Geez you two have been through some crazy jobs 😢 Makes for some good stories and life lessons though, at least! Really proud of you both for getting to where to are today. It's been a journey. My first job in high school was at a pizza place too, like Mint. Except my bosses were normal I guess? lol They didn't harass anybody at least. One of them would snap sometimes and yell though. I remember that made me cry once, except our fridge had a window so it wasn't as private. The other boss would let us make and eat pizza on breaks, which was nice (my favorite part). And my coworkers were nice too. One of them was a few years older than me and was really into Cowboy Bebop and would lend me his DVDs to watch. Anyways, thanks for the episode! Glad you two are here with us now.
The final thing that made me quit my last job was a message on a bathroom door in a pub I went to after crying mid-shift in the office stairwell! It just said "Quit your job, it's crap" and I thought "you know what? You're right anonymous door person" and handed my notice in a week later! Now I work in a lovely fridge company and I'm so much happier!
"I've been harmed way more by friends than enemies." That's probably true for most people. You're not exactly giving your enemies opportunities or information that could be used against you, at least intentionally.
My worst job was cleaning houses in a old folk's neighborhood, brutal labor and got harassed a lot by older ladies the same age as my grandma. Not a fun time, even if it was a little flattering. Definitely a weird feeling. The pay was awful, the elderly didn't tip, the bones and muscles ached and sometimes chemicals burned, but... I don't remember any upside lmaoooo glad I'm gone from there
Episode was fantastic, thank you for all the stories! You two should go to antarctica and film outside but say you're in a fridge and only tell us later
My only restaurant job was working for Pizza Hut as a delivery driver. It never got bad enough that I cried in the walk-in fridge, but I could see why that would be the place to go.
I had two call center jobs one after the other, first one was canadian telecom, second one was american healthcare/health insurance. Horrible, 0/10, I've witnessed the worst that humanity has to offer and I now have a great evil germinating within my soul. Any longer and it would have been a complete villain origin story, glad I'm not there any more.
I previously had a job working with Black Card members for American Express. Can confirm they do indeed not have a limit. You also cannot volunteer to sign up for one. The company has to invite you, when you meet a list of qualifications they keep secret. One of the perks is you get a service where you can just call a number and say you want "blank" and we'll get it for you. That was my job. Whether that be a hotel reservation, specific wine delivered, horseback riding lessons, whatever.
I have so many work stories, and I feel like you've not really worked in food service or certain types of retail until you've been locked in the walk in fridge. For me I had two, it was 15 minutes while I was sorting inventory and didn't even notice, someone came in and was like "You know it was locked right?" The other time was when I was trying to skive off at the pizza place I worked at while on close and got locked in the fridge, fortunately I learned that day that it can be unlocked from the inside too because of exactly this reason.
My worst job was a call center for numerous reasons, but it helped get me where I am to day and I survived. Glad Mint and Matara survived their bad jobs too and made it to where they are today so we can enjoy this wonderful podcast! HAGS
@@bhustacrow2183 I get why they get abuse tbh. How tf are you going to constantly moan at someone to buy your shit constantly and not think someone will get pissed off?
- 0:39:03 - Mint's story about reporting her boss, and an additional detail about it at 0:56:18 lol. 📞🤣 - 0:49:20 - Matara's views on tipping being a North American custom that should be eliminated. 💲👎 - 1:06:20 - Mint's story about old French dudes perving after Japanese maids. 🤨 - 1:17:23 - Matara joking about pyramid schemes. 🔺🤑 - 1:28:49 - Matara making the essential point for Vtubing. Good looks mean nothing with a horrid personality. The best Vtubers have a genuine charisma that cannot be faked, and the use of avatars makes irrelevant one's real-life appearance, the need for make-up, and streaming while crying in the walk-in fridge. 🙂 Thank you for the podcast, Mint and Matara! 🌿👻🪳
The worse job I've ever had was a promotion at my retail job had to move stores and started to manage a grocery crew the problem being that the previous grocery manager had got in the bad habit of just finishing the truck for his guys because he wanted the overtime. These would be like 1000 to 1800 case trucks. So when i got there the crew was lazy and would only finish part of the truck and after six months of retraining and working 7 days a week with the exception of one week off for the single vacation i took while i was there them and getting them just ok not good just ok. I got a write up for leaving early to get to a doctor's appointment this was the only time i have ever thought about just walking out on a job. I out in my transfer request and took a demotion to leave the store and am in a much better place mentally.
In my experience working as a cook in a hotel, the walk-in fridge is where people cry (both servers and cooks) and eat. Really relatable when we are so tired and hungry during a very busy day or week. Urgh... especially on long weekends/holidays when we really don't have time to eat and rest, but we have to in secret. Take turns in the fridge, even hide the food in there and make sure the chefs (sous and executives) don't find out.
Had varrious odd jobs over the years. from being a cold storage hauler (in temp: -40) to courier services. One of the more fucked up jobs I had was cleaning ferry rest spots for tourists. Sounds simple enough right? Just clean spaces on regular intervals. No biggie. This one time I came into the toilet section the whole room was covered in wet, smelly shit that was everywhere and I mean everywhere. It was in the sinks. on the walls and not even the celling was spared. Just as I was about to turn around and leave even the door was covered. It was like a toilet had exploded in there but oddly enough those where more clean items there, nor was anything broken. Someone had during the night gone through the trouble of drenching everything in litteral shit, for reasons nobody knows why. I went outside, grabbed nearby hose and what detergents I could find and did what I could about the smelly problem I was now stuck with, then called bossman to get insurance on the case. That area was closed off for the rest of the season until they could renovate that section. Oh and a few years later I even had the pleasure of cleaning inside septic tanks wearing a full body suit, knee deep in shit. At least I got higher respect for people working with this stuff daily.
I worked retail for 11 years so i have a few strange things. When the PS5 was first coming out and having those supply shortages, every time it got stocked we had a ton of people showing up. I worked in the back primarily so i didn't have to deal with it usually, but a (i believe mentally ill) man stormed into the back demanding his PS5. He started swinging at me and hit me once square in the chest (he wasn't very strong so it didn't hurt though). But i was dealing with a LOT of anxiety at that time so it really freaked me out. I heard after it was resolved that he assaulted his mother and had to be taken out of the store by police. Props to the management, even though we didn't get along super well the manager that day was totally supportive of me and it made me respect him a lot more. But that was the thing that pushed me to get ready to leave that job.
My worst experience was being a woodcutter operator. 40C temperatures, dust everywhere, I had nosebleeds consistently every couple of weeks, due to the dryness of the air, was constantly berated, and I worked 50 hours a week for about 6 months. I think I almost died when someone dropped a sheet of wood on my foot while being nearly crushed on one side, to add insult to injury the coworker WATCHING this whole thing unfold just smiled and shrugged as it happened (I'm fine, no permanent injuries). Thankfully, I was able to move onto better things after that.
When y'all mentioned how some people need to get hyped up to quit a job it reminded me when I was super super depressed a year or so ago, there were videos of an AI voice of Master Chief "encouraging you to clean your room" or "telling you he's proud of you". A little cringe looking back at it but it's crazy that it actually genuinely helped when I was in that mindset
My weirdest interview experience was also my first one. I was applying for a job as a substitute teacher at a local school, and I met the principal for my interview just before the classes started. I was just there for my interview. I had a quick chat with him, went for a quick tour of the school, met some of the other teachers, and then the principal was like "Simping, you seem to be a great fit for this school and we'd like to have you. Could you start right now?" A few moments later little Simping, fresh from high school, was left alone in a classroom with 30 over-stimulated six year-olds, one of whom was having a mental breakdown and had to be physically separated from the rest of the class (I may have put them in a closet), and I was just desperately trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy as everything was falling apart around me. I somehow managed to keep this up until the bell rang, and then I was shuttled off too another classroom to repeat the same process. Again and again. Honestly, it was kind of great. To this day, I have never gotten so many hugs in such a short period of time. Small children are at the same time the most loving and most vicious creatures I have ever encountered. Some lessons, I would be partnered up with an actual teacher, and I'd basically be acting as an assistant, and that was a great learning experience. I was there the whole day, I somehow didn't get fired, and I even stayed to work at the school's youth club afterwards. I was offered another shift the next day and worked that too. And then I didn't get any calls from the school. Week after week would go by without any calls, and I would keep calling them just to check if I had been let go (I hadn't). I didn't have any other jobs lined up, so I just waited for my call. SIX MONTHS LATER, the day before I was gonna leave for art school, I get a call: "Hi Simping, it's *school*, one of our teachers called in sick, could you come tomorrow?" I politely declined.
worst job, worked at graphic designer for a week for a doctor who wanted to create a network, the workplace was a hotel lobby and had no acces to food for 10 hours daily, with 2 hours of commute from house to the place and other 2 going bak, didnt got paid a single penny, left him without any work finished nor the files i worked on...
I finally watched the episode! My worst job ever was in customer service. I was hired by a scammy credit card company to do IN PERSON problem solving for clients. We only had 1 manager for 3 different branches and she was never at mine so I had no one to lean on. People constantly quit so I kept doing the work of 2 people by myself (cleaning the place included). It was 8 hs of minimun wage btw. People would spit at me, shout and insult me on the daily. My breaking point was after making a mistake because of how stressed I was trying to solve an enraged customer's problem (Classic insurance scam he never asked for). My manager said she was gonna come with her car but she never did. He tried to attack me physically but the security in the mall was ready to stop him (yes, My office was a stand in a mall for people to complain at the company). It was extremely dehumanizing, everyone saw me as the face of an evil corporation. I quit the next week. I suffered of social anxiety and I was afraid of human confrontation for years. I'm glad I'm doing much better now.
I've also worked quite a few shitty jobs, though when I worked fast food I mostly vented frustration in the fridge (when I had time)! Glad to be a patron of the Mintara high arts podcast 🎨🎭
I had to take breaks listening because the stories stressed me out. The worst job I worked was in a meatworks cutting kidneys and uteruses out of sheep. I kept getting heatstroke because it was constantly 35 degrees celcius and humid from the water used to hose the blood off the floor. Took days to get the smell off me once I left.
My worst job was actually working at Subway forever ago. For some reason, I ended up not having a schedule for an entire week and when I called to inquire about it they merely told me, "Oh. We just decided we didn't need you any more."
It should be illegal for jobs to just cold fire people like that. I had that happen to me for a warehouse job after I got sick for a week. Schedule app just stopped getting updated. I had to drive up there and pry it out of them to say "yeah we're letting you go."
Unfortunately I don't have any really crazy work stories. Probably my craziest story is about how my one Black Friday shift was... actually not at all crazy! I was working produce at Wal Mart at the time and while all the usual black friday hubbub was happening elsewhere in the store we just had one long line people stretching from the front of the store around next to all the fridges, leading to several pallets of TVs on sale. Very orderly, very sensible, each person came up, handed me a ticket, and I put a TV in their cart. Went on for about an hour or so then the whole store calmed down and we just got to cleaning up and regular sales. People left MOUNTAINS of shit piled up under the price scanners. Best part is, I'd already worked 40 hours that week. So I got base pay, +1 mult for overtime, +1 mult for holiday, +flat bonus for overnight pay. Walked out with something like 3.2 days pay for a very reasonable night's work.
I almost got a job as a door to door vacuum salesman. The interview was in someone's apartment, and it was like a group interview; there were 5 of us there. The guy proceeded to give us a demonstration of the vacuum we were going to sell. It felt like he was trying to sell it to us. I'm pretty sure two of the interviewees were plants based on how wowed they were with the vacuum. They had free chocolates and sodas though.
I've mostly had jobs that only last for 1 vacation, summer or winter, with my only job that I held onto beyond those times into the weekends being my current job at mcD's, now at 2+ years. McD's has treated me pretty well but that's because mine is managed well, unlike the horror stories. No fridge crying for me yet. Now whenever I visit other fast food restaurants I always find myself peering into the kitchen in the back, seeing only 3 people working the full kitchen with a further 2 in service and 1 in the drive, and immediately seeing it as a management problem. My worst jobs are a toss up between my very first one, at a rose farm, and one at a factory making plastic crates, like the ones a 24x pack of beers comes in, or 12 large soda bottles. The rose farm job was, looking back, probably pretty illegal. We were a bunch of 14 year old children and group of polish adults nipping off flower buds so that every branch would only hold 1 flower, so they grew bigger. Not that bad but very tiring as the blazing sun was above us. We were done earlier than expected, so in the last days we were made to crawl through the dirt on hands and knees, no kneepads or anything, and had to rip out weeds with our hands and stuff them in our pockets as the seeds could go airborne. It was humiliating, hard, tiring, and my knees, shins and palms were bloodied and scratched. We got paid in cash each day, no bank records, and for all of that work I only got 20 euros per workday. After the first day of picking weeds I never went back. The factory work wasn't bad in itself, I have just never felt so replacable as I did there. I got there through a work agency and the factory was on 24/7, so my department worked in 3 shifts, 6-14, 14-22, 22-6. When I got there I never met my department head, never got any contact info, nothing. Just a small tour of the immediate surroundings and being told that the others would teach me how to do the job. All contact was done through the agency. It was simple work, just using a tool to cut the sharp edges off of the newly molded crates and stacking them. I was allowed to wear my headphones and listen to music, also a plus. But I do this job diligently for 4 weeks, then 1 morning I wake up extremely sick, like, can't get out of bed sick. It was 5 in the morning because I had my alarm set for a morning shift. I try calling the agency to call in sick: no one answers because they open at 8. I want to call the factory, I don't have a phone number. I try calling the company that this factory is a part of (the factory was on a industry field where every factory on that space was owned by the same company and fed into each other, but each individual factory still kept their own name), nothing. So I eventually just gave up and decided to put my own health first. I get a call at 8:05, from my agency. I explain my situation, they say I no longer have to show up. Just like that, I was fired. Never have I felt less like my bosses care for me, and it was a harsh but important lesson to learn.
