The job I quit with righteous indignation was the one that I have never regretted leaving. At the time I was a cashier at a specialty butcher shop that also offered bakery items and a full service deli. The hours were long and except for the boss being a nit picky tyrant, I enjoyed it. The customers were high end with lots of money to spend and always polite and kind. I enjoyed the interaction with the public and my fellow co-workers.
My boss loved to put a person on the spot, and humiliate publicly if possible. He would come up and bag groceries and make rude comments in front of the customers. I honestly grew to hate the man. When I went to the interview, he hired me on the spot failing to mention what my pay would be. I was shocked to discover I had taken a $2.00 pay cut when I went to work there. I learned the hard way to never take a job unless I knew things like that up front .
It was normal to work 10 hour days with no breaks. His idea of a break was allowing me to eat or drink at the register. There was no break room, and no such thing as true 15 minute breaks or lunch hours. At one point he even accused me of stealing a Christmas wreath that happened to disappear on a day when I wasn’t even working. Evidently whoever was working forgot to take it in at night and it was gone by morning. The other cashier who had been working always spent entirely too much time in his private office for him to ever blame her. I refused to do anything like that. It wasn’t in either of our job descriptions, but she was afraid of him and did his bidding. She was trying to pay for college plus an apartment and needed the money so felt she had little choice.
It had been tradition in my family for years to spend a couple days over New Years in Merrillville, Indiana with the Oak Ridge Boys. We would buy our tickets and make our hotel reservations around the first of August and plan for New Years months in advance. I had asked my boss several times over the course of July if he foresaw a problem with me having the time off as long as I worked every single day until then. He told me “No, of course not. Write a note and post it to the bulletin board in his office so he wouldn’t forget.” Relieved and happy, I made plans and spent the money. My family bought concert tickets for all the shows for the duration which equaled 6 shows and made reservations for a hotel room. It added up to quite a large chunk of change. I counted the days in anticipation and continually made certain my request was still on the board. The day before New Years Eve, my boss came out to the register and threw my time off request in my face telling me he needed me to work all weekend.
To say that I was livid was an understatement. The following day was New Years Eve and I was scheduled to be there despite my long standing plans and the money invested. The next day dawned frigid and cold. As fate would have it the locks on my car froze up, and then my car refused to start. I called in and told him of my dilemma, and he told me to call a cab. If I was a minute late he would dock my pay. At that point, I had enough. I told him to take his job and shove it up his a$$ and to have a Happy New Year without me. I went with my family to Merrillville and brought the New Year in with style.
I never regretted quitting that job. Eventually karma caught up to him because OSHA discovered he didn’t have a break room and didn’t allow his employees any breaks from the job. They shut him down until he built on to his establishment to make room for a break room and forced him to treat his employees fairly as mandated by law. I am sure he never was accused of sexual harassment, but he should have been. In the end, goodbye says it all. I went on to bigger and better things and never looked back until next time when I give you another glimpse into the life of a trucker’s wife.
What bad experiences have you had on a job that forced you to quit?
