I thought of this question because someone joked about double-dipping their hands in the chocolate fountain at Golden Corral and boy did that invoke one of my least favorite paying-for-college memories.
Yes, someone did dip his hands into the chocolate fountain at the Golden Corral. Worse, he was a repeat offender, a man that was at least in his 30s if not older slurping it off of his fingers and all, sometimes while making eye contact with me or my coworkers. Worse, there was no enforced rule against doing so, at least at my location, so my manager just told me to let him do it, don’t make a big deal out of it, and hope he doesn’t bother anyone else.
That same manager once insisted on me making the place extra clean a little before Christmas, so they insisted that I use double the amount of cleaning bleach in the same bucket. I explained that’s not how cleaning works or how OSHA compliance works. I got a write-up. I said that wasn’t an offense that qualified for a write-up, and what they said was “thanks for the tip, I’ll find something that is. Your word against mine.”
That same manager punched me out early without telling me, because the place wasn’t perfect enough before I left over an hour late, missing my family waiting to pick me up outside by that long to go out to do holiday stuff. I did call that in on the supposedly anonymous tip line later, but you can guess what happens when an anonymous tip about wage theft is called in on a manager that already knows who would call in that tip in a “right to work” situation.
That same manager was fired a week later for embezzlement, and not the cool kind. They were writing up and firing people for months for money missing from the register. I found out when collecting my last check and noticed someone new.
Working at a machining/widget manufacturing plant on routing & part grinding. Generally do a good job of things for a couple months, good quality, good rate etc., the job sucks ofc but what are you gonna do (absolutely terrible for carpal tunnel & other hand/arm joint shit). Still, I get compliments on part quality, I get stuff done, and I at least make some (shit) cash. Management is starting to talk about mandatory overtime and all but yknow this is base level US manufacturing shit.
Now, to preface the real jokerfying event, this is the same job where I, as a lighter skinned black person with a fro get asked day one “So what are you? Must have some Indian in ya, wouldn’t guess by the hair though”. Same sort of question I have gotten at pretty much every job I’ve ever had though so I just file it away as another in a long list of the same shit in conservative hell USA. (anyway great guess dude! great grandfather actually was chickahominy - that’s 500pts!) Edit: in retrospect at least I didn’t get any slurs thrown at me that I know of, that’s the benefit of not looking exactly like what these chuds picture in their heads, they usually gotta ask first to precision target the slurs.
Had a couple black coworkers come up to me one lunch break a day or two later and say “oh yeah this place is racist as fuck, we gotta stick together here yknow?”. Good signs no red flags
Status: initial
Later on, my section gets a new part order for several hundred of the same widgets we usually work on, but the shift manager says it’s high priority and to drop everything else and switch over to these. This is a pain in the ass when you’re in the middle of a 600 part order ofc but whatever, I shift the grinding machine over to working on these. I notice they’re the same parts but of noticeably lower quality metal than the usual, which we’re going to auto manufacturers iirc.
I didn’t see the specifics of the contracts unless I asked, and I was curious this time. So they tell me these are part of a contract with General Dynamics! Not only that, but a coworker, ancient old white dude (as it seemed 50-60% of the employees were), tells me they get those specific orders all the time, and they’re being used in M61 Vulcan rotary guns! This mummified fuck then claps me on the shoulder and says “How’s it feel knowing you’re helping protect a lot of people - or kill a lot haha!”
Status: terminal
Quit when I learned that about 50%+ of their manufacturing was military contracted, couldn’t do it. I had to cite “deeply held personal/religious beliefs” when asked for form purposes lol. Ngl I’m still fucked up about unwittingly building parts to killing machines. Shit that’s been used since Vietnam for massacres and imperialist power grabs. Feel like I should’ve idk, looked at their contracts or some shit before taking the job?! But everything here is linked to the MIC, fuck man. Should expect everything in this hell country to be suffused with white supremacy and linked intrinsically to the slaughter engine but fuck was it concentrated there.
Still feel guilty but now I kinda laugh too, it’s just so evil here. Anyway big crisis of faith yadda yadda, I helped the slaughter engine and kinda hate myself for it yadda yadda, I am currently heading to Arkham in the back seat of the Batmobile. Fuck this country
Everyone is a cog in the great machine. Some are just closer to the heart than others.