Worst job experience is kinda a tie between having a trench collapse that buried me alive and a pharmaceutical plant construction that kept trying to cut every corner culminating in the CEO taking us into a room and closing the door so he could tell us to vent hazardous chemicals into the ceiling so the room would pass air quality. Me and my supervisor refused and fortunately they hadn't been paying our company so they weren't willing to risk the liability of doing it for them.
I actually do Rover! I was a vet tech and got burnt out over the pandemic. A lot of animal jobs, especially vet are soul crushing. Most people think it’s the euthanasia that causes burnout but it is actually so much more than that, there’s angry owners, seeing loving owners go through financial crises, overwork, lack of hospitals and vets etc. the profession holds one of the highest rates of some dark things. There is also a LOT of work place bullying (apparently it’s very common in medical fields). I saved like insanity in order to move away and start a new life once i saved enough money. I started doing Rover as a “temporary” thing while i got used to the new city i moved into because it would force me to go out and explore more. But it turned from a few months to a year and I’m trying to do it full time in order to make it work! I listen to your podcasts just as you recommended, hahaha, i am literally the person you are describing! Trust idk about the other dog walkers but we do not all have our life together- i think most kinda fall into this job by accident and after struggling for years with many career issues. It is also not perfectly lucrative and it’s a struggle to make ends meet, but I honestly feel so much more at ease than I did before. ❤
I've worked many strange low tier jobs, but the worst was probably the lifeguarding gig I had while at uni. It started fine, I did my shifts with no drama or anything. But as the months went on, the managers began to be much more demanding of my time and me not having that much of a backbone I would sacrifice my lectures to be able to work. Apathy began when I was ill one day and they gave me a disciplinary and was chewed out by management. Then one of the other lifeguards started saying that I should drop out of uni to get a full time contract with them, another lifeguard turned out to be very racist and the straw that broke the camels back was the FRIDGE cold lifeguard trainer they had, who put me in unreasonable scenarios like doing a perfect spinal turn on someone twice my weight. I was planning to stick at the job until I started my master's thesis, but I quit early. The job took away a lot of my face to face teaching and social events I had with friends. Glad that I am now teaching English in Japan lol
My Worst job was when I worked at this laundry mat company that just washed used hospital clothes. I've seen congealed blood, human feces, human organs, like a liver and placenta, and the entire soil side of the building would smell of old people piss. The craziest thing that happened there was, I found a zip log bag with I could only describe as raw ground beef like texture with what looked like a bone around it, I worked there for 3 years.
one of the fondest memory of my childhood was going on a school field trip to a mcdonalds 🤣 we got a whole tour of their kitchen and of course my favorite spot was their walk in FRIDGE!!!! I honestly dont even know why they brought us there coz it was just a small group of kids, but I loved the cold and the fridge felt soooo huge to lil old me
I've never had a real weird interview experience, but a while ago I was deployed to Kosovo, and within like 36 hours of arriving there one of my roommates found a smoke grenade in a footlocker and set it off INSIDE THE ROOM thinking it was a dud/training grenade. So we're all waving towels around trying to not let the smoke alarm go off (unsuccessfully of course) when two captains from JAG run over to see what the hell is going on. So that was a great start. On that same deployment I got a chance to climb a mountain to earn a special badge from our German partners there and while we were almost to the top of the mountain a huge thunderstorm rolled in so we all sprinted down the mountain to a safe house in a torrential downpour. One of the guys had a sled type of thing on his back as a way to get an injured person that couldn't walk down in case that happened, and he slipped like 3 or 4 times so occasionally you'd just see the guy sliiiiiding right past everybody like something out of a cartoon. That deployment was overall one of the most mind numbingly boring times of my life but moments like these I will never forget.
My worst job was some crappy warehouse that sold store fixtures and always smelled like old mustard and depression. My GROSSEST job was also my favorite, commercial/industrial refrigeration repair and installation. If you saw how some supermarkets and restaurants stored your food, you would never eat again.
Great episode. I've only had one job that I would consider to be bad. I spent six months there during my sabbatical before going to university. The job was with a fundraising company, making calls for very reputable non-profits to convince their past donors to agree to donate to them monthly via direct debit. Here's the part that made it even worse than it sounds like: after some time had passed, people that weren't able to convince 20-25% of their calls to agree to a monthly donation via direct debit started to get sent home for the day, "better luck next shift", and everyone there worked by the hour. It never affected me personally but every shift I'd see like a third or more of my coworkers get sent home, losing out on however many hours were left on their shifts.
My first job, way back in the day, taught me how to code websites and do video editing. The pay was also good. The company produced adult content, and I was constantly surrounded by naked people because some of the recordings and photoshoots took place in the office, which was a small apartment with a couple of desktops and computers. It was a fun experience. The office also have a fridge.
If I have to put it on a tier list for worst experiences, I would rank my pharmacy tech job S tier and my fast food would be on A tier. I used to do night shift in a hospital, running around like a maniac because I don’t want to deliver my med late, we were understaffed and it was not good. We had one tech and one pharmacist trying to hold the place for 6 hours until morning people come, so during covid I did not get to sit my butt down for 6-7 hours straight on some nights. I got burned out so bad after couple months, my schedule was like 9:00 pm to 8:30am for 7 days straights and then couple days off and come back again…. Honestly at some point I thought I developed schizophrenia from sleep deprived because I could not sleep well for months and I did not know how to take care of myself. I was hospitalized for almost a week, my parents turned me to the ER and the doctor would not let me go home, got a big shot of Hadol and pass out. It was the worst but the best lesson I learned so far. At the end, no matter what you do, please take care of yourself people.
My first job was in my Uni cafeteria. I liked replacing the milk machine because it was a break from dishwashing, and the fridge was refreshing. So anyway, my wallet with my keys and 150 dollars stolen in the first two weeks. It was in the managers desk drawer, so only one of the other employees could have stolen it. Would have had to sleep in the hallway, but thankfully, one of the uni resident heads walked by and was able to let me in my room. About what the topic of being a fan of something vs working there about 1 hour in. Another vtuber said this about becoming a vtuber, but i think it applies here. "When you work at Disney world, they stop being Goofy or Donald, and become Frank from the break room in a costume.". And yeah, that's the thing about guys and fights. A lot of times, even if you aren't friends, and you fight, even if you lose and get beat up, just the fact you were willing to stand for yourself and fight will get them to respect you more, because it shows strength of will, if not strength of arms. Even in the instances where the fight makes them consider you more of an enemy, they still want you gone, but the mind set they have about you is different from then on. I'd rather a swift punch in the face, than years of a metaphorical knife being slowly twisted in my back.
My worst job was at a pizza place. I was a delivery driver, the actual work wasn't bad, but the owner was one of those "everything has to be done the way I want it done even if the way I want it done makes no sense" types. There were days he'd "help out" when we were shorthanded by, say, hopping on dishes, which you'd think would be awesome, except that one of the things he insisted on was hand-drying every single plate, and we had a buffet so WE WENT THROUGH A LOT OF PLATES. Dishes were piling up higher and higher in the sink while he was back there running a towel over every single plate individually (which was probably less sanitary than just putting them out still a bit wet to begin with). It was things like that, that were actively counterproductive or nonsensical, that he made his personal bugbears. Dishes were one of the things I was supposed to help with when I wasn't on deliveries so sadly I couldn't hide in the fridge. That place got weird later too. We went in one day and the owner told us he'd fired the general manager, we never found out why. After I quit, he swapped the booths and the tables around so the booths were out in the middle of the floor with no side walls and the tables were up against the middle walls meant for the booths. Then he started arbitrarily closing early on random days. The place went out of business not long after. I found out from an ex-coworker years later that the owner had been in jail on drug charges, so that was a thing.
My worst job was at an American BBQ restaurant. I worked as a dishwasher, prep cook, and expo. Dishwashing and prep cooking were the most exhausting jobs I have ever done, I would make it home at 1 am shacking from exhaustion. As an expo I was way more stressed than tired and I lost my temper so bad I punched the metal counter hard enough to dent it.
A funny interview for myself was right after I had just graduated fresh out of college and saw a job listing for a mechatronics engineer for a small company working on a robotic device to throw shooting targets into the air. I get to the interview and get shown this device, it's rather cool, all remote controlled thru a phone app. However as the interview goes on, I realized there is no one else at this job working on the code for this product. I asked what happened to the original author of all the code and was told they left. Ooookay, I asked if they had any documentation or notes on the code. Nope. I asked if others were going to be hired on to help with the code. Nope. Huge red flags left and right appeared during the tour, and it turns out he hired someone from another country dirt cheap to write all this code and I was going to be the underpaid, freshly graduated person to fix it. Then it turns out, the same owner had another company in the same building making custom fire arm accessories, but he was the only manager of everything, no one to delegate tasks to. Dude was in over his head and was desperately looking for dirt cheap abusable employees. Then I found out he was many months behind schedule shipping out the robots to customers that already paid... Anyway, at the very end of the interview he told me if I wanted the job, I would have to do "homework" and fix some of the code. I got out of there in a friendly manner, polite etc, but when I got the email with the homework later that evening I politely told him I wasn't interested in the position any longer and that I don't work for free. Whole thing felt so off, I genuinely feel bad for anyone that may have been hired 😅
Catching this late yippee... watched most of this yesterday, but got to the fridge story and realised it was 3am 💀 My worst job was also my longest one - call centre work. Gave me stability during covid period and basically no barriers to entry but the pay was awful (especially given the emotional labour required) and being there impacted my physical and mental health. Some gnome vtuber helped me gain the courage to keep trying to find other jobs, and now I'm much happier in a position that is equally stable and pays almost twice as much. No idea what that gnome is doing now but I'll always be grateful.
One of my first jobs was being a furniture mover. We often got abused to deliver the bad news about people being fired. Basically we where sent to a place, an office for example, to start packing up the furniture and making it ready for moving. At the first time we go somewhere the most senior dude in our group usually introduced us like "Hi, we are here from xyz movers. We are supposed to start packing up the furniture because this place closes down in X amount of time".
