People may leave their jobs on the first day for a number of reasons, including discovering that the job duties and expectations described during the hiring process do not match the actual duties and expectations of the position, encountering unpleasant working conditions, encountering a poor company culture, feeling unsupported by their supervisor or colleagues, receiving a better job offer, or having personal reasons that make it difficult to continue in the role. So, when an employee decides to leave their job on the first day, it is often a result of their expectations not aligning with the realities of the position.
People who quit their jobs on the first day shared their experiences on the AskReddit when asked about their “I’m outta here” moments. These stories can serve as cautionary tales for others.
“Salesman” for Kirby vacuums. The first sale call was to a single elderly woman who was supporting her son in the hospital (they got us in the door by offering a free carpet cleaning as a demonstration). The supervisor training me pushed and pushed to make the sale until this old woman was in tears. Just as she was about to sign the paperwork I asked if she actually wanted to vacuum and she said it was lovely but she couldn’t afford it. I took the paperwork away from her and said not to worry. Outside I told the supervisor I quit to which he replied I would’ve been fired anyway. No love lost. I hung around for half an hour playing on my phone to make sure the supervisor left because he was a real piece of work.
Warehouse job, putting stickers on file folders or some such garbage. Seemed pointless and the floor was just a mass of these same stickers, so they were either falling off constantly or people were shirking work by emptying their quota onto the floor.
Went to ask the boss a question, and found him asleep in an empty office. He’d taken off a sock and draped it over his eyes to block out the light.
On my way out the door, the other girl who had started that day said “please come back, don’t leave me alone here.” I couldn’t stop laughing.
This is gonna get buried, but walking into an Alzheimer’s assisted living facility, and seeing my college philosophy professor (who was an inspiring individual for me and changed how l viewed things), sitting in a chair in the Day Room, drooling on himself. I checked with the Head on Duty, and yeah… It was him.
I avoided him as much as I could for the whole day, but when leaving, I told him that he inspired me and I probably wouldn’t ever see him again. He was far gone and asked about his slippers.
I left, sat in my car, had smoke and cried. I didn’t go back and found another job.
A long time ago, not long after getting my papers as a chef, I had an interview at a hotel for a position in the kitchen. The Executive Chef and I chatted in his office for about 20 mins, at the time I remember him coming off as very arrogant which is quite common in this field, I didn’t think much of it at the time as the pay was decent and the shift was what I wanted. As I was leaving his office I turned to leave through the dining room (the way I had come in) which was closed at the time it was another hour or so before service started and he says to me “No not that way, go through the kitchen, you’re not good enough to go through the dining room.” I was so surprised by what he said, I just did what he asked without a word. Later on, after I had got home I phoned him up and said that after having a close look I decided that his menu wasn’t good enough and that I wouldn’t be accepting his offer.
I got a job at a Build-A-Bear knockoff at the end of a mall that wasn’t very busy. My interview with the owners was interesting. They were an older couple who said that they had wanted to open a Chick Fil A, but they need about a million dollars to do that. On my first day, one other girl was working, and she didn’t really talk to me. I had basically no training and she disappeared into the back. I was standing at the register area, which was underneath a giant storybook mushroom. A mother and her young son walk in and start to look at the bearskin options. I greeted them and left them to look around. They ended up leaving after a couple of minutes and my coworker reappeared from the back with the cordless phone and handed it to me. It was my boss. He told me that when a customer walks in, he wants me to come out from under the mushroom to them (“come OUT! from the mushroom!”). After he finished speaking to me, I hung up and went to my coworker and asked about the phone call. She said the place has cameras set up and the owners watch them from their house and call in a lot. I did not come back to work after that day.
A summer job working for a landscape architect. Got to the job site and he asked me to dig a hole in some rocky dirt. I asked for a shovel. He didn’t have one. I asked for a hand spade. He didn’t have one. He told me to just dig the hole with my bare hands and then he drove off to another site leaving me completely alone. I dug for a little bit and then said ‘f*ck this’ and left.