Unfortunately true. I’d worked plenty of shit jobs but never had my hands so directly on the raw material that keeps it running. Didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know about this country, the state of labor, the MIC etc, but did learn a bit about my sense of personal culpability for being involved in it I suppose. Can’t abstract it away here
I quit one job developing a video platform because, as it turns out, that video platform was specifically for selling pseudoscience to practicing doctors. I quit another because I was making logistics software and it turned out their major clients were arms dealers. The first one wasn’t my fault because they laundered their client list very well. But after the second one I made sure to start researching the company’s clients beforehand as well as just asking during the interview. Turns out that hiring managers tend to know what’s unpalatable and downplay it heavily
My first job as a teen was dreadful. I’m socially anxious and was incredibly awkward when I was younger, but I was always polite and patient with people. The real problem was my parents. They made me get a job, which you’d think is pretty normal for a teen, learn the value of money and all, but my step-siblings didn’t have to work and got new computers and cars from their other parents, so here I was with no car, expected to get to work and back everyday. I had to go to school, get dropped off from the bus at the church, cross two roads, and go to the other end of a stripmall to the dollar store I worked at. Then I’d work until dark and have to wait in the parking lot for them to pick me up because while they wanted me to have the job, they didn’t want to help me get a car, so they’d consistently come an hour late, pretend like they forgot, and act annoyed that they had to go out of their way to drive me home. And I didn’t have a phone to call and was too anxious to ask to use a phone. So then I’d come home and do all the chores in the house while my step-siblings just did whatever I guess. I was literally the red headed stepchild trope but without the red hair. And the real kicker was, I never saw a dime of the money I made working. My stepmom took the card I got paid on and I never got any of it. One day she accused me of getting a new card to access the money because she had somehow lost track of a few hundred dollars. My money that she lost, I don’t know how you even manage that, it’s on the damn card, you should be able to track where the money goes. Not that I would have seen it anyway. Eventually dealing with my stepmom had me so sick with anxiety and depression everyday I started messing up change and stuff and got fired.
Another time when I was older and not living with those people, I had a nightshift at a walmart where I’d get home, go to sleep, and be so worn out I’d only wake up just in time to go to work again. It was so bad that once they fired me for calling out too much I literally cheered in my car. I wasn’t sure how I’d pay for food or rent but I was just so happy not to have to work there any more.
Then there was a fast food place I worked, Sonic I think.
self harm
I got to a point where I just couldn’t take working these shitty jobs that didn’t pay enough to afford living. I took an entire bottle of sleeping pills with the intent to kill myself. I’m gonna get real graphic, but you imagine sleeping pills and you think “aww, just drifting off peacefully in your sleep, how romantic”. Nah. Your body isn’t stupid, it knows when it’s been poisoned and it doesn’t want to die even if you do. I didn’t know projectile vomiting was a real thing, but it came out like that scene in the Exorcist. I passed out in a literal puddle of vomit, woke up not dead, and then… I just went back to work. What was I gonna do? My entire body felt like how your limbs do when they’ve fallen asleep and are waking up, that prickly feeling but all over, for about three days after that.
Then there was the bakery where we were literally working 12 hour days 7 days a week, and I had a 40 minute commute living in a disgusting, moldy, rat infested trailer with my mom and her husband and getting giardia or some shit. When I saved up from the bakery I got my own place, but I couldn’t take working that much for long.
Then I worked at a Food City where I didn’t get paid enough to afford the food I was stocking. I was literally having to live off of 10 dollars a week for food.
I was actually at my wits end again a year or more ago when I lost my car and was coasting on Covid rent relief to not be homeless. Luckily, there was a place within walking distance where I work now. I don’t have to work too much, I don’t have to interact with too many people, I get to dick around a lot and my boss is pretty cool as far as bosses go. So who the fuck knows where I’d be now if not for pure dumb luck. I’m pathetically allergic to work and I know full well there’s no assistance for people here, so I don’t know what I’d do if this job stops working out for me.
Getting paid under min wage to develop and deploy software that if wrong could ruin people’s lives in a cowboy dev shop with no guidance or tools with a boss who proudly told me his teenage pass time was throwing bricks at cars from an overpass.
No automated deployment manual installing bug fixes onto 140 tablets one by one in a hotel room the night before the event, working the entire weekend unpaid and then being expected to turn up on Monday.
oh and long car journeys to said events with boss driving he demanded i sit there in silence no radio and can’t look at my phone for several hour drives. I learned how to lucid dream cos i was tempted to grab the wheel and crash us into something.