I could listen to you two talk about literally anything, even fridges 😂Honestly, the longer the better! After hearing about your bad workplace stories, and the inspirational videos... I'd love a mental health podcast where you share your journeys dealing with mental health, what you do for self-care, etc. It may be a deep topic, but I feel like the two of you could really make it uplifting and fun :)
I worked at Walmart for about 6 months in the Dairy section. The job itself wasn't really bad, and when I was left alone I got a lot of work done and enjoyed my time, but the management was absolutely atrocious. I felt like I was the only person that worked there at all. Every single time I came in for my shift, there would be NOTHING done. All the shelves were empty. Milk and eggs just FLY off the shelves throughout the day, people buy enormous quantities of both, and whenever i'd start my shift there would be nothing on the shelves and all the stuff that needed to be put out on the shelves outside of the fridge area was also not put out. Some days, i'd just have random managers come by and try to tell me how to do my job which I never appreciated and I let them know I didn't appreciate it every time they did it. I was already ornery and didn't care if I got fired, so I always spoke my mind. Had this asshole come up to me literally 5 minutes after I clocked in asking why there was nothing done in dairy. And i'm like, dude, I clocked in 5 minutes ago, I just started, if you want it done throughout the day you gotta hire or schedule someone to work BEFORE and AFTER I do. The worst part was when multiple managers would come by re-assigning and micromanaging me. I'd be putting milk on the shelves, some asshat would come by and say stop doing that and put eggs out. So i'd start putting eggs out and some other ass hat would come by and say stop doing that and do the milk. So i'd switch again, then some OTHER asshat would come by and say stop doing that and start putting shit on the shelves. And whenever one of them would could by and be like "why are you doing this when I told you to do this" i'd just straight up tell them the other manager told me to stop doing that and do the other thing and THEY need to work it out between themselves what they want me to do or let me handle myself, it isn't my responsibility of I got two managers telling me to do different things and trying to overrule each other. Then some other days there would be no management at all and I was left completely to my own devices. And every single time I didn't have some asshole trying to tell me how to do my job, I got 50% more work done because I could do it efficiently and prioritize things better because those asshats had never worked back there and had no clue how to do it properly or manage it, I feel like they just walked the store micromanaging people to justify their paycheck. Another issue I ran into a lot was I ran into so many outdated products on the shelves. Because it was the dairy section, everything had a relatively short shelf-life and i'd find shit that was 5 months out of date. Corporate policy was something like when it was a few days from expiring, it had to be marked down and put in a different area, and if it was already expired it had to be done away with in the back. We didn't throw anything away, we just had to stack it up in some area specifically for expired goods and I think someone eventually came by to take it and catalog it or something, I really don't remember. But i'd start looking through the products for expired goods and when those managers saw that they'd get so pissed off. I guess it made them (or the store, and them by extension) look bad when too many products were turning out to be expired so they'd always try to find some bullshit for me to do to stop me from checking dates even when I had literally nothing else to do. They legit wanted people to buy yogurt and milk that was out of date just so they could keep their numbers up. I even had them come to me and try to tell me to mop the floors and clean up spills and shit like that and i'm like, uh no, i'm not gonna do that. I was not hired to be a janitor. They'd try to argue that part of my responsibility was cleaning up messes in my department and I flat out refused. They just wanted me to have busy work because they hated it when I got all my work done and stayed on top of my department so at times i'd have nothing to do so I got paid to just stand around in the cooler. They would never fire me though, I always assumed they had trouble getting and keeping people, and with how awful the management was, it is no surprise. I literally ran that department. Nothing got done when I wasn't there. I never worked with a single other person, I was always alone. Another issue that happened regularly was that when the frozen and/or refrigerated trucks were unloaded, people unloading them didn't know where to take the shit, so when I came in to work every day, i'd often find shit in the cooler that was supposed to be in frozen and of course no longer was because it had been thawing out in the cooler for an unknown number of hours before I got there, and i'd find shit in the freezer that was supposed to be taken to the cooler and frozen solid when it wasn't supposed to be. About the only thing they got right was milk. So there were a LOT of times that I saved that store thousands of dollars by rescuing pallets that were put in the wrong location because corporate mandate said if frozen things stopped being frozen that they had to be chucked. Of course sometimes they thawed out and management ordered me to take it to the freezer anyway like it was still frozen and totally fine so they didn't have to lose that money and accept responsibility for it. Oh SPEAKING of milk... Another part of the job i'd forgotten about was dealing with the fucking milk crates. GOD I hated dealing with the milk crates. All those jugs of milk would come in on pallets with stacks and stacks and stacks of milk crates with 4 gallons per crate. As I took milk out to put on the shelves, the empty crates were stacked on an empty pallet until it got as high as a full load, then i'd have to wrap the whole thing in plastic wrap then pull the crate through the warehouse area. Now THIS is where it gets really fucking stupid... I HAD to remove these pallets full of milk crates because new shipments of milk and shit were coming in on a daily basis, so you had to get rid of the empty ones to make room for the new ones. So it 100% had to be done or you'd run into a situation where fresh milk couldn't fit in the cooler as there was limited room in there. But when I took the empty crate pallets to the back door, only fucking managers could OPEN IT. So whenever I wanted to take one of these pallets outside, I had to get on the phone, call a manager and wait until they showed up to do nothing except unlock the door, wait till I took the pallet out, then lock it again. And boy they fucking hated doing it, and boy I fucking hated it too, because sometimes i'd wait as long as 45 minutes for a manager to show up because they were "busy". I can't imagine those assholes actually doing anything except needlessly micromanaging people that knew how to do their jobs better than they did in the first place, but somehow they were always "busy" when they were called. It is so profoundly stupid we can't even open the door ourselves to take those pallets out and have to get one of the managers to unlock the door for us, I guess corporate mandated that stupidity because they were scared warehouse workers might steal something by sneaking it out the back door? Idk, it makes no sense to me because theres nothing out there, you'd have to walk all the way around the outside to get to some getaway car to stash your illicit goods in or have that car drive around to the back door to pick it up, and in both cases you'd be on security cameras the whole way it was actually easier to steal by just walking out of the front of the store with something, but whatever, no one ever said any of these people were intelligent.
So anyway one day I go to clock in and I can't. I go ask the assistant store manager about it because she is confused and after some digging around, she finds out that I was fired automatically by "the system". No one at that store had done it, I was terminated by an automated system because I had called in too many times. So I ask how that is possible because I know I didn't actually call out too many times, so after we talked for a little while we both figured out what happened together. You see, dear reader, I was hired right as the store was changing its attendance policy. The OLD policy had X number of days that you had access to right as you got hired, the NEW policy had fewer days (of course) as well as you only having access to HALF of them until you'd worked at least 6 months before you sort of unlocked the rest of them. Because of when I was hired and started working there, I went through training and was told by HR when I was hired about the OLD attendance policy, but I hadn't actually started working until the NEW policy had already done into effect. So I was trained on the old system, and because I hadn't technically started working yet, no one ever bothered to inform me that the policy had changed because all the older employees were told about it and the newer ones were trained on the new system, and I just fell through the cracks. When she realized what happened, she told me to go speak to the store manager to tell her the situation so she could undo it because they really didn't want to lose me. Management both hated and loved me because though I didn't respect those idiots at all, they knew I did a damn good job running that department and they had nobody else anyway, so they really wanted me to stay and keep working. So I went to the store manager... Told her my tale, she called the assistant manager and talked to her, she made some other calls, dicked around in the computer a bit, until finally she said she had fixed it, I was no longer terminated and was free to clock in now. Keep in mind, this whole ordeal took about an hour, so it was about an hour after I was supposed to clock in. Manager's office was at the front of the store. Dairy (as well as where you clock in) was at the back of the store. So I walked out of her office, walking through the store, heading toward the place to clock in. I didn't even make it halfway through the store before one of those micromanaging manager pieces of shit stopped me and demanded to know why there was no milk on the shelves yet. I just stared at him in disbelief for a long time. It was probably only a few seconds but boy it felt like ages and I said, "You know what? I quit." then I went right back to the store manager's office and told her. I told her why I was quitting, I bitched about those micro managing assholes that hassle me and waste my time and slow me down and complain endlessly about things I have no control over like nothing being done before I clock in since I was the only one in the damn store that worked in dairy. After my cathartic complaints, then I walked out. Whats funny is, that isn't my regular walmart, but I do go there from time to time as a shopper. I thought it would be kind of awkward to see those shitty managers wandering around aimlessly while I was shopping, but it actually never happened. After about a month, I actually began to actively look for people I used to work with and I didn't recognize ANYBODY. It was kind of freaky honestly, like every single person that used to work there was just gone and replaced by all new faces i'd never seen before. I saw some managers wandering around, but they weren't the same people. In my heart, I wished those idiots had gotten fired, but I don't truly know what happened to them, they just vanished. The moral of the story is check the dates on EVERYTHING you buy in the dairy department and never trust that your frozen food has been frozen the whole time.
Nothing you have said has surprised me I have a career in retail and it's kinda unofficially known Walmart is the worse big retail place to work for not as in pay which is not good for what you are doing expecialy in dairy or frozen but how bad the work can get and how frantic it can be
People usually talk about customers being the worst part of retail but they're only, i would say, half maybe 3/5 of the problem. The rest is management. I worked Target for 11 years and went through multiple managers and they were what dictated whether my time was tolerable or not. A good manager can help mitigate the customer nightmare. A bad manager both doesn't help and makes the job infinitely worse. Not to mention corporate completely divorced from what human beings are like and trying i make sweeping changes that make NOBODY happy.
2:11:45 That's the Centurion Card from American Express. It's their fanciest card, and you can't apply for it. They can only invite you, so it's reserved for the wealthiest people whom they know can afford it. You are correct that there's no limit, but it charges you interest all the same. So nobody would want to charge too much for too long. I think another reason for no limit is that a declined card is very embarrassing. So they can spend lavishly on dinners, vacations, and fridges.
Not really a job job but still a job: I was an undergrad Teaching Assistant in Uni for CS courses. The professor didn't communicate with any of us TAs before classes started which was odd but I figured things were ok. It was a class with lab sessions and the first sessions were on the first day of classes, before any of the lectures. Since we hadn't been assigned any sessions to be in, I just assumed the prof had cancelled first weeks lab sessions. This was not the case, I stopped by the labs and the students were understandably confused why no one was there. Later that afternoon I got an email from the professor asking to meet with all the TAs in his office that day. The professor had absolutely nothing prepared for the semester. Didn't even know there were lab sessions that day. Didn't know what he was supposed to teach either. No syllabus. Me and another TA dug through our stuff from when we took the class to refresh our memories. We tried to share our homework and project notes but he insisted on using a convoluted method which involved connecting to a private server of his or something instead of using Google Drive or something, you know, normal. All the undergrad TAs and I ended up quitting the next day (all independently). I was also a TA for another CS class, there was no way I'd take the full brunt of this professors incompetence on top of that + my own classes. Months later I check the Uni reddit and the class was a total shitshow, half the class failed and a lot of people reported the situation to the department. Heck, I revisited the sub as I write this and the professor is still teaching, still a total shitshow.
I had a similar situation, but I was one of the students. Our masters course was pretty sound but we had an extra unit where we could get a certification in a specific software that would look great on our CV. The teaching for this unit was abysmal, the guy they got to teach us the software didn't know what he was doing and constantly said the software was bad and began teaching us a different software (plus showing off his portfolio in the process). It got to the point we all complained, but it wasn't fixed until the last few months of the academic year, so we had to cram in a years worth of content in 2 months whilst creating and writing our master's thesis. If I recall, the test itself was the same week our thesis was due. To no ones surprised, we all failed miserably and that opportunity was wasted.
I've worked a lot of crappy dead end jobs, but I feel like each one has taught me a valuable life lesson about my own work ethic and how I value myself. Sometimes you just gotta have a little cry in the fridge to sort out what's going on in your life
I'm at the dog walking conversation atm, and just an FYI to anyone, if you ever plan to walk/watch other people's animals, make sure you have the correct insurance to cover an umbrella over you should something happen. Look up state laws and such, do you require a license, etc. People can be very vicious with the well being of their animals and WILL seek to place blame should something go wrong (even if it wasn't your fault). You can be sued and incur legal fees. I speak from experience as it was a family business, make sure you can protect yourself before doing anything!
Crying in the fridge is just the thing to do. You got privacy, the cold would soothe the swelling at your eyes, and you could steal kids meal juice boxes in there
Thankfully, I've been lucky enough to never work in a toxic place, but I was raised to be something of a people pleaser, thought there is a limit. This probably shaped me to the point where if I hate someone to the point I'm willing to fight them and stuff them in a fridge, I'll just completely cut off all contact instead of making a scene or plotting something. I've learned throughout the years that actively hating people is more effort than simply ignoring their existence.
The Fridge & Bathroom Sumer Special Podcast is something I really look forward to every week! The best part is when it's over.. I still have the Patreon extended version to enjoy afterwards!!
My worst job was when I was in high school I was a summer camp counselor for kids doing various different coding activities like making roblox games, minecraft mods, and lego robotic stuff and for the most part it was fine but what made it bad was just how insufferable some kids were. They would do everything in their power to disobey and mess around and just break things or annoy the other kids like throwing legos at everyone. What topped it off was that I only got paid 50 dollars in gift cards for a weeks worth of work from 8 to 5. It wasn’t all bad but I definitely don’t want to work with kids again.
I relate to Mint so much when she mentioned taking longer when doing work tasks, because she actually cared about doing quality work. It frustrated me so much when some of my past jobs wanted me to work even faster, at major cost to quality. My worst job experience was probably driving for pizza delivery during the winter, but their provided car had almost no tire tread. I slid off the road even though I was driving super cautious. I switched to my own car during the winter season after that. I also got fired from an ice cream shop, but they wouldn't tell me why I was being fired. I was never told about anything I was doing wrong, or anything to improve. Quite frustrating. Glad that I found a job I relatively enjoy a few years back.
Worst job was a call center for a for-profit college that rhymes with "University of DeVry." While i was working there they got censured by the state for having a graduation rate 10%-ish lower than state minimums to maintain a level of accreditation that allowed them to create new courses. While i don't remember the exact numbers, i remember that this was *not* a high bar they were failing to clear. In response, the CEO sent us a video giving us a directive to reach out and market to "a better kind of student," instead of doing anything to help the existing students. Breaking point was when they decided to open the call center on weekends but only staff one person for the whole day. First weekend shift I had 30 callers in queue while my manager played solitaire in the cube across from me. Spent my break screaming in my car and quit not long after that.
As someone who has been working in retail for almost seven years, I have grown to feel sympathy towards employees when I'm at a store. Knowing the workings of corporate leaves a lot to be desired lol
My favorite part was when they both shouted "ITS HAGGING TIME" and then did poses, can't wait for the "Whats in your fridge" episode. 10/10 podcast though, would be horrified by terrible working conditions and even worse betrayer friends again. I remember one job I had at an office supply store where the older boss definitely had a 'type' of young women he would hire, though I don't recall him ever creeping on them. He did have a singular interest in beating other stories in the region on these knowledge tests that would pass down from corporate, and I ended up getting out of a lot of grunt work because I would speed complete the quizzes that were mostly context clue reading tests to boost us. When I left there to go back to classes my brother took a semester off and ended up getting the job I was leaving, to the point of them giving him the raise I would have gotten if I had been there like 8 months. The other workers that weren't fresh out of high school or starting college were all extremely weird in their own ways that would take too much text to get into.
I was waiting to say this for when the 25 eps were over but. Thank you two, for making something that makes me look forward to mondays. Sometimes I can't finish listening to a week's episode until the weekend, but that just makes the wait for the next episode shorter!