Had the job specified that I needed to supply my own tools I could’ve but I didn’t and I wasn’t going to work for somebody that expected folks to dig through hard, rocky soil with their hands.
I put in to do transcription work for a company that sounded really good on paper, and they were enthusiastic to hire me. They told me they just had to do a test run first to see how I’d do it. And that they would pay me for my work. Okay, no problem. I had a few years as a transcriber and document preparer working for an attorney, so the work they wanted or described to me was very similar, nothing new at all.
What they sent me was a really crappy audio file with a guy who had a thick accent and microphone feedback so I could barely hear anything said. The file was over half an hour and an hour-long too, not 15 minutes like they’d said they would send. I transcribed 15 minutes then sent it back stating that I hadn’t transcribed the whole thing since per the original instructions it was only 15 minutes they wanted.
I waited and half an hour later I got my transcript back marked up with all kinds of errors – not mine, theirs. Punctuation wrong, content I know and could hear was not what the person on the tape said etc. I also got a “contract” attached to that statement I agreed to be dinged (25 cents deducted from my invoice) for every error found followed along with a promise I would never badmouth the company.’
I blocked them immediately and ignored their repeated attempts to contact me over the next few days, blocking each contact until they gave up trying to reach me.
It was a sandwich shop in college. I got the flu before my first day, told them I was sick, and they said to come in any way it’s just training. Then they had me making sandwiches, no gloves, runny nose, coughing and everything. I left in under an hour and didn’t eat there again.
I used to work at a craft store as a cashier but quit when I moved. Ended up going back a couple of years later to make some extra cash, but this time in the framing department. During the interview they swore up and down I would only ever be a backup cashier because I said I refused to have full cashier shifts. The first shift after an interview is listed as framing, but I’m put on cash and told that actually most of my shifts would be cash since they’d found someone else for framing. I spent the next six hours giving everyone who came to my register 20% off of everything and then never went back.
On the first day of working at the Amazon warehouse, the managers broke down to Everyone how a 15-minute break works there. Walking to the break room is 2 1/2 minutes. 10 minutes of actual break and then 2 1/2 minutes to go back to your stations. It took me 2 1/2 minutes to walk to my car and I took a forever break.
No one told me where anything was. Got chewed out for it.
Guests enjoying their meals told me to pay no mind/I was doing a good job and that my boss is a c*nt.
I told the manager that I was quitting and wouldn’t be doing the next shift.
I arrived the next day, returning a work uniform and my supervisor approached me and yelled at me for being late. I told her I already quit but if I was working, technically I was 5 hours early for my shift.
I was thirteen and I would be delivering phone books from the back of a van through people’s letterboxes.
So I’d be in the back of the van with the phone books and there was an older guy driving slowly while I went back and forth to the van/houses with the books.
At one point the van was getting quite empty so there was more space to move around and we had finished the delivery in the street we were paid to deliver to and he drove to another.
While driving there he drove let’s say aggressively and I fell inside the back where the books were. I wasn’t sitting in a seat as the van had no seats in the back. As I put my hand out to steady myself I accidentally laid it across a portable radio that had its antenna extended but the antenna was also broken halfway and razor sharp.
It sliced the palm of my hand cleanly open 3-4 inches. I can only describe what I saw as gruesome. I said to him to pull the van over and that I needed help. He saw my hand and just threw me a plastic bag, the kind you’d get at a supermarket and told me to wrap my hand in it.
Then .. he continued with the deliveries, at least he delivered the remaining books himself.
I should have been taken to a hospital or at-least home to my parents. I quit after that and never showed up again. As you can imagine my parents were quite angry at him.
When I was 20 or so I got hired to be a temporary floor member for Forever21 during the holiday season.
My training started a week before Black Friday so the store was already kind of in chaos. On my first day of training, I walked in and the floor manager gave all the new hires a tour showing us the facility and layout of the store. After this, I was assigned to a veteran floor member to shadow and get an idea of what my job was and what my duties would be. As soon as I was given the manager dipped never to be seen again.
