Chocolate Donuts

I’m a young college student and about a year ago I was searching
desperately for my first job because I needed money and no one wanted
to hire a 17 year old. My friend worked for a little ma-and-pa donut
shop at the time and I told her to let her boss know that I was
avaliable and to have him call me if he needed help. One night at
about 11 she called me and told me to be there the next morning at 8
for my first day of work. I thought it was strange because I had
never even met her boss, much less turned in any sort of application,
but I didn’t argue.

The owner was an Arabic man with a heavy Middle Eastern accent and a
tendency to mumble so I couldn’t understand anything he ever said.
Basically, I was to serve coffee and donuts and keep the front of the
store clean and swept. I didn’t even have to go in the back. The first
few annoyances were tolerable: he yelled at me for not doing things I
didn’t know I was supposed to be doing, he called me ‘Susie Q’ all
the time, he paid me $5 and hour and only had me work 5 hours a week.
But then I went into the back of the store.

One day we ran out of chocolate donuts. He told me to go make some
more, to which I responded with a blank stare because I had been
working there a month and hadn’t even seen a donut being made. He
showed me that I just had to put frosting on regular donuts and
proceeded to mix the chocolate frosting and smear it on the donuts
WITH HIS HANDS. And I don’t mean he grabbed some gloves or even
washed his hands first. Just shoved his hands into a bowl of frosting
and mixed it up. Then he had me clean out a huge cabinet full of
donuts covered in a thick, thick blanket of mold. All this on top of
the fact that the guy practically lived in the back of the store and
I was done. I walked out and called the health department. I work
with clothes now and haven’t eaten a donut since.

Tipping Is Not A City In China

A little while back I worked at a Japanese Steakhouse run by a
Chinese man and his wife and brother. I worked as hard as I could,
but every day my manager would come up to me and call me stupid
before walking over to his wife and speaking angrily in Chinese while
pointing at me. I ignored it — the money was needed for school, and
friends insisted it was often part of a job to put up with crap. As
long as I knew I was doing a good job, I was okay.

One night, he shouted at me for a computer glitch that was completely
not my fault, and told all of the employees that I caused it. Telling
me I was stupid and incompetent, he stormed off cursing in Chinese
again. I went home crying and promised myself that if one more thing
went wrong, I’d quit. I was tired of him being sexist (I’m a girl)
and racist towards me (I was the only American employee and he made
sure I knew it). The next night, in the middle of serving a table, he
pulled me aside and told me (and I quote to the best of my ability),
“Black people don’t tip good. They are poor. I will charge an 18%
gratuity.” I told him no, I didn’t want him to do that, I had faith
in my customers and my ability to serve well. And to make matters
worse, the company takes away 9% of all of my tips, so what he was
doing was NOT to benefit me. He got mad at me and stormed away. Later
when I brought the customers their checks, they called me over and
asked about an extra charge on their bill. My boss had put the
gratuity on there anyways, despite me telling him not to and despite
it being against policy since the party was under 6 people. He
covered it up to be my fault, a “miscalculation” he called it. That
night I quit, and now that I think about it, I would have loved to
have reported the restaurant if I knew how. I hadn’t noticed it
before on customer’s checks because I never really thought of it, but
after that night it suddenly clicked. The only time I had ever spotted
gratuity on the bottom of the check was when I had customers from
varying ethnic backgrounds. Some people disgust me, and I wish I had
noticed the pattern sooner instead of being so wrapped up in
everything else.

‘Shroom & Swiss

I worked in a rather well respected New York City fine dining
establishment that had just replaced a celebrity chef with a new ‘up
and coming’ chef.

He was always looking for a new ‘angle’ with his food, and taken to
his garden for sources of inspiration. One day he confides his newest
weapon to me – the “false morel” mushrooms he had just gotten. Much
cheaper then regular morels he says, but look the same! “What a
treat”, he says! Well, as it turns out, my mother happens to be a
total mushroom nut (went to college to study mushrooms. Seriously.) I
remembered something she had yammered on about over the years – never
eat a wild morel because one species is edible and another one is
toxic. The toxic one is casually known as a ‘false morel’.

So I tell him that they are poisonous and explain I was rather aghast
a purveyor would even sell them to him. He writes me off and proceeds
to tell a prep cook to start to clean and prepare them for the next
day.

The next day I bring in a botany book I had that listed species of
mushrooms, with a nice, big bookmark on the page discussing the
poisonous false morel. He never ended up serving them, never
mentioned it to me again – and when I asked him for my book back – he
said he had no idea what I was talking about!!

The only thanks I get for saving peoples lives (and his career) is
that he stole my book. Jerk.

Save The Date

For nearly 5 years, I worked for the largest organic/natural foods
grocery chain. You may also know it as “Whole Paycheck.”
When I found out I was pregnant with my first child about 3 years
ago, I gave my team leader the due date. It was around Christmas
time, which meant that around Thanksgiving would be when I’d start my
leave.

As the date got closer, and I got bigger and more tired easily, I was
up for a job performance review. He said that I’ve shown less
initiative in what I do. I said that I’m doing my best, but I’m 8
months pregnant, and you fired everyone but 2 of us on the night
shift. My doctor told me that it was about time to give up working
for a little bit and start resting more. I turned in my paperwork 2
weeks before Thanksgiving, and was told that I couldn’t take time off
because it was the holidays and we were short staffed.

I said “You know I’m having a baby?” He fired back with “Can’t you move
the date further back until sometime around the middle of January?”