My worst job was my first job as a site engineer. Being in a third-world country, safety practices were often ignored and we worked a minimum of 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. I had no overtime pay, and I spent a lot of my (below) minimum wage to help my workers - like buying them gloves and even tools. I even did manual labor along with them just to lift their spirits. Now I always strive to protect the workers im entrusted with from abuse
1:04:11 - Mint when I explain my bad work stories from the military and working as a garbageman in a chronically understaffed city sanitation department where less employees means each employee has to do more work, and as such, you can't just fire every s***head without thinking about the consequences it'll have on the good workers. Crazy stories though? I can do that. I'll leave out the tragic ones b/c I don't think this is the right place for them. I'll go with the craziest story I can recall atm, and might update more later when I have time. 1. More than a decade ago, I worked on a ship. We pulled into a port in Mozambique and the crew had some time off work to go out and see the sights. This happened to a guy I knew in our navigation division. If I remember correctly, he was on a tour bus that got pulled over by the local *police, who got on and made him hand over all the money in his wallet at gunpoint.* There were other cases of folks being harassed by the local "authorities" as well, but his was the most extreme I'd heard. We'd been told the government in the country was sketchy, but I think the explanation we got may have been understated. We were supposed to stay for 3 days, but left after the first night, because it clearly wasn't safe to remain there. I'm glad I stayed on the ship (being an extreme introvert kept me out of trouble), and I'm thankful nobody got hurt. 2. My ship was tasked with apprehending "pirates" once. The crazy part was how much the pirates failed to live up to expectations. Forget modern-day Jack Sparrow; from the distance I was able to observe, these guys just looked like a few rifle-toting hobos floating on the ocean in a "boat" that resembled a 12-ft. wide bucket. So much for pirates being cool. 3. At one point, I had an upper-level manager who liked to throw his rank around, didn't understand how work worked for the lower ranks, and just generally made things more difficult than they needed to be. One time I needed to do some computer-related work, and the only PC available was my manager's. He had his browser open with his Facebook page pulled up and was logged into his account. I punished him for poor opsec by adding goofy, nonsensical phrases in his profile, such as "I Love Chiken Sandwich", and "Brony 4 Lyfe". He never found out I did it. My coworkers got a kick out of it though. :D 4. Christmas Eve 2021, I had to do nearly 13 hours of physical labor, and afterward had a Walmart employee threaten to call the cops on me for the unforgivable crime of trying to buy food. I was working as a garbageman (not the driver, but the guy who rides on the back of the truck and has to physically move the dumpsters). All but one of our trucks had problems throughout the day and had to go in for repairs. I figured it was better if the people who had families got to go home and see them, so I stayed to join the crew that had to finish up 2 extra routes' worth of work. Will finish later.
Thanks for another fun episode. Interesting discussions today. Since you mentioned fridges, my first job was at a convenience store and being in the fridge, stocking shelves, was one of my favorite things about it. As for my worst job experience, it was GameStop in mid-2000s; I thought it would be the dream place to work as a gamer, and it wasn't.
I used to be a store manager at a cell phone place that used to be a Ice cream shop. We used the fridge as storage, and for some reason it still worked, so I would go in there to do paperwork on hot days.
This may be my favourite episode so far. I often listen to this whilst walking to work and back but ideally I'd prefer to _watch_ it whilst kicking back with a few craft brews from the beer fridge. Maybe next episode I'll do just that 👌
@49:20 - Ah, tips. Worked a job that sometimes had some AMAZING tips, enough that it made up for the fact that I was often barely above minimum wage normally. While I'd rarely get too much (maybe $1 - $20) outside of a particular season, my all-time cap was $478 in one day. But I had a co-worker at the same job who managed $539 in one day. @57:30 - I rarely get above 4K to 10K steps most days, but at my height I was getting between 30K to 50K.
About the conversation around 15:00-16:00, 2 interesting points. First, grindset culture seems to have gained real popularity in the US in the late 2000s. I remember first seeing it as the “insanity wolf” image macro. You know what else happened right around then? The 2007 financial crisis. I have a feeling there’s a correlation between economic strife, a shrinking middle class, and grindset culture. It’s not proactivity; it’s reactive. Second, it’s always fascinating to see what imagery is associated with grindset culture. Dr. K mentioned something about all that imagery of sigmas, alphas, and that sort of stuff: the guy in the picture is always ALONE. That mindset does not lead to the ability to share a life with a partner; it’s inherently isolating. And yet, we as a society see that and think it’s “cool” and something to aspire to. I mean, I completely agree that life throws obligations and responsibilities at you, and you don’t have a choice but to do it. We’re always going to have to convince ourselves to do it, but how we convince ourselves to do it is important. The guy talking about dying on the treadmill - it’s funny and I think I see what he’s trying for. But I think he’s saying more than he realizes, and it’s not a good look for him. He’s performing, instead of acting from his own motivation. You do that, and sure you may run harder, but you might also DIE trying to show how much more motivated you are. No matter how much you can get done in a month, you can get more done if you keep living.
It might also be related to changes in recruitment practices around that time. I remember in both education and job applications there was a shift towards a heavy emphasis on being a highly passionate hard worker rather than SAT scores or the like. There are some videos on youtube about Byung-Chul Han's theory of a burnout society, and they present an interesting idea where productivity in the modern day is more about optimizing mental processes rather than physical labor, which ties into how we encourage grindset, toxic positivity, etc., even into a shift in discrimination based on culture instead of race. If viewing it through that lens, I wouldn't even say it's reactive so much as something we've subconsciously internalized from the messaging of corporations and institutions, like osmosis instead
Stories like this make me realize how sheltered I was. I went to college, didn't need to work while studying, then fresh out of college I got a job in a place where everyone is nice, there hardly ever crazy deadlines to meet and pay is okay.
My worst job was working at a horrifically toxic car dealership. I lasted three months before I just collected my final paycheck one day, clocked out and never returned. I've never seen a workplace filled with so much infighting. The sad thing is, the cars we sold were great! They were some of the most dependable machines on the road.
Worst job experiences I've had were both at car dealerships. First time was a lube tech, hated the people I was working with, never again. Second time was a Porter, basically delivering cars and/or loaners to customers while their car was being worked on. Loved the job, loved the customers, loved my coworkers, hated HATED my manager. Messed with my money too many times within the six weeks I was there. Hate that I left, but it was for the best, plus I have a better job now.
48:00 I'm surprised anyone actually does that stupid "counting down their tip as the wait staff makes mistake" thing. I would assume that any service worker that sees that happening would see the "maximum" tip amount on offer, weight the cost-benefit analysis quickly, and decide the person was not worth the extra effort and attention they were demanding. Maybe that's just me, and maybe that's why I never did too well in customer service.
The supper club part reminds me so much of host clubs. I don't think I could ever last long in a job with any kind of competitive "sales." For one summer I was 1 of 2 pool attendants at this older hotel. They had one single dinky little pool on the roof. I worked one part of the week, the other person on the rest. They did have an old crusty fridge up there that wasn't used. I was often baking in 100+ degree weather while dealing with drunk or high af guests. Most of the guests were nice and kept to themselves, but I would get the occasional entitled tourist or creepy old man. I was alone up there, mind you, sometimes with 30+ people crowded on this lil rooftop. Security had to take the elevator from the ground floor to get to me if anything happened. It wasn't the worst job in the world, but being isolated up there and having to wait for security with some fight breaking out between guests or getting hit on by men at least 30 years older than me wasn't too fun.
The subject of "tipping" in North America is an interesting one. Tipping started in England, but was frowned upon in America because it was perceived as a way of flaunting your wealth. But when the prohibition of alcohol came to America, restaurants suffered lower earnings. Tips had to be accepted to offset this, to the point where it became expected. The prohibition ended, but tipping stayed. As for my worst just was probably fast food. Like it is with Mint, office jobs are much more favorable to me. ...Although, if babysitting counts, that would be my worst job. I was in middle school, and would look after the children of an "independent massage therapist" who was a older single mom that worked nights and was paid in cash. Everyone in the neighborhood knew what types of massages she offered. But what it meant for me is that you never knew how late she'd be out, or if she'd have enough money to pay you for that day. That, and her kids were brats.
HAGS!! Thanks for sharing your wild and sad work and fridge related stories! Lol I always like listening to people like you guys who've changed jobs so many times since I've just had 2 my whole life, partly because I didn't work during college. Don't have many interesting stories but one time I went into a little caesars to pick up a delivery and cops walked in right behind me because I guess just a couple minutes before I got there, a guy was in there yelling and waving a gun around because he was upset about his food 😮
both mint's and matara's work stories were crazyyy. i don't have any like that (ive only worked two jobs so no surprise there) but funnily enough at my restaurant job i don't remember crying in the fridge but i did scream in the fridge a few times
Not a restaurant, but I worked at a Target for 6 hrs. Part of this time was when Target was just adding freezers and fridges for foods. We'll during the summers it's got really hot in the store (the store did not have ac) it got to be common practice for workers to duck into the back storage freezers to cool down
This one was really fun, some of Matara's stories i already knew, but they are always very entertaining. They should totally do part 2, the contrast between Waiter Matara and OL Mint is really nice. I'm just sad that by the end they just resorted to the old cliche of woman in the refrigerator (fridge)
That happens a lot, especially in restaurants that have teenagers,and/ or drivers,and/ or a fluctuating schedule. I've worked at least 13 years at a pizza restaurant, and I've seen multiple managers do that, especially with the long running manager doing that to me because they were pissy with me about something I've said before, but I knew I didn't care because I had a second job
There's so many weird stories I could share from being a language teacher abroad, but I think the weirdest one was someone thought it was a good idea to attempt to cook a Thanksgiving Turkey in a school that didn't have a proper oven. They nearly burnt down the school because they shoved a whole turkey into what was basically a toaster oven AND LEFT IT UNATTENDED. To make matters worse, after putting the partially burnt and partially still raw turkey in the fridge, they later attempted to try and feed it to some of the students.
thanks for the episode!! it's really fun to hear both of y'alls crazy work stories! I once worked at a self storage place, and all I had to do was sweep up or sit there and call the owner if any issues came up, but once when I was sweeping I encountered a DEAD RAT T_T anyways my current job is much better but i share the office with a lot of other people and our office fridge gets reallyyyy gross sometimes 💀 my supervisor cleaned it up once and took a before picture and printed the gross fridge picture to tape on the fridge to tell everyone to clean up after themselves. it's kinda jarring how some people don't learn how to clean properly!!
"Get the cooks on your side" Yeah, I can agree with that. During my army national service I was in the same company as the cooks and made sure to befriend them. I nearly always got better food than the rest of my platoon (Who were not on their good side) and the rest of the platoon couldn't complain since I was a vegeterian at the time. I also became a good mate with cook when I worked as a bartender/dishwasher and damn, those work lunches were much bigger than anything else served at the resturant. Never cried in the fridge at the different jobs, but we did sit and have a beer or two during some of the nights we worked.
1:46:20 Matara, the severity of the injuries suffered from a fall down a mountain is dependent on the terrain and the height of the mountain if a mountaineer suffers a fall, it is usually certain death as nearly 100 years ago, George Mallory and his climbing partner, Andrew "Sandy" Irvine, disappeared on the Northeast Ridge of Everest, it was not until 1999 that the body of George Mallory was found revealing he'd fallen down the north face of Everest, no-one knows what happened to Andrew "Sandy" Irvine
when i can't catch the premier and then see the podcast is 2+ hours 😀 watching the vod the entire way through was really fun though, i didn't even go to the fridge to get some drinks
The fridge and the bathroom were definitely the two calm oasises in the restaurant for me. The fridge was the place I could change my music there and people went there to vape for like 45 seconds at a time.
I used to work at a restaurant and the hiding place to cool off and get away for a bit was either by the dumpsters (the smoking area) or the walk in fridge. Must be a universal restaurant thing.
Thank you for the podcast!! I'm late but I'm here! I don't have much to share, but there was time that I interviewed with a really shady businesses. I asked them more than twice like "is this really legal" lol And recently, I saw the news that goes like engineers ran out when police arrived and their business were exactly the same that got reported. (fyi, the engineer didn't get arrested, I think. They got threaten to work. Their can't get out--of the fridge--and were the one calling for help.) I was like luckily I didn't go for that job. The pay was high thought. and I really want to give Matara (and anyone in the same situation) a hug. You deserved the world!! Girl fights hurt the soul fr. I just want to have girl talk and enjoy our time together without the need to get be little or betray because of jealousy ;w;
Geez you two have been through some crazy jobs 😢 Makes for some good stories and life lessons though, at least! Really proud of you both for getting to where to are today. It's been a journey.
My first job in high school was at a pizza place too, like Mint. Except my bosses were normal I guess? lol They didn't harass anybody at least. One of them would snap sometimes and yell though. I remember that made me cry once, except our fridge had a window so it wasn't as private. The other boss would let us make and eat pizza on breaks, which was nice (my favorite part). And my coworkers were nice too. One of them was a few years older than me and was really into Cowboy Bebop and would lend me his DVDs to watch.
Anyways, thanks for the episode! Glad you two are here with us now.
The final thing that made me quit my last job was a message on a bathroom door in a pub I went to after crying mid-shift in the office stairwell! It just said "Quit your job, it's crap" and I thought "you know what? You're right anonymous door person" and handed my notice in a week later! Now I work in a lovely fridge company and I'm so much happier!
I hope no one has cried in the fridge today. But if you did, you are loved and you have a place in this world. Never give up hope.