He radicalised me as well by writing down my wage and his wage on a piece of paper and telling me this is why I need to work for free over my weekends to deliver x because the money paid needs to cover his wage.
Permanent psychological damage.
He radicalised me as well by writing down my wage and his wage on a piece of paper and telling me this is why I need to work for free over my weekends to deliver x because the money paid needs to cover his wage.
Amazing shit. Truly a mindboggling strategy. “I am your boss. You must pay my wage with your work because my work is not worth my wage.” Bro how do you think that will go?
Thing is this guy was the antichrist. He didn’t do things for money he quite literally just liked watching people suffer. He did it to make me feel bad that was all.
So glad he’s dead now. Funnily enough died very shortly after retiring, I think torturing his staff is all that kept him going.
I have so many. I could talk about the time when I worked in ice cream. We had a dollar cone day, all cones (regular sugar and cup) were a dollar. Waffle cones were still like 4.50 because bigger cone more ice cream. Almost everyone understands this but I explained it anyway to every single person that came up to the window all day. So I’m like 6 hours in with no break at this point (I was clocked out for my break but told to keep working anyway). Some lady comes in with her family of 6 and orders 6 waffle cones. I start explaining and she snaps at me 'I know I know go do your job." Okay. 6 waffle cones out that window and that total is like 30 bucks or whatever. She hands me 6 . I try to explain again and she says it’s 6. So her response is to cuss me out, a 17 year old. And then throw her ice cream in my face. My manager did not let me go clean myself up, wrote me up for being rude to the customer, and then took the bill that lady just ran out on out of my paycheck for the day. Which was probably most of it because I was only making minimum wage back in the early 2000s.
My last day at that place I left an hour early, without doing any of the clean up tasks, with 6 pints of ice cream, some cones, and some scoops, to go to a party. I did not pay. I still have one of those scoops too real nice scoop.
I started that job a Rules Matter Republican and ended that job jokerified and fully believing that society was beyond repair and that it was specifically western governments fault for it. It wasn’t until like a decade later that I unlearned the rest of it through a host of other radicalization moments and realized oh huh I’m communist. But that was one of the first.
The manager absolutely saw him and the customer as the same class and you were a slave that embarrassed him wtf
CW: Death/suicide/violence against women
When I was in my twenties I worked at a 7-11 for several years, now the experience of being promoted to assistant manager was its own radicalizing experience, watching all the corporate training videos full of casual racism. But that is not what this story is about, this story is about my friend [redacted]. We worked together for a few months and bonded over growing up poor as shit, hating cops etc. I even went to her boyfriend’s house with her to help him harvest his weed plants. She didn’t smoke herself, because she had recently graduated from a rehab program. One morning I get a phone call from a former coworker/friend who’s aunt had come in to shop and found the store was empty, but the bathroom was locked. I lived across the street at the time so he asked me to go check on her, we both worried she had relapsed and maybe passed out in the bathroom.
So I go over there and there is now a cop who asks me if I can open the door, saying since there is no sign of foul play he can’t kick in the bathroom door without a warrant and asks me to open it. I check the handle and sure enough it is locked. I knock a few times and call her name, but don’t get any answer. So I give the door a firm shove with my should, it’s a shitty thin plyboard door with a latch that is fairly easy to force open. I immediately knew something was really wrong because I felt a weight on the other side of the door and it shut itself on me as I jerked back in surprise.
At this point a thick pool of blood flowed out from under the door and I immediately lost my shit and retreated from the back room, figuring now officer fuck face can actually do something and my mind just collapsing on me.
I would soon learn that an ex-boyfriend who she met in rehab and who didn’t graduate the program had come in and forced her into the bathroom and shot her and himself in a murder/suicide. Now here comes the exact moment when I decided I would dedicate my life to destroying capitalism: This happened at about 11:30 AM. The crime scene cleaning company was in and out in a few hours after their bodies were taken away and the store was open again by 8PM that night. My boss told me “you don’t have to come in tomorrow if you need some time away”. No offer of any counseling, no empathy for the poor girl that had been murdered in his store just hours before. That guy died of heart failure a few years back and I hope it was the most painful possible way someone can die of that. I hope it was fucking slow.