An hour and a half into my shift my shadowee got an emergency family call and had to take off for a week. When this happened I found some other floor managers and explained the situation and asked them who else I should shadow. The manager’s response was “just do what you can by yourself you’ll be fine, everyone else is busy.” Figured we’ll ok I’ll try.
I don’t know if any of you have shopped in the women’s section of Forever 21. Still, during seasonal sales they will have multiple articles of clothing that all look almost exactly the same but with slight differences (ex. A white cardigan with 4 buttons that looked literally the same as a white cardigan with 5 buttons). The best part was these different items were often placed in completely separate parts of the store and it was the job of the dressing room to return the unpurchased items to the correct section so the employees could put them back on the shelves. Well, these employees sucked and I didn’t know if they were a part of my section or not so I’d spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to find where they go before realizing “wait this isn’t even my section I’ve checked literally every rack” so I’d put it back on the sorting rack and move to the next item. More than 50% of the stuff I was told to shelf wasn’t my section. I just did as best as I could and got ready for my next miserable day.
The next day I come in and the store manager pulls me to her office and tells me how slow I was the day before and that if I want to keep working there I need to be very fast. I explained my lack of training and unfamiliarity with the store and she told me if I didn’t know where the clothes were in sections I should come in my free time and memorize where stuff was at. I spent the rest of my shift putting clothes in random f places then never came back for a third shift.
My first internship was at a Brazilian teen detention center (it’s akin to a prison, but Brazilian law has some distinctions between crimes committed while as an adult or as a teenager – teens go through socio-educational measures).
I was walking through a courtyard with my supervisor when some doctors came running flailing their arms and screaming while officers came running from the opposite direction. I get pulled by my supervisor who just tells me to run back to our office. These teens as young as 12 had escaped their block. A few minutes later an officer comes knocking on the doors of the offices and yelling for everyone to run outside because a fire had broken out. Some of the teens had set mattresses on fire in their cells.
I didn’t really nope out. My teacher did (she hadn’t even been there that day). So I was forced by the university to choose another place to intern at. Oh well.
I was a cashier at Lowe’s during college for less than a full day. I made it through the multiple-day training but there was so much stupid sh*t going on I almost thought I was on a hidden camera show.
All of the employees complained about how hard they had to work while simultaneously not getting enough hours. Nobody understood why they were hiring like 4 new people (I was one of those 4).
Turns out it’s because they were progressing through a sexual harassment complaint that required restructuring of the store and firing of some employees. This was known to HR and explained to new hires (against company policy), but wasn’t known to the employees, apparently, some of whom still worked there, including the f*cking person doing the training. She was really inappropriate and said not to worry about the sexual harassment stuff, that everything would “go back to normal” soon enough and we wouldn’t have to “be so uptight.” They fired her the day before I started, along with one of the cashiers who trained me.
She also offered me terrible guidance for the application process. They were looking for part-time help and for two of the three days they needed help, I had off from school. I told them I could work nights most nights, but if they needed daytime help it had to be on those days. She said if I was too restrictive they wouldn’t keep me on, lied to my boss about my availability to make me “even more attractive than I already was” wink, and told me to schmooze them a bit and I’d make it further. She said in the end it wouldn’t impact anything, and I’d get those days.
In my first week’s schedule, I was working mornings every day that I was in school, and I wasn’t given any hours on my days off. Aside from the fact that I was given 2 times the hours the position called for (when other employees were shorted), my work schedule was literally impossible to consolidate with my school schedule.
I only went to work on my “first” day to tell them I was quitting and that their application process was a f*cking mess. They couldn’t figure out how so much went wrong and then they asked who trained me and everything made sense. They thanked me for “at least showing up to quit” unlike the other 3 they hired, who just stopped returning their calls and no-showed their first days.