"I've been harmed way more by friends than enemies." That's probably true for most people. You're not exactly giving your enemies opportunities or information that could be used against you, at least intentionally.
My worst job was cleaning houses in a old folk's neighborhood, brutal labor and got harassed a lot by older ladies the same age as my grandma. Not a fun time, even if it was a little flattering. Definitely a weird feeling.
The pay was awful, the elderly didn't tip, the bones and muscles ached and sometimes chemicals burned, but...
I don't remember any upside lmaoooo glad I'm gone from there
Episode was fantastic, thank you for all the stories! You two should go to antarctica and film outside but say you're in a fridge and only tell us later
I love the tiny reactions you two do during the podcast really gives life to it hehe
My only restaurant job was working for Pizza Hut as a delivery driver. It never got bad enough that I cried in the walk-in fridge, but I could see why that would be the place to go.
I had two call center jobs one after the other, first one was canadian telecom, second one was american healthcare/health insurance.
Horrible, 0/10, I've witnessed the worst that humanity has to offer and I now have a great evil germinating within my soul.
Any longer and it would have been a complete villain origin story, glad I'm not there any more.
I previously had a job working with Black Card members for American Express. Can confirm they do indeed not have a limit. You also cannot volunteer to sign up for one. The company has to invite you, when you meet a list of qualifications they keep secret. One of the perks is you get a service where you can just call a number and say you want "blank" and we'll get it for you. That was my job. Whether that be a hotel reservation, specific wine delivered, horseback riding lessons, whatever.
1:32:00
its amazing how "be nice and not a bitch" is such a high bar for some girls to overcome
I have so many work stories, and I feel like you've not really worked in food service or certain types of retail until you've been locked in the walk in fridge. For me I had two, it was 15 minutes while I was sorting inventory and didn't even notice, someone came in and was like "You know it was locked right?" The other time was when I was trying to skive off at the pizza place I worked at while on close and got locked in the fridge, fortunately I learned that day that it can be unlocked from the inside too because of exactly this reason.
My worst job was a call center for numerous reasons, but it helped get me where I am to day and I survived. Glad Mint and Matara survived their bad jobs too and made it to where they are today so we can enjoy this wonderful podcast! HAGS
The politics inside call centers are abysmal. At least, from where I come from.
@@bhustacrow2183 I get why they get abuse tbh. How tf are you going to constantly moan at someone to buy your shit constantly and not think someone will get pissed off?
- 0:39:03 - Mint's story about reporting her boss, and an additional detail about it at 0:56:18 lol. 📞🤣
- 0:49:20 - Matara's views on tipping being a North American custom that should be eliminated. 💲👎
- 1:06:20 - Mint's story about old French dudes perving after Japanese maids. 🤨
- 1:17:23 - Matara joking about pyramid schemes. 🔺🤑
- 1:28:49 - Matara making the essential point for Vtubing. Good looks mean nothing with a horrid personality. The best Vtubers have a genuine charisma that cannot be faked, and the use of avatars makes irrelevant one's real-life appearance, the need for make-up, and streaming while crying in the walk-in fridge. 🙂
Thank you for the podcast, Mint and Matara! 🌿👻🪳
The worse job I've ever had was a promotion at my retail job had to move stores and started to manage a grocery crew the problem being that the previous grocery manager had got in the bad habit of just finishing the truck for his guys because he wanted the overtime. These would be like 1000 to 1800 case trucks. So when i got there the crew was lazy and would only finish part of the truck and after six months of retraining and working 7 days a week with the exception of one week off for the single vacation i took while i was there them and getting them just ok not good just ok. I got a write up for leaving early to get to a doctor's appointment this was the only time i have ever thought about just walking out on a job. I out in my transfer request and took a demotion to leave the store and am in a much better place mentally.
In my experience working as a cook in a hotel, the walk-in fridge is where people cry (both servers and cooks) and eat. Really relatable when we are so tired and hungry during a very busy day or week. Urgh... especially on long weekends/holidays when we really don't have time to eat and rest, but we have to in secret. Take turns in the fridge, even hide the food in there and make sure the chefs (sous and executives) don't find out.
Had varrious odd jobs over the years. from being a cold storage hauler (in temp: -40) to courier services.
One of the more fucked up jobs I had was cleaning ferry rest spots for tourists. Sounds simple enough right? Just clean spaces on regular intervals. No biggie.
This one time I came into the toilet section the whole room was covered in wet, smelly shit that was everywhere and I mean everywhere. It was in the sinks. on the walls and not even the celling was spared. Just as I was about to turn around and leave even the door was covered. It was like a toilet had exploded in there but oddly enough those where more clean items there, nor was anything broken.
Someone had during the night gone through the trouble of drenching everything in litteral shit, for reasons nobody knows why.
I went outside, grabbed nearby hose and what detergents I could find and did what I could about the smelly problem I was now stuck with, then called bossman to get insurance on the case.
That area was closed off for the rest of the season until they could renovate that section.
Oh and a few years later I even had the pleasure of cleaning inside septic tanks wearing a full body suit, knee deep in shit.
At least I got higher respect for people working with this stuff daily.
I worked retail for 11 years so i have a few strange things. When the PS5 was first coming out and having those supply shortages, every time it got stocked we had a ton of people showing up. I worked in the back primarily so i didn't have to deal with it usually, but a (i believe mentally ill) man stormed into the back demanding his PS5. He started swinging at me and hit me once square in the chest (he wasn't very strong so it didn't hurt though). But i was dealing with a LOT of anxiety at that time so it really freaked me out. I heard after it was resolved that he assaulted his mother and had to be taken out of the store by police. Props to the management, even though we didn't get along super well the manager that day was totally supportive of me and it made me respect him a lot more. But that was the thing that pushed me to get ready to leave that job.
My worst experience was being a woodcutter operator. 40C temperatures, dust everywhere, I had nosebleeds consistently every couple of weeks, due to the dryness of the air, was constantly berated, and I worked 50 hours a week for about 6 months. I think I almost died when someone dropped a sheet of wood on my foot while being nearly crushed on one side, to add insult to injury the coworker WATCHING this whole thing unfold just smiled and shrugged as it happened (I'm fine, no permanent injuries). Thankfully, I was able to move onto better things after that.
When y'all mentioned how some people need to get hyped up to quit a job it reminded me when I was super super depressed a year or so ago, there were videos of an AI voice of Master Chief "encouraging you to clean your room" or "telling you he's proud of you". A little cringe looking back at it but it's crazy that it actually genuinely helped when I was in that mindset
My weirdest interview experience was also my first one. I was applying for a job as a substitute teacher at a local school, and I met the principal for my interview just before the classes started. I was just there for my interview. I had a quick chat with him, went for a quick tour of the school, met some of the other teachers, and then the principal was like "Simping, you seem to be a great fit for this school and we'd like to have you. Could you start right now?"
A few moments later little Simping, fresh from high school, was left alone in a classroom with 30 over-stimulated six year-olds, one of whom was having a mental breakdown and had to be physically separated from the rest of the class (I may have put them in a closet), and I was just desperately trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy as everything was falling apart around me. I somehow managed to keep this up until the bell rang, and then I was shuttled off too another classroom to repeat the same process. Again and again.
Honestly, it was kind of great. To this day, I have never gotten so many hugs in such a short period of time. Small children are at the same time the most loving and most vicious creatures I have ever encountered. Some lessons, I would be partnered up with an actual teacher, and I'd basically be acting as an assistant, and that was a great learning experience. I was there the whole day, I somehow didn't get fired, and I even stayed to work at the school's youth club afterwards. I was offered another shift the next day and worked that too.
And then I didn't get any calls from the school. Week after week would go by without any calls, and I would keep calling them just to check if I had been let go (I hadn't). I didn't have any other jobs lined up, so I just waited for my call. SIX MONTHS LATER, the day before I was gonna leave for art school, I get a call: "Hi Simping, it's *school*, one of our teachers called in sick, could you come tomorrow?"
I politely declined.
worst job, worked at graphic designer for a week for a doctor who wanted to create a network, the workplace was a hotel lobby and had no acces to food for 10 hours daily, with 2 hours of commute from house to the place and other 2 going bak, didnt got paid a single penny, left him without any work finished nor the files i worked on...
I finally watched the episode!
My worst job ever was in customer service.
I was hired by a scammy credit card company to do IN PERSON problem solving for clients. We only had 1 manager for 3 different branches and she was never at mine so I had no one to lean on. People constantly quit so I kept doing the work of 2 people by myself (cleaning the place included). It was 8 hs of minimun wage btw.
People would spit at me, shout and insult me on the daily. My breaking point was after making a mistake because of how stressed I was trying to solve an enraged customer's problem (Classic insurance scam he never asked for). My manager said she was gonna come with her car but she never did. He tried to attack me physically but the security in the mall was ready to stop him (yes, My office was a stand in a mall for people to complain at the company).
It was extremely dehumanizing, everyone saw me as the face of an evil corporation. I quit the next week. I suffered of social anxiety and I was afraid of human confrontation for years.
I'm glad I'm doing much better now.
I've also worked quite a few shitty jobs, though when I worked fast food I mostly vented frustration in the fridge (when I had time)! Glad to be a patron of the Mintara high arts podcast 🎨🎭
I had to take breaks listening because the stories stressed me out. The worst job I worked was in a meatworks cutting kidneys and uteruses out of sheep. I kept getting heatstroke because it was constantly 35 degrees celcius and humid from the water used to hose the blood off the floor. Took days to get the smell off me once I left.
My worst job was actually working at Subway forever ago. For some reason, I ended up not having a schedule for an entire week and when I called to inquire about it they merely told me, "Oh. We just decided we didn't need you any more."
It should be illegal for jobs to just cold fire people like that. I had that happen to me for a warehouse job after I got sick for a week. Schedule app just stopped getting updated. I had to drive up there and pry it out of them to say "yeah we're letting you go."
That's so fucking stupid man, sucks.
Unfortunately I don't have any really crazy work stories. Probably my craziest story is about how my one Black Friday shift was... actually not at all crazy! I was working produce at Wal Mart at the time and while all the usual black friday hubbub was happening elsewhere in the store we just had one long line people stretching from the front of the store around next to all the fridges, leading to several pallets of TVs on sale. Very orderly, very sensible, each person came up, handed me a ticket, and I put a TV in their cart. Went on for about an hour or so then the whole store calmed down and we just got to cleaning up and regular sales. People left MOUNTAINS of shit piled up under the price scanners. Best part is, I'd already worked 40 hours that week. So I got base pay, +1 mult for overtime, +1 mult for holiday, +flat bonus for overnight pay. Walked out with something like 3.2 days pay for a very reasonable night's work.
I almost got a job as a door to door vacuum salesman. The interview was in someone's apartment, and it was like a group interview; there were 5 of us there. The guy proceeded to give us a demonstration of the vacuum we were going to sell. It felt like he was trying to sell it to us. I'm pretty sure two of the interviewees were plants based on how wowed they were with the vacuum. They had free chocolates and sodas though.
I've mostly had jobs that only last for 1 vacation, summer or winter, with my only job that I held onto beyond those times into the weekends being my current job at mcD's, now at 2+ years. McD's has treated me pretty well but that's because mine is managed well, unlike the horror stories. No fridge crying for me yet. Now whenever I visit other fast food restaurants I always find myself peering into the kitchen in the back, seeing only 3 people working the full kitchen with a further 2 in service and 1 in the drive, and immediately seeing it as a management problem.
My worst jobs are a toss up between my very first one, at a rose farm, and one at a factory making plastic crates, like the ones a 24x pack of beers comes in, or 12 large soda bottles. The rose farm job was, looking back, probably pretty illegal. We were a bunch of 14 year old children and group of polish adults nipping off flower buds so that every branch would only hold 1 flower, so they grew bigger. Not that bad but very tiring as the blazing sun was above us. We were done earlier than expected, so in the last days we were made to crawl through the dirt on hands and knees, no kneepads or anything, and had to rip out weeds with our hands and stuff them in our pockets as the seeds could go airborne. It was humiliating, hard, tiring, and my knees, shins and palms were bloodied and scratched. We got paid in cash each day, no bank records, and for all of that work I only got 20 euros per workday. After the first day of picking weeds I never went back. The factory work wasn't bad in itself, I have just never felt so replacable as I did there. I got there through a work agency and the factory was on 24/7, so my department worked in 3 shifts, 6-14, 14-22, 22-6. When I got there I never met my department head, never got any contact info, nothing. Just a small tour of the immediate surroundings and being told that the others would teach me how to do the job. All contact was done through the agency. It was simple work, just using a tool to cut the sharp edges off of the newly molded crates and stacking them. I was allowed to wear my headphones and listen to music, also a plus. But I do this job diligently for 4 weeks, then 1 morning I wake up extremely sick, like, can't get out of bed sick. It was 5 in the morning because I had my alarm set for a morning shift. I try calling the agency to call in sick: no one answers because they open at 8. I want to call the factory, I don't have a phone number. I try calling the company that this factory is a part of (the factory was on a industry field where every factory on that space was owned by the same company and fed into each other, but each individual factory still kept their own name), nothing. So I eventually just gave up and decided to put my own health first. I get a call at 8:05, from my agency. I explain my situation, they say I no longer have to show up. Just like that, I was fired. Never have I felt less like my bosses care for me, and it was a harsh but important lesson to learn.
