Who Are You Again?

Back in the ’80s I was a college student and needed a part time job
to help pay for my beer. I was hired by a contract security firm that
had the airport passenger screening contract and was sent down to get
trained.

The lady who I was to work for acted surprised when I showed up and
grudgingly showed me around. She then passed me off to another
employee for training.

I worked for three weeks, the whole time getting the vibe from the
boss that she did not like me. I have no idea why, I wore the uniform
I was issued, always clean and ironed, I did as I was told and tried
to be pleasant. I was never counseled about any problems.

The last conversation I had with her was when I finished the required
training. She told me to call on Monday for my work schedule. I called
that Monday, there were no hours scheduled for me. I called each of
the next six weeks and there were no hours scheduled, so I stopped
calling. I got a job slinging pizzas instead.

Fast forward two years, I’m moving out of that city and as I packed I
found my uniform. I drove over to the corporate offices and went to
the desk. I explained that I wanted to turn in the uniform since I
obviously didn’t need it. The man asked me where I was working, so I
told him the tale. He just stared at me and asked “Who are you
again?”

Car Troubles

I was a”low ranking” manager at a plus size women’s fashion store.
The store manager was psycho! She gossiped about me all the time and
this time was the last straw! She threatened to demote me because I
didn’t have a car! (She knew about it before I even got the job
because she used to work with my husband at a different store.) I had
never been late or called in, I was always early and picking up shifts
at last minute. My house was only a 15 minute walk from work so I
couldn’t figure out what her problem was. So I called the district
manager and told her about the situation and that in a way it was
discrimination. She told me that the store manager was under a lot of
stress and she didn’t mean it. Well she should not have been talking
about me in front of customers and co-workers in the middle of the
store and very loudly, no matter what kind of stress she was under! I
finally, one day, told her that if she had a problem she needed to
tell me to my face! She never got the guts and continued her
rantings. I finally got fed up with her and told her to get herself
another “low ranking” manager to put up with her pointless crap!

Throw Away The Key

I worked at a gift store that only hired females and part of the
dress code was to wear short skirts, yet we were expected to climb
ladders.

The ladders were old and should have been serviced or replaced years
ago, but the DM thought that they were fine, though she would NEVER
get on one herself.

When I was pregnant I was still expected to climb ladders though I
got severe dizzy spells and had a doctors note stating I am not to be
on them at all.

I was almost forced to work by myself for 8 hours while the DM was at
another store with 4 other employees, apparently no one would come and
cover me at all. Though I had morning sickness she told me I should
drag everything in from the mall and lock up to go throw up.

After a few hours of this I finally dragged everything into the
store, I took a black marker and a piece of paper and wrote “I QUIT”
in big black letters and faxed it to the store that the DM was at,
locked up the store threw the keys inside and went home.

The store got fined by the mall for early closure, I called the
health and safety board and they got multiple violations at every
location in the city, and I filed a complaint with the labour board.
I found out later that the DM and all store managers were fired and
replaced, and the last time I saw the DM she was working at a home
renovations store as a cashier. Ahh Karma is great

Crash & Burn

A few years ago I was working for a software company, in charge of
their network and all the hardware. Being a busy company we were
constantly upgrading, and I would have to work late many nights to
upgrade the network while the programmers and other staff had gone
home. I was constantly telling my boss that we should make some major
upgrades as all these small, incremental ones were inefficient and
ultimately more expensive. He’d never listen andkept asking me to put
additional small capacity hard drives in the servers.

Eventually I convinced him to upgrade to a larger hard drive at a
cost of nearly $1,000. Suddenly, he didn’t trust me with this
expensive hard drive so he stayed late with me to install it himself.
I’d never seen him work with hardware and it was interesting to watch
him try to shoehorn this hard drive into the case between all the
small hard drives he’d had me put in. warned him that we should do
two things first. One, remove some of the old hard drives so there
was space, and two turn the server off.

First he plugged in the hard drive without turning off the server,
then he tried to force it into the case with everything turned on. A
small flash and a whisp of smoke and the sudden silence as the server
quit was all I needed to know that he’d wrecked it all. He just
stopped, looked at me and said “What did you do?” I said “I just
watched you wreck several thousand dollars worth of equipment by
ignoring my advice and leaving the server on.” “Did I do that? I
wondered what the noise was. ” That was all he said.
Well I got to run out the next day and order a nice big new server
with plenty of hard drive space and I got a load of overtime while I
set it up. He never touched hardware again nor did he mention it
ever.