Got what was supposed to be a prestigious political internship that came with a security clearance and everything. Found out at orientation that the “part-time” internship was really 40-60 hours, unpaid and that no intern had gone on to work with the organization and wasn’t really given a leg up for other federal posts. We were supposed to facilitate meetings with heads of state, coordinate conferences and assist the actual employees with composing published research papers for which we would not be credited.
They were definitely drinking their own koolaid so I bounced right on out of there.
I got hired at a very small knockoff dollar store in an old, failing mall. The owner was foreign with a very thick accent. He told me I’d get $6 an hour but neglected to mention it was under the table. I spent about an hour stocking the very overly cluttered shelves before I was told to get more chips out of the back storage area. I walk back there and there are about a dozen men sitting on boxes all crammed into a small back room. I asked where the chips were and these guys all glared at me. They started speaking in another language and rapid motion towards me. Then one guy got up and asked what I needed. I told him I was supposed to get a box of chips and he got a box out of the pile and handed it to me. The entire time these guys are all staring at me. Everything back there looked shady as all heck and it was very uncomfortable.
A while later I had to use the restroom which was also in the back. These guys all just wordlessly glared at me while I went into the women’s restroom. While I was in the restroom, someone tried to open the door. I was the only woman there. The owner told me he wanted me to come back that night late in the evening well after the mall closed. I didn’t show up. I came in the next morning and lied about why I couldn’t work there. He still gave me a few bucks from what little time I did work. I don’t know what in the heck that guy had going on there and I didn’t want to find out.
Forgot to add the best part. I was 18 and this was supposed to have been my first job.
I was a waitress, the only waitress, at a just opened diner. The boss didn’t have me sign any paperwork. Everything was under the table. But that wasn’t what made me quit at the end of the night. In order to get me where he wanted me to go, he would pinch my skirt at my upper thigh, not quite the butt but very close, and pull me around like it was a leash. Needed me in the kitchen? Rather than call me. He would come out, pinch my skirt and pull me to the kitchen. Needed me at the cash machine? Again, come over to where ever I was, didn’t matter if I was serving a customer, and would grab my skirt to pull me. That act in itself made some customers uncomfortable. Mind you, one couple left an almost 50% tip in the end. But I think it was more out of pity and embarrassment on my behalf. I was supposed to come in the next day but I called that night and said the job wasn’t for me. I came in a couple of days later to turn in my apron and he just took a wad of cash out of his pocket and paid me then and there. God, he was creepy. I think it was a smart move to quit.
It was a small independent insurance agency in 2006. On my first day there the owner (a true fossil) said email and fax were strictly forbidden as he only “believed in” communication in person, by phone, or through the mail. Left for lunch and never went back. I couldn’t imagine the inefficiency I’d have dealt with had I stayed.
They ultimately closed their doors so it was definitely the right decision.
I interviewed for a “professional marketing assistant” and got the job straight away. I was under the impression that I would be an assistant to the man I was interviewed by. When I showed up for my first day, the same waiting room I was in the previous day was FULL of people. I quickly learned that we were all hired and that I would be a door-to-door salesperson selling some pretty useless sh*t.
I spent my entire day inside a Starbucks applying for other jobs and went home, got paid, but never went back.
It was a petrol station and the manager wanted me to work for free until I had learned their computer systems to what he deemed a satisfactory extent. I agreed to do it because I needed a job, and he brought me in at 7 am on my first day, however, he was not present to go through the training with me, so I was just standing around kind of helping out on the forecourt but not really knowing what I should be doing. Not learning anything. After about an hour and a half without the manager showing up or anyone training me on anything, I decided that I wasn’t going to continue to be taken advantage of and told the cashier to pass on the message to the manager that I had quit.
My first day working at EB games. I was super excited to be there!
The first half of my shift was basically “tidy up the shelves” It was a high-traffic location so the shelves ALWAYS need tidying.
After 5 hours of following kids around and putting things away, I go on break.