Worst job experience is kinda a tie between having a trench collapse that buried me alive and a pharmaceutical plant construction that kept trying to cut every corner culminating in the CEO taking us into a room and closing the door so he could tell us to vent hazardous chemicals into the ceiling so the room would pass air quality. Me and my supervisor refused and fortunately they hadn't been paying our company so they weren't willing to risk the liability of doing it for them.
I actually do Rover! I was a vet tech and got burnt out over the pandemic. A lot of animal jobs, especially vet are soul crushing. Most people think it’s the euthanasia that causes burnout but it is actually so much more than that, there’s angry owners, seeing loving owners go through financial crises, overwork, lack of hospitals and vets etc. the profession holds one of the highest rates of some dark things. There is also a LOT of work place bullying (apparently it’s very common in medical fields). I saved like insanity in order to move away and start a new life once i saved enough money. I started doing Rover as a “temporary” thing while i got used to the new city i moved into because it would force me to go out and explore more. But it turned from a few months to a year and I’m trying to do it full time in order to make it work! I listen to your podcasts just as you recommended, hahaha, i am literally the person you are describing! Trust idk about the other dog walkers but we do not all have our life together- i think most kinda fall into this job by accident and after struggling for years with many career issues. It is also not perfectly lucrative and it’s a struggle to make ends meet, but I honestly feel so much more at ease than I did before. ❤
I've worked many strange low tier jobs, but the worst was probably the lifeguarding gig I had while at uni. It started fine, I did my shifts with no drama or anything. But as the months went on, the managers began to be much more demanding of my time and me not having that much of a backbone I would sacrifice my lectures to be able to work.
Apathy began when I was ill one day and they gave me a disciplinary and was chewed out by management. Then one of the other lifeguards started saying that I should drop out of uni to get a full time contract with them, another lifeguard turned out to be very racist and the straw that broke the camels back was the FRIDGE cold lifeguard trainer they had, who put me in unreasonable scenarios like doing a perfect spinal turn on someone twice my weight.
I was planning to stick at the job until I started my master's thesis, but I quit early. The job took away a lot of my face to face teaching and social events I had with friends. Glad that I am now teaching English in Japan lol
My Worst job was when I worked at this laundry mat company that just washed used hospital clothes. I've seen congealed blood, human feces, human organs, like a liver and placenta, and the entire soil side of the building would smell of old people piss. The craziest thing that happened there was, I found a zip log bag with I could only describe as raw ground beef like texture with what looked like a bone around it, I worked there for 3 years.
Management was also bad and night shift (which was my shift) would always pick up morning shift slack which meant we would do 10-12hr plus days
one of the fondest memory of my childhood was going on a school field trip to a mcdonalds 🤣 we got a whole tour of their kitchen and of course my favorite spot was their walk in FRIDGE!!!! I honestly dont even know why they brought us there coz it was just a small group of kids, but I loved the cold and the fridge felt soooo huge to lil old me
I've never had a real weird interview experience, but a while ago I was deployed to Kosovo, and within like 36 hours of arriving there one of my roommates found a smoke grenade in a footlocker and set it off INSIDE THE ROOM thinking it was a dud/training grenade. So we're all waving towels around trying to not let the smoke alarm go off (unsuccessfully of course) when two captains from JAG run over to see what the hell is going on. So that was a great start.
On that same deployment I got a chance to climb a mountain to earn a special badge from our German partners there and while we were almost to the top of the mountain a huge thunderstorm rolled in so we all sprinted down the mountain to a safe house in a torrential downpour. One of the guys had a sled type of thing on his back as a way to get an injured person that couldn't walk down in case that happened, and he slipped like 3 or 4 times so occasionally you'd just see the guy sliiiiiding right past everybody like something out of a cartoon. That deployment was overall one of the most mind numbingly boring times of my life but moments like these I will never forget.
My worst job was some crappy warehouse that sold store fixtures and always smelled like old mustard and depression. My GROSSEST job was also my favorite, commercial/industrial refrigeration repair and installation. If you saw how some supermarkets and restaurants stored your food, you would never eat again.
Great episode. I've only had one job that I would consider to be bad. I spent six months there during my sabbatical before going to university. The job was with a fundraising company, making calls for very reputable non-profits to convince their past donors to agree to donate to them monthly via direct debit. Here's the part that made it even worse than it sounds like: after some time had passed, people that weren't able to convince 20-25% of their calls to agree to a monthly donation via direct debit started to get sent home for the day, "better luck next shift", and everyone there worked by the hour. It never affected me personally but every shift I'd see like a third or more of my coworkers get sent home, losing out on however many hours were left on their shifts.
My first job, way back in the day, taught me how to code websites and do video editing. The pay was also good. The company produced adult content, and I was constantly surrounded by naked people because some of the recordings and photoshoots took place in the office, which was a small apartment with a couple of desktops and computers. It was a fun experience. The office also have a fridge.
If I have to put it on a tier list for worst experiences, I would rank my pharmacy tech job S tier and my fast food would be on A tier. I used to do night shift in a hospital, running around like a maniac because I don’t want to deliver my med late, we were understaffed and it was not good. We had one tech and one pharmacist trying to hold the place for 6 hours until morning people come, so during covid I did not get to sit my butt down for 6-7 hours straight on some nights. I got burned out so bad after couple months, my schedule was like 9:00 pm to 8:30am for 7 days straights and then couple days off and come back again…. Honestly at some point I thought I developed schizophrenia from sleep deprived because I could not sleep well for months and I did not know how to take care of myself. I was hospitalized for almost a week, my parents turned me to the ER and the doctor would not let me go home, got a big shot of Hadol and pass out. It was the worst but the best lesson I learned so far. At the end, no matter what you do, please take care of yourself people.
Always great to grab a cold one from the fridge while enjoying MintaraMondays.
My first job was in my Uni cafeteria. I liked replacing the milk machine because it was a break from dishwashing, and the fridge was refreshing.
So anyway, my wallet with my keys and 150 dollars stolen in the first two weeks.
It was in the managers desk drawer, so only one of the other employees could have stolen it.
Would have had to sleep in the hallway, but thankfully, one of the uni resident heads walked by and was able to let me in my room.
About what the topic of being a fan of something vs working there about 1 hour in.
Another vtuber said this about becoming a vtuber, but i think it applies here.
"When you work at Disney world, they stop being Goofy or Donald, and become Frank from the break room in a costume.".
And yeah, that's the thing about guys and fights. A lot of times, even if you aren't friends, and you fight, even if you lose and get beat up, just the fact you were willing to stand for yourself and fight will get them to respect you more, because it shows strength of will, if not strength of arms. Even in the instances where the fight makes them consider you more of an enemy, they still want you gone, but the mind set they have about you is different from then on. I'd rather a swift punch in the face, than years of a metaphorical knife being slowly twisted in my back.
My worst job was at a pizza place. I was a delivery driver, the actual work wasn't bad, but the owner was one of those "everything has to be done the way I want it done even if the way I want it done makes no sense" types. There were days he'd "help out" when we were shorthanded by, say, hopping on dishes, which you'd think would be awesome, except that one of the things he insisted on was hand-drying every single plate, and we had a buffet so WE WENT THROUGH A LOT OF PLATES. Dishes were piling up higher and higher in the sink while he was back there running a towel over every single plate individually (which was probably less sanitary than just putting them out still a bit wet to begin with). It was things like that, that were actively counterproductive or nonsensical, that he made his personal bugbears.
Dishes were one of the things I was supposed to help with when I wasn't on deliveries so sadly I couldn't hide in the fridge.
That place got weird later too. We went in one day and the owner told us he'd fired the general manager, we never found out why. After I quit, he swapped the booths and the tables around so the booths were out in the middle of the floor with no side walls and the tables were up against the middle walls meant for the booths. Then he started arbitrarily closing early on random days. The place went out of business not long after.
I found out from an ex-coworker years later that the owner had been in jail on drug charges, so that was a thing.
My worst job was at an American BBQ restaurant. I worked as a dishwasher, prep cook, and expo. Dishwashing and prep cooking were the most exhausting jobs I have ever done, I would make it home at 1 am shacking from exhaustion. As an expo I was way more stressed than tired and I lost my temper so bad I punched the metal counter hard enough to dent it.
A funny interview for myself was right after I had just graduated fresh out of college and saw a job listing for a mechatronics engineer for a small company working on a robotic device to throw shooting targets into the air.
I get to the interview and get shown this device, it's rather cool, all remote controlled thru a phone app. However as the interview goes on, I realized there is no one else at this job working on the code for this product. I asked what happened to the original author of all the code and was told they left. Ooookay, I asked if they had any documentation or notes on the code. Nope. I asked if others were going to be hired on to help with the code. Nope. Huge red flags left and right appeared during the tour, and it turns out he hired someone from another country dirt cheap to write all this code and I was going to be the underpaid, freshly graduated person to fix it. Then it turns out, the same owner had another company in the same building making custom fire arm accessories, but he was the only manager of everything, no one to delegate tasks to. Dude was in over his head and was desperately looking for dirt cheap abusable employees. Then I found out he was many months behind schedule shipping out the robots to customers that already paid...
Anyway, at the very end of the interview he told me if I wanted the job, I would have to do "homework" and fix some of the code. I got out of there in a friendly manner, polite etc, but when I got the email with the homework later that evening I politely told him I wasn't interested in the position any longer and that I don't work for free. Whole thing felt so off, I genuinely feel bad for anyone that may have been hired 😅
Catching this late yippee... watched most of this yesterday, but got to the fridge story and realised it was 3am 💀
My worst job was also my longest one - call centre work. Gave me stability during covid period and basically no barriers to entry but the pay was awful (especially given the emotional labour required) and being there impacted my physical and mental health.
Some gnome vtuber helped me gain the courage to keep trying to find other jobs, and now I'm much happier in a position that is equally stable and pays almost twice as much. No idea what that gnome is doing now but I'll always be grateful.
As a guy who usually can handle a lot of stress from people, I cried in the fridge
One of my first jobs was being a furniture mover. We often got abused to deliver the bad news about people being fired. Basically we where sent to a place, an office for example, to start packing up the furniture and making it ready for moving. At the first time we go somewhere the most senior dude in our group usually introduced us like "Hi, we are here from xyz movers. We are supposed to start packing up the furniture because this place closes down in X amount of time".
I could listen to you two talk about literally anything, even fridges 😂Honestly, the longer the better!
After hearing about your bad workplace stories, and the inspirational videos... I'd love a mental health podcast where you share your journeys dealing with mental health, what you do for self-care, etc. It may be a deep topic, but I feel like the two of you could really make it uplifting and fun :)
This is why I love about Matara, she doesn't lie. Stories on stories pew pew
I worked at Walmart for about 6 months in the Dairy section.
The job itself wasn't really bad, and when I was left alone I got a lot of work done and enjoyed my time, but the management was absolutely atrocious.
I felt like I was the only person that worked there at all. Every single time I came in for my shift, there would be NOTHING done. All the shelves were empty. Milk and eggs just FLY off the shelves throughout the day, people buy enormous quantities of both, and whenever i'd start my shift there would be nothing on the shelves and all the stuff that needed to be put out on the shelves outside of the fridge area was also not put out.
Some days, i'd just have random managers come by and try to tell me how to do my job which I never appreciated and I let them know I didn't appreciate it every time they did it. I was already ornery and didn't care if I got fired, so I always spoke my mind. Had this asshole come up to me literally 5 minutes after I clocked in asking why there was nothing done in dairy. And i'm like, dude, I clocked in 5 minutes ago, I just started, if you want it done throughout the day you gotta hire or schedule someone to work BEFORE and AFTER I do. The worst part was when multiple managers would come by re-assigning and micromanaging me.
I'd be putting milk on the shelves, some asshat would come by and say stop doing that and put eggs out. So i'd start putting eggs out and some other ass hat would come by and say stop doing that and do the milk. So i'd switch again, then some OTHER asshat would come by and say stop doing that and start putting shit on the shelves. And whenever one of them would could by and be like "why are you doing this when I told you to do this" i'd just straight up tell them the other manager told me to stop doing that and do the other thing and THEY need to work it out between themselves what they want me to do or let me handle myself, it isn't my responsibility of I got two managers telling me to do different things and trying to overrule each other.
Then some other days there would be no management at all and I was left completely to my own devices. And every single time I didn't have some asshole trying to tell me how to do my job, I got 50% more work done because I could do it efficiently and prioritize things better because those asshats had never worked back there and had no clue how to do it properly or manage it, I feel like they just walked the store micromanaging people to justify their paycheck.
Another issue I ran into a lot was I ran into so many outdated products on the shelves. Because it was the dairy section, everything had a relatively short shelf-life and i'd find shit that was 5 months out of date. Corporate policy was something like when it was a few days from expiring, it had to be marked down and put in a different area, and if it was already expired it had to be done away with in the back. We didn't throw anything away, we just had to stack it up in some area specifically for expired goods and I think someone eventually came by to take it and catalog it or something, I really don't remember. But i'd start looking through the products for expired goods and when those managers saw that they'd get so pissed off. I guess it made them (or the store, and them by extension) look bad when too many products were turning out to be expired so they'd always try to find some bullshit for me to do to stop me from checking dates even when I had literally nothing else to do. They legit wanted people to buy yogurt and milk that was out of date just so they could keep their numbers up. I even had them come to me and try to tell me to mop the floors and clean up spills and shit like that and i'm like, uh no, i'm not gonna do that. I was not hired to be a janitor. They'd try to argue that part of my responsibility was cleaning up messes in my department and I flat out refused. They just wanted me to have busy work because they hated it when I got all my work done and stayed on top of my department so at times i'd have nothing to do so I got paid to just stand around in the cooler. They would never fire me though, I always assumed they had trouble getting and keeping people, and with how awful the management was, it is no surprise. I literally ran that department. Nothing got done when I wasn't there. I never worked with a single other person, I was always alone.