And on top of all that the cleanup crew didn’t even do a very good job, months later I went to fix the soap dispenser on the wall and it still had dried blood behind it.
Bathrooms, particularly public ones all smell like that place on that day to me now.
spoiler
ugh. i feel for you. i never had to deal with finding a friend like that before, but ive been active in the local trans community long enough that ive had many people die on us and its always heart wrenching to see such kind people die to shit like this. its always worse cause usually when one suicide or bad thing happens there is a big spat of them that ripple through and you gotta be very vigilant. i dont wanna be too detailed because ive already had enough things on here to identify me, but fuck cops and fuck how they handle anti-trans violence. i regularly think about how many intelligent, kind, thoughtful people die or are traumatized so early in life and how that effects social progress. death to america.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
I think of this quote by Stephen Jay Gould often.
I truly don’t know how to properly respond to that; that kind of experience is very personal and life defining.
I had a similar one that has lead to some of my own strong opinions, no matter how trivial they seem on the outside.
Without going too far into the details, (CW: death, some morbid details)
spoiler
I had a close friend, a coworker actually (tying this to the topic thread, if only somewhat) take his own life, only minutes after I thought he was fine when the call ended, and I was very, very wrong and failed to see the signs. I was there when the noose was cut on the freeway overpass. He was a tormented, hurt, but wonderful young man that had nothing at the end but those that cared about him enough to show up but we were all too poor to put on a funeral, instead doing an impromptu vigil on the spot before the county coroner took the body away.
Later, I had to watch several people die that did not want to go, were not ready, and would probably never have been ready, both in pain and afraid. They did not have a cinematically touching final few moments, only wails of terror and labored rattling breathing until the breathing stopped. I then had to clean up what their corpses expelled not long after that, bowels emptying out as a matter of course. The smell never fully left those rooms.
That’s a big part of why when someone tries to play internet tough guy and say something I watch for entertainment is “for babies” because there isn’t enough death or killing in it, underneath it all, I sort of envy them because I wouldn’t wish them the experience of scrubbing fecal matter and lung fluid out of wallboards, nor the smell of already-decaying flesh wafting out where the flies can get it, or for that matter the unforgettable stench of bowel-sludge, black as tar, no matter what pompous asses such Vincent Adultman tryhards sound like to me.
Life’s brutal and cruel and most of all indifferent for many at the end, many that are forgotten and ignored because that reality is frightening to those that still have time left and they avoid the actually dying no matter how “mature” they otherwise claim they are. For that reason I don’t derive much pleasure from cynically gratuitous death/killing spectacles on screens.
Yeah another more recent thing was when I was at work and a local unhoused guy was buying some food, and began to have a major seizure. I accompanied him out to the bus stop outside the store and sat with him watching his convulsions get stronger, until I was sitting on the sidewalk after he started to slip off the bench and just did what I could to make sure he didn’t smack his head on the pavement.
I asked if he wanted me to call him an ambulance and he managed to get out the words “can’t afford”. So I sat, and I waited, and I made sure it had passed and that he was safe for the moment before I had to go back inside.
I’ve volunteered to do org work for the unhoused.
Being untrained as an orderly and trying to pull an old man having a seizure out of a bus while his limbs were each individually fighting me and my team was unforgettable.
I didn’t know his full medical condition and perhaps never will, but all he wanted when he came to and was hydrated enough to be stable was his pineapple-shaped plastic drinking vessel which still reeked of the little bit of booze still sloshing in it. Fuck it, I gave it back and lied about its contents because he had gone through enough.
I asked if he wanted me to call him an ambulance and he managed to get out the words “can’t afford”. So I sat, and I waited, and I made sure it had passed and that he was safe for the moment before I had to go back inside.
I’m drifting off of my own topic, but that reminds me of one more moment. One unhoused woman cried, I mean wailed, because I actually stopped and listened to her while working for the same org and gave her an extra pair of socks and helped her fill out some replacement paperwork for what had been destroyed by some fratboy assholes that wrecked her shopping cart and left her and her stuff stranded when she couldn’t drag it any farther. To paraphrase what she said that night, she said that was the first time she felt human in a while.
I asked if he wanted me to call him an ambulance and he managed to get out the words “can’t afford”.
In the future, you generally only need to pay for the ambulance if they take you somewhere. It is usually gonna be helpful to have a paramedic assist you even if getting to the hospital is going to be an issue.