When I come back my Manager is standing in his strangely empty store absolutely aghast. Staring at a HUGE steaming pile of sh*t on the carpeted floor. Apparently, a homeless person had walked in. Without saying a single word he Dropped trou and emptied his bowls.
My boss at me and says. “Oh good, you’re back. Just in time. Clean that up, I’m going for lunch.” I laughed at him and told him you can’t be serious. I’m not going near that. He responds with. “It’s your job, I’m taking a break. I want it gone before I get back.” I told him he was going to have to deal with it on his own because I don’t need this job that bad. So I quit. I grabbed my coat and went home.
1 week later the district manager calls me up to apologize and offer me my job back.
Young and naive right out of college took a “marketing” job. My interview was great, nothing shady seemed to be going on and no immediate red flags. After 4 hours of training, my first day consisted of going door to door in a suburban town trying to sell cable to older people. We were told to dress for business, so I’m hiking around for miles in my best skirt, suit jacket and heels. Hours were from “9-5” but we didn’t get back to the business until well after 10 pm. Not to mention, the person I was shadowing was able to make a sale to an older gentleman who seemed to have memory issues. I noped the f*ck right out of there.
I have worked in construction-type jobs my whole life. The amount of angry abusive *ssholes you encounter are endless. This one d*ckhead still has the title. This was in the 90’s so he has stood the test of time.
A friend quit this job and gave my number to his *sshole boss he had, without my knowledge. I never did thank him for that. This guy calls me out of the blue and asks if I need work. I said I did. He said he could pick me up the next morning. I said I have my own car and I could meet him on-site. He yells and says he will pick me up. I was floored that this idiot was yelling at me 2 minutes after talking to me. I gave him my address and he said he would be there at 6;30 the next morning.
At 5″:30 the next morning this *sshole is calling asking, “Where the f*ck is your house?”. No hello, no good morning, just full-on screaming. I said if he would stop yelling I would give him directions. He starts yelling again so I hang up. He calls right back and is losing it because I hung up on him. I tell him to f*ck off and not even bother to show up. The two other guys I lived with were now awake and not too happy with me. I explain what happened and they just go back to bed.
About 30 minutes later I am awakened by the sound of a horn blaring outside our house. We lived on a farm so luckily the next neighbour was half a mile away. My roommates once again wake up and they are livid. We all go outside and this *sshole is yelling at us to get in the truck because we’re late. He’s there half an hour earlier than he said he would be. He also doesn’t know who is who because he just spoke to me on the phone. I’m about to tell him to f*ck off again but my buddy walks up to the truck and says he wants to get paid upfront. This guy lets loose a tirade on my buddy. My buddy just laughs in his face. He says if you’re going to be an *sshole he will have to pay him first. The guy just keeps yelling. My buddy says he will be out in a minute and he better have his money ready,
We all go back in the house and watch this guy wait in his truck. He’s there for about 5 minutes and starts blowing the horn. We just laugh and poke our heads out the door and say we’ll be there in a minute. He keeps blowing the horn. We just ignore him. After another 10 minutes, he bangs on the door. I open the door and this fool is about 5’2″ and maybe 200 lbs. I am shocked by his appearance. He’s just about to say something and I say, “Didn’t I tell you to f*ck off and not bother coming here?” He is truly confused. He asked where’s the other guy? I said he was just f*cking with you. I’m the guy you were talking to, now f*ck off. He says, “So you’re going to f*ck me up and not come to work?”. I was amazed at what an *sshole this guy was. I said you got to pay me upfront first. He starts yelling and swearing again, I slam the door in his face. He starts banging on the door like a madman. I finally have enough and get a hockey stick and chase him back to his truck. It was pretty funny watching him run. He backs out of the driveway and threatens he’ll get me for this.
I was hired at a chain restaurant to be a hostess. I was so excited because my last job was washing dishes and because of my eczema, I had to quit. It was too painful to do that job. So, I arrived at my new job dressed up to be a hostess and those mfers took me back to the kitchen to do dishes because the dishwasher