Another issue that happened regularly was that when the frozen and/or refrigerated trucks were unloaded, people unloading them didn't know where to take the shit, so when I came in to work every day, i'd often find shit in the cooler that was supposed to be in frozen and of course no longer was because it had been thawing out in the cooler for an unknown number of hours before I got there, and i'd find shit in the freezer that was supposed to be taken to the cooler and frozen solid when it wasn't supposed to be. About the only thing they got right was milk. So there were a LOT of times that I saved that store thousands of dollars by rescuing pallets that were put in the wrong location because corporate mandate said if frozen things stopped being frozen that they had to be chucked. Of course sometimes they thawed out and management ordered me to take it to the freezer anyway like it was still frozen and totally fine so they didn't have to lose that money and accept responsibility for it.
Oh SPEAKING of milk... Another part of the job i'd forgotten about was dealing with the fucking milk crates. GOD I hated dealing with the milk crates. All those jugs of milk would come in on pallets with stacks and stacks and stacks of milk crates with 4 gallons per crate. As I took milk out to put on the shelves, the empty crates were stacked on an empty pallet until it got as high as a full load, then i'd have to wrap the whole thing in plastic wrap then pull the crate through the warehouse area. Now THIS is where it gets really fucking stupid... I HAD to remove these pallets full of milk crates because new shipments of milk and shit were coming in on a daily basis, so you had to get rid of the empty ones to make room for the new ones. So it 100% had to be done or you'd run into a situation where fresh milk couldn't fit in the cooler as there was limited room in there. But when I took the empty crate pallets to the back door, only fucking managers could OPEN IT. So whenever I wanted to take one of these pallets outside, I had to get on the phone, call a manager and wait until they showed up to do nothing except unlock the door, wait till I took the pallet out, then lock it again. And boy they fucking hated doing it, and boy I fucking hated it too, because sometimes i'd wait as long as 45 minutes for a manager to show up because they were "busy". I can't imagine those assholes actually doing anything except needlessly micromanaging people that knew how to do their jobs better than they did in the first place, but somehow they were always "busy" when they were called. It is so profoundly stupid we can't even open the door ourselves to take those pallets out and have to get one of the managers to unlock the door for us, I guess corporate mandated that stupidity because they were scared warehouse workers might steal something by sneaking it out the back door? Idk, it makes no sense to me because theres nothing out there, you'd have to walk all the way around the outside to get to some getaway car to stash your illicit goods in or have that car drive around to the back door to pick it up, and in both cases you'd be on security cameras the whole way it was actually easier to steal by just walking out of the front of the store with something, but whatever, no one ever said any of these people were intelligent.
So anyway one day I go to clock in and I can't. I go ask the assistant store manager about it because she is confused and after some digging around, she finds out that I was fired automatically by "the system". No one at that store had done it, I was terminated by an automated system because I had called in too many times. So I ask how that is possible because I know I didn't actually call out too many times, so after we talked for a little while we both figured out what happened together. You see, dear reader, I was hired right as the store was changing its attendance policy. The OLD policy had X number of days that you had access to right as you got hired, the NEW policy had fewer days (of course) as well as you only having access to HALF of them until you'd worked at least 6 months before you sort of unlocked the rest of them. Because of when I was hired and started working there, I went through training and was told by HR when I was hired about the OLD attendance policy, but I hadn't actually started working until the NEW policy had already done into effect. So I was trained on the old system, and because I hadn't technically started working yet, no one ever bothered to inform me that the policy had changed because all the older employees were told about it and the newer ones were trained on the new system, and I just fell through the cracks. When she realized what happened, she told me to go speak to the store manager to tell her the situation so she could undo it because they really didn't want to lose me. Management both hated and loved me because though I didn't respect those idiots at all, they knew I did a damn good job running that department and they had nobody else anyway, so they really wanted me to stay and keep working. So I went to the store manager... Told her my tale, she called the assistant manager and talked to her, she made some other calls, dicked around in the computer a bit, until finally she said she had fixed it, I was no longer terminated and was free to clock in now. Keep in mind, this whole ordeal took about an hour, so it was about an hour after I was supposed to clock in.
Manager's office was at the front of the store. Dairy (as well as where you clock in) was at the back of the store. So I walked out of her office, walking through the store, heading toward the place to clock in. I didn't even make it halfway through the store before one of those micromanaging manager pieces of shit stopped me and demanded to know why there was no milk on the shelves yet. I just stared at him in disbelief for a long time. It was probably only a few seconds but boy it felt like ages and I said, "You know what? I quit." then I went right back to the store manager's office and told her. I told her why I was quitting, I bitched about those micro managing assholes that hassle me and waste my time and slow me down and complain endlessly about things I have no control over like nothing being done before I clock in since I was the only one in the damn store that worked in dairy. After my cathartic complaints, then I walked out.
Whats funny is, that isn't my regular walmart, but I do go there from time to time as a shopper. I thought it would be kind of awkward to see those shitty managers wandering around aimlessly while I was shopping, but it actually never happened. After about a month, I actually began to actively look for people I used to work with and I didn't recognize ANYBODY. It was kind of freaky honestly, like every single person that used to work there was just gone and replaced by all new faces i'd never seen before. I saw some managers wandering around, but they weren't the same people. In my heart, I wished those idiots had gotten fired, but I don't truly know what happened to them, they just vanished.
The moral of the story is check the dates on EVERYTHING you buy in the dairy department and never trust that your frozen food has been frozen the whole time.
WOW just wow 😳😱
Nothing you have said has surprised me I have a career in retail and it's kinda unofficially known Walmart is the worse big retail place to work for not as in pay which is not good for what you are doing expecialy in dairy or frozen but how bad the work can get and how frantic it can be
@@inthewoods4759 same as asda
People usually talk about customers being the worst part of retail but they're only, i would say, half maybe 3/5 of the problem. The rest is management.
I worked Target for 11 years and went through multiple managers and they were what dictated whether my time was tolerable or not. A good manager can help mitigate the customer nightmare. A bad manager both doesn't help and makes the job infinitely worse.
Not to mention corporate completely divorced from what human beings are like and trying i make sweeping changes that make NOBODY happy.
2:11:45 That's the Centurion Card from American Express. It's their fanciest card, and you can't apply for it. They can only invite you, so it's reserved for the wealthiest people whom they know can afford it.
You are correct that there's no limit, but it charges you interest all the same. So nobody would want to charge too much for too long. I think another reason for no limit is that a declined card is very embarrassing. So they can spend lavishly on dinners, vacations, and fridges.
Not really a job job but still a job:
I was an undergrad Teaching Assistant in Uni for CS courses. The professor didn't communicate with any of us TAs before classes started which was odd but I figured things were ok. It was a class with lab sessions and the first sessions were on the first day of classes, before any of the lectures. Since we hadn't been assigned any sessions to be in, I just assumed the prof had cancelled first weeks lab sessions.
This was not the case, I stopped by the labs and the students were understandably confused why no one was there. Later that afternoon I got an email from the professor asking to meet with all the TAs in his office that day.
The professor had absolutely nothing prepared for the semester. Didn't even know there were lab sessions that day. Didn't know what he was supposed to teach either. No syllabus. Me and another TA dug through our stuff from when we took the class to refresh our memories. We tried to share our homework and project notes but he insisted on using a convoluted method which involved connecting to a private server of his or something instead of using Google Drive or something, you know, normal. All the undergrad TAs and I ended up quitting the next day (all independently). I was also a TA for another CS class, there was no way I'd take the full brunt of this professors incompetence on top of that + my own classes.
Months later I check the Uni reddit and the class was a total shitshow, half the class failed and a lot of people reported the situation to the department. Heck, I revisited the sub as I write this and the professor is still teaching, still a total shitshow.
I had a similar situation, but I was one of the students. Our masters course was pretty sound but we had an extra unit where we could get a certification in a specific software that would look great on our CV. The teaching for this unit was abysmal, the guy they got to teach us the software didn't know what he was doing and constantly said the software was bad and began teaching us a different software (plus showing off his portfolio in the process).
It got to the point we all complained, but it wasn't fixed until the last few months of the academic year, so we had to cram in a years worth of content in 2 months whilst creating and writing our master's thesis. If I recall, the test itself was the same week our thesis was due. To no ones surprised, we all failed miserably and that opportunity was wasted.
I've worked a lot of crappy dead end jobs, but I feel like each one has taught me a valuable life lesson about my own work ethic and how I value myself. Sometimes you just gotta have a little cry in the fridge to sort out what's going on in your life
Thanks for the episode! I now view fridges in restaurants differently.
I'm at the dog walking conversation atm, and just an FYI to anyone, if you ever plan to walk/watch other people's animals, make sure you have the correct insurance to cover an umbrella over you should something happen. Look up state laws and such, do you require a license, etc. People can be very vicious with the well being of their animals and WILL seek to place blame should something go wrong (even if it wasn't your fault). You can be sued and incur legal fees.
I speak from experience as it was a family business, make sure you can protect yourself before doing anything!
Crying in the fridge is just the thing to do. You got privacy, the cold would soothe the swelling at your eyes, and you could steal kids meal juice boxes in there
Thankfully, I've been lucky enough to never work in a toxic place, but I was raised to be something of a people pleaser, thought there is a limit. This probably shaped me to the point where if I hate someone to the point I'm willing to fight them and stuff them in a fridge, I'll just completely cut off all contact instead of making a scene or plotting something. I've learned throughout the years that actively hating people is more effort than simply ignoring their existence.
The Fridge & Bathroom Sumer Special Podcast is something I really look forward to every week!
The best part is when it's over.. I still have the Patreon extended version to enjoy afterwards!!
My worst job was when I was in high school I was a summer camp counselor for kids doing various different coding activities like making roblox games, minecraft mods, and lego robotic stuff and for the most part it was fine but what made it bad was just how insufferable some kids were. They would do everything in their power to disobey and mess around and just break things or annoy the other kids like throwing legos at everyone. What topped it off was that I only got paid 50 dollars in gift cards for a weeks worth of work from 8 to 5. It wasn’t all bad but I definitely don’t want to work with kids again.
I relate to Mint so much when she mentioned taking longer when doing work tasks, because she actually cared about doing quality work. It frustrated me so much when some of my past jobs wanted me to work even faster, at major cost to quality.
My worst job experience was probably driving for pizza delivery during the winter, but their provided car had almost no tire tread. I slid off the road even though I was driving super cautious. I switched to my own car during the winter season after that.
I also got fired from an ice cream shop, but they wouldn't tell me why I was being fired. I was never told about anything I was doing wrong, or anything to improve. Quite frustrating.
Glad that I found a job I relatively enjoy a few years back.
Worst job was a call center for a for-profit college that rhymes with "University of DeVry." While i was working there they got censured by the state for having a graduation rate 10%-ish lower than state minimums to maintain a level of accreditation that allowed them to create new courses. While i don't remember the exact numbers, i remember that this was *not* a high bar they were failing to clear. In response, the CEO sent us a video giving us a directive to reach out and market to "a better kind of student," instead of doing anything to help the existing students. Breaking point was when they decided to open the call center on weekends but only staff one person for the whole day. First weekend shift I had 30 callers in queue while my manager played solitaire in the cube across from me. Spent my break screaming in my car and quit not long after that.
As someone who has been working in retail for almost seven years, I have grown to feel sympathy towards employees when I'm at a store. Knowing the workings of corporate leaves a lot to be desired lol
Worst job experience was selling life insurance, never again will I go into sales.
My favorite part was when they both shouted "ITS HAGGING TIME" and then did poses, can't wait for the "Whats in your fridge" episode. 10/10 podcast though, would be horrified by terrible working conditions and even worse betrayer friends again.
I remember one job I had at an office supply store where the older boss definitely had a 'type' of young women he would hire, though I don't recall him ever creeping on them. He did have a singular interest in beating other stories in the region on these knowledge tests that would pass down from corporate, and I ended up getting out of a lot of grunt work because I would speed complete the quizzes that were mostly context clue reading tests to boost us.
When I left there to go back to classes my brother took a semester off and ended up getting the job I was leaving, to the point of them giving him the raise I would have gotten if I had been there like 8 months. The other workers that weren't fresh out of high school or starting college were all extremely weird in their own ways that would take too much text to get into.
Thank you for the fun and crazy stories in this podcast. Love listening to it during late work hours (not in a fridge)
I was waiting to say this for when the 25 eps were over but. Thank you two, for making something that makes me look forward to mondays. Sometimes I can't finish listening to a week's episode until the weekend, but that just makes the wait for the next episode shorter!
