situation can get more dire with just a small run of bad luck.
I one worked for maybe the largest company there is, and one Christmas in lieu of bonuses, they went out and bought a bunch of household items and sundries held a “raffle” for them, with no consideration to employee quality, seniority, etc., so the person who won the “big” prize (a 13" color TV) was someone who had been there three weeks and lasted another four more, and I and others who had been there a decade got things like a 12 pack of gym socks, jam assortments, etc.
Same company next year decided only two people per department would get bonuses. A couple of lower level departments were staffed solely with new entry level employees, of which two per department got bonuses, and the two departments that had ten skilled long time employees per department had eight people get nothing.
When you work at MegaloMart for (x) amount of years you get a little numeric sticker to put on your name badge*.
Woooo, that was such a special moment for me.
when you are there 5 years you get to pick a variety of cheap items ( water bottle, nylon drawstring backpack(rucksack to you OverThePond), and other assorted cheapass gifts, all with the company logo on it.
I made the joke, " Where is the 5 year anniversary Dildo? Oh, wait, that comessnerk in the form of our weekly paycheck."
*Under our name on our badge is the phrase, " I can help" in red letters. If I could find the exact font, I would add to it, " If I cared enough."
Along the same lines, I know of a car dealer that would not allow the technicians to play radios in the shop because it used “his” electricity. So one of the technicians rigged up a solar cell to a portable radio. He put the solar cells on the roof, and the radio in the vent ducts. The entire shop had piped in music when ever the sun was up. 
One Saturday the owner went into the shop for something (shop was closed) and spent the next 4 hours trying to find the radio to unplug it.
Where ever he went in the shop, the music seemed to come from some other part of the shop. 
he never did find that damn radio.
I’ve been offered to order stuff like that at work before, and I generally state my preference for higher budget cosmetics whenever offered.
Vinyl Turnip: I worked at a place at one point in time that made coffee with those “individual serving” packets for an entire carafe of coffee; what made this tasteless dreck worse was that the coffee they ordered was not only really cheap and nasty but stale to boot!
Wee Bairn: A flight from Atlanta, Georgia to Portland, Oregon is a six hour flight. I’m sure it would become at least an hour longer if not more to extend the boundaries from Miami, Florida to Seattle, Washington. Six hours is a bit long for some people to not eat, and we’ve got so many rules regarding what is and is not allowed on flights these days that I’d be surprised if they let someone bring on much in the way of food. That being said, I tend to bring my own food when I’m on a long flight.
This practise is the norm here, and I’d be surprised if anywhere offered a free refill.
YES.
A government contractor that I worked for had signed a 4 Billion Dollar Deal™ with the government. My co-workers and myself were paid considerably less than what our peers made in the same industry and experience level in DC. I had asked for a raise and it was rejected because I didn’t ask during a review period. WTF!
The government decided to eliminate our contract and bring in government workers. Throughout the hiring process my contractor asked us to not jump ship because of obligations to their client. As others left, I began doing more and more work and still met all of the deadlines. I asked for a raise again and they turned it down stating that their budget was locked because the money is allocated per worker. Meaning, just because there are fewer poeple didn’t mean that there was more money. They had signed a **4 Billion ** dollar deal a year prior!
I posted my resume that night.
The work I did was pretty high profile. I was interviewed and was hired elsewhere within a week and a half… at over double my old salary.
And nothing is more satisfying than to hear about work grinding to a halt when you leave a crappy employer. Ahhhhh.
A while back, I worked for an “ebay business” in brooklyn, that took the unsold overflow from some small auction galleries and tried to sell them to specific collectors online. Most of the stuff was junky, and most of the collectors were old women who couldn’t use ebay for the life of them. I was the “office manager” which meant doing all the computer work and fixing the ebay auction information for the appraisers who were just as clueless as the old women but with more attitude.
Anyhoo, we were informed one day by an ebay customer service rep that we were some sort of special “power seller” based on volume- maybe on of the top 100 sellers in the US- and that we were going to get a prize from ebay delivered to the office. We were a small place, only about 6 employees, and speculation abounded. What would they deliver? An old-timer mentioned that once they’d earned a clock with an ebay logo on it. We thought, maybe a plastic trophy? I loudly guessed that they’d set up an ebay petting zoo out on the grimy, industrial-area street. We were in hysterics imagining camels and goats trooping through our cramped, tchochke-filled warehouse.
And then the day arrived. The doorbell rang.
Outside was a disheveled black man in an apron. He walked in with a big smile on his face and heavily-accented speech. He was carrying a tray upon which was one small cup of local coffee from next door (cost- $0.25) in an ebay mug, a paper cup of orange juice, a plastic plate with a corn muffin and a wilted croissant, a doily, a small glass vase with a single flower, and a pair of cheap plastic “fuzzy” slippers with the ebay logo on the top. He said, in garbled english, “Sorry I 'pposed to bring NY TIMES or WALL JERNIL but I don’t find NY TIMES or JERNIL!” He plopped down a NY Post instead.
We gaped, our mouths hanging open. The guy seemed blithely unaware that anything in the presentation was less than spectacular. He was PROUD of it.
What ebay was going for was obvious- their whole “image” of people sitting in bed, effortlessly selling the contents of their basements or attics, and the prize was meant to be “breakfast in bed”, so to speak. It would have been an interesting idea had it not been so A) inappropriate and B) HORRIBLY, HORRIBLY executed. First of all, I would NEVER let the delivery man into my home. It looked like they’d pulled him out of an alley. Secondly, this was a BUSINESS. What, are we supposed to split the corn muffin into fifths? Thirdly, the customer service rep really built this up ahead of time, getting excited, trying to get us excited… for THIS? It was the worst possible of EVERYTHING. Worst and cheapest delivery guy, worst and cheapest coffee, cheapo muffin and croissant, etc. No one wanted to eat any of it. I think I ate half of the corn muffin.
We laughed ourselves silly and then explained what we’d received to the company owner, who was across the country at the time. She was horrified. We wrote a strongly-worded letter to ebay. I don’t remember getting much of a response.
Do they charge you by the cup also if you order tea with your meal?