My worst job was my first job as a site engineer. Being in a third-world country, safety practices were often ignored and we worked a minimum of 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. I had no overtime pay, and I spent a lot of my (below) minimum wage to help my workers - like buying them gloves and even tools. I even did manual labor along with them just to lift their spirits. Now I always strive to protect the workers im entrusted with from abuse
This episode was so long that I had to put it in the fridge a couple of times and watch it in sections, but I enjoyed it a lot.
1:04:11 - Mint when I explain my bad work stories from the military and working as a garbageman in a chronically understaffed city sanitation department where less employees means each employee has to do more work, and as such, you can't just fire every s***head without thinking about the consequences it'll have on the good workers.
Crazy stories though? I can do that. I'll leave out the tragic ones b/c I don't think this is the right place for them. I'll go with the craziest story I can recall atm, and might update more later when I have time.
1. More than a decade ago, I worked on a ship. We pulled into a port in Mozambique and the crew had some time off work to go out and see the sights. This happened to a guy I knew in our navigation division. If I remember correctly, he was on a tour bus that got pulled over by the local *police, who got on and made him hand over all the money in his wallet at gunpoint.* There were other cases of folks being harassed by the local "authorities" as well, but his was the most extreme I'd heard. We'd been told the government in the country was sketchy, but I think the explanation we got may have been understated. We were supposed to stay for 3 days, but left after the first night, because it clearly wasn't safe to remain there. I'm glad I stayed on the ship (being an extreme introvert kept me out of trouble), and I'm thankful nobody got hurt.
2. My ship was tasked with apprehending "pirates" once. The crazy part was how much the pirates failed to live up to expectations. Forget modern-day Jack Sparrow; from the distance I was able to observe, these guys just looked like a few rifle-toting hobos floating on the ocean in a "boat" that resembled a 12-ft. wide bucket. So much for pirates being cool.
3. At one point, I had an upper-level manager who liked to throw his rank around, didn't understand how work worked for the lower ranks, and just generally made things more difficult than they needed to be. One time I needed to do some computer-related work, and the only PC available was my manager's. He had his browser open with his Facebook page pulled up and was logged into his account. I punished him for poor opsec by adding goofy, nonsensical phrases in his profile, such as "I Love Chiken Sandwich", and "Brony 4 Lyfe". He never found out I did it. My coworkers got a kick out of it though. :D
4. Christmas Eve 2021, I had to do nearly 13 hours of physical labor, and afterward had a Walmart employee threaten to call the cops on me for the unforgivable crime of trying to buy food. I was working as a garbageman (not the driver, but the guy who rides on the back of the truck and has to physically move the dumpsters).
All but one of our trucks had problems throughout the day and had to go in for repairs. I figured it was better if the people who had families got to go home and see them, so I stayed to join the crew that had to finish up 2 extra routes' worth of work. Will finish later.
Thanks for another fun episode. Interesting discussions today.
Since you mentioned fridges, my first job was at a convenience store and being in the fridge, stocking shelves, was one of my favorite things about it.
As for my worst job experience, it was GameStop in mid-2000s; I thought it would be the dream place to work as a gamer, and it wasn't.
I used to be a store manager at a cell phone place that used to be a Ice cream shop. We used the fridge as storage, and for some reason it still worked, so I would go in there to do paperwork on hot days.
This may be my favourite episode so far. I often listen to this whilst walking to work and back but ideally I'd prefer to _watch_ it whilst kicking back with a few craft brews from the beer fridge. Maybe next episode I'll do just that 👌
This episode was so funny, you guys always manage to keep the topics as fresh as if they were on the fridge
@49:20 - Ah, tips. Worked a job that sometimes had some AMAZING tips, enough that it made up for the fact that I was often barely above minimum wage normally. While I'd rarely get too much (maybe $1 - $20) outside of a particular season, my all-time cap was $478 in one day. But I had a co-worker at the same job who managed $539 in one day.
@57:30 - I rarely get above 4K to 10K steps most days, but at my height I was getting between 30K to 50K.
About the conversation around 15:00-16:00, 2 interesting points. First, grindset culture seems to have gained real popularity in the US in the late 2000s. I remember first seeing it as the “insanity wolf” image macro. You know what else happened right around then? The 2007 financial crisis. I have a feeling there’s a correlation between economic strife, a shrinking middle class, and grindset culture. It’s not proactivity; it’s reactive.
Second, it’s always fascinating to see what imagery is associated with grindset culture. Dr. K mentioned something about all that imagery of sigmas, alphas, and that sort of stuff: the guy in the picture is always ALONE. That mindset does not lead to the ability to share a life with a partner; it’s inherently isolating. And yet, we as a society see that and think it’s “cool” and something to aspire to.
I mean, I completely agree that life throws obligations and responsibilities at you, and you don’t have a choice but to do it. We’re always going to have to convince ourselves to do it, but how we convince ourselves to do it is important. The guy talking about dying on the treadmill - it’s funny and I think I see what he’s trying for. But I think he’s saying more than he realizes, and it’s not a good look for him. He’s performing, instead of acting from his own motivation. You do that, and sure you may run harder, but you might also DIE trying to show how much more motivated you are. No matter how much you can get done in a month, you can get more done if you keep living.
It might also be related to changes in recruitment practices around that time. I remember in both education and job applications there was a shift towards a heavy emphasis on being a highly passionate hard worker rather than SAT scores or the like. There are some videos on youtube about Byung-Chul Han's theory of a burnout society, and they present an interesting idea where productivity in the modern day is more about optimizing mental processes rather than physical labor, which ties into how we encourage grindset, toxic positivity, etc., even into a shift in discrimination based on culture instead of race. If viewing it through that lens, I wouldn't even say it's reactive so much as something we've subconsciously internalized from the messaging of corporations and institutions, like osmosis instead
1:12:53 Listening at my job right now! You guys always help the paperwork go by much faster.
Stories like this make me realize how sheltered I was. I went to college, didn't need to work while studying, then fresh out of college I got a job in a place where everyone is nice, there hardly ever crazy deadlines to meet and pay is okay.
My worst job was working at a horrifically toxic car dealership. I lasted three months before I just collected my final paycheck one day, clocked out and never returned. I've never seen a workplace filled with so much infighting. The sad thing is, the cars we sold were great! They were some of the most dependable machines on the road.
Worst job experiences I've had were both at car dealerships. First time was a lube tech, hated the people I was working with, never again. Second time was a Porter, basically delivering cars and/or loaners to customers while their car was being worked on. Loved the job, loved the customers, loved my coworkers, hated HATED my manager. Messed with my money too many times within the six weeks I was there. Hate that I left, but it was for the best, plus I have a better job now.
48:00 I'm surprised anyone actually does that stupid "counting down their tip as the wait staff makes mistake" thing. I would assume that any service worker that sees that happening would see the "maximum" tip amount on offer, weight the cost-benefit analysis quickly, and decide the person was not worth the extra effort and attention they were demanding. Maybe that's just me, and maybe that's why I never did too well in customer service.
Legendary episode. Never cried in a work fridge but I found someone else crying in there on more than one occasion.
The supper club part reminds me so much of host clubs. I don't think I could ever last long in a job with any kind of competitive "sales."
For one summer I was 1 of 2 pool attendants at this older hotel. They had one single dinky little pool on the roof. I worked one part of the week, the other person on the rest. They did have an old crusty fridge up there that wasn't used. I was often baking in 100+ degree weather while dealing with drunk or high af guests. Most of the guests were nice and kept to themselves, but I would get the occasional entitled tourist or creepy old man. I was alone up there, mind you, sometimes with 30+ people crowded on this lil rooftop. Security had to take the elevator from the ground floor to get to me if anything happened.
It wasn't the worst job in the world, but being isolated up there and having to wait for security with some fight breaking out between guests or getting hit on by men at least 30 years older than me wasn't too fun.
The subject of "tipping" in North America is an interesting one.
Tipping started in England, but was frowned upon in America because it was perceived as a way of flaunting your wealth. But when the prohibition of alcohol came to America, restaurants suffered lower earnings. Tips had to be accepted to offset this, to the point where it became expected. The prohibition ended, but tipping stayed.
As for my worst just was probably fast food. Like it is with Mint, office jobs are much more favorable to me.
...Although, if babysitting counts, that would be my worst job. I was in middle school, and would look after the children of an "independent massage therapist" who was a older single mom that worked nights and was paid in cash. Everyone in the neighborhood knew what types of massages she offered. But what it meant for me is that you never knew how late she'd be out, or if she'd have enough money to pay you for that day. That, and her kids were brats.
HAGS!! Thanks for sharing your wild and sad work and fridge related stories! Lol I always like listening to people like you guys who've changed jobs so many times since I've just had 2 my whole life, partly because I didn't work during college. Don't have many interesting stories but one time I went into a little caesars to pick up a delivery and cops walked in right behind me because I guess just a couple minutes before I got there, a guy was in there yelling and waving a gun around because he was upset about his food 😮
both mint's and matara's work stories were crazyyy. i don't have any like that (ive only worked two jobs so no surprise there) but funnily enough at my restaurant job i don't remember crying in the fridge but i did scream in the fridge a few times
1:32:28 Cute Mint expression
Not a restaurant, but I worked at a Target for 6 hrs. Part of this time was when Target was just adding freezers and fridges for foods. We'll during the summers it's got really hot in the store (the store did not have ac) it got to be common practice for workers to duck into the back storage freezers to cool down
This one was really fun, some of Matara's stories i already knew, but they are always very entertaining. They should totally do part 2, the contrast between Waiter Matara and OL Mint is really nice.
I'm just sad that by the end they just resorted to the old cliche of woman in the refrigerator (fridge)
That happens a lot, especially in restaurants that have teenagers,and/ or drivers,and/ or a fluctuating schedule. I've worked at least 13 years at a pizza restaurant, and I've seen multiple managers do that, especially with the long running manager doing that to me because they were pissy with me about something I've said before, but I knew I didn't care because I had a second job
There's so many weird stories I could share from being a language teacher abroad, but I think the weirdest one was someone thought it was a good idea to attempt to cook a Thanksgiving Turkey in a school that didn't have a proper oven. They nearly burnt down the school because they shoved a whole turkey into what was basically a toaster oven AND LEFT IT UNATTENDED. To make matters worse, after putting the partially burnt and partially still raw turkey in the fridge, they later attempted to try and feed it to some of the students.
thanks for the episode!! it's really fun to hear both of y'alls crazy work stories!
I once worked at a self storage place, and all I had to do was sweep up or sit there and call the owner if any issues came up, but once when I was sweeping I encountered a DEAD RAT T_T
anyways my current job is much better but i share the office with a lot of other people and our office fridge gets reallyyyy gross sometimes 💀 my supervisor cleaned it up once and took a before picture and printed the gross fridge picture to tape on the fridge to tell everyone to clean up after themselves. it's kinda jarring how some people don't learn how to clean properly!!
Worst job was working debt colletion over the phone. People were either angry or depressed
Well debt collector's are hated by many
When a streamer said his job is socialy draining, I can't imagine this job.
"Get the cooks on your side"
Yeah, I can agree with that. During my army national service I was in the same company as the cooks and made sure to befriend them. I nearly always got better food than the rest of my platoon (Who were not on their good side) and the rest of the platoon couldn't complain since I was a vegeterian at the time.
I also became a good mate with cook when I worked as a bartender/dishwasher and damn, those work lunches were much bigger than anything else served at the resturant.
Never cried in the fridge at the different jobs, but we did sit and have a beer or two during some of the nights we worked.
1:46:20 Matara, the severity of the injuries suffered from a fall down a mountain is dependent on the terrain and the height of the mountain
if a mountaineer suffers a fall, it is usually certain death as nearly 100 years ago, George Mallory and his climbing partner, Andrew "Sandy" Irvine, disappeared on the Northeast Ridge of Everest, it was not until 1999 that the body of George Mallory was found revealing he'd fallen down the north face of Everest, no-one knows what happened to Andrew "Sandy" Irvine
when i can't catch the premier and then see the podcast is 2+ hours 😀
watching the vod the entire way through was really fun though, i didn't even go to the fridge to get some drinks
When I previously worked at a restaurant, the pantry was the place to do a sneaky bump of nose candy during the shift.
The fridge and the bathroom were definitely the two calm oasises in the restaurant for me. The fridge was the place I could change my music there and people went there to vape for like 45 seconds at a time.
I used to work at a restaurant and the hiding place to cool off and get away for a bit was either by the dumpsters (the smoking area) or the walk in fridge. Must be a universal restaurant thing.
Another fun podcast episode! Now to get something to drink from the fridge before watching the one from the Patreon.
Thank you for the podcast!! I'm late but I'm here! I don't have much to share, but there was time that I interviewed with a really shady businesses. I asked them more than twice like "is this really legal" lol And recently, I saw the news that goes like engineers ran out when police arrived and their business were exactly the same that got reported. (fyi, the engineer didn't get arrested, I think. They got threaten to work. Their can't get out--of the fridge--and were the one calling for help.) I was like luckily I didn't go for that job. The pay was high thought.
and I really want to give Matara (and anyone in the same situation) a hug. You deserved the world!! Girl fights hurt the soul fr. I just want to have girl talk and enjoy our time together without the need to get be little or betray because of jealousy ;w;
Worst job experience?
Toys R Us without a doubt
I worked at Toys R Us during the holiday rush one year. God, that sucked. 😆
I feel sorry for you. That was a great company that got driven into the ground by venture capitalists.
It's coming back in the UK in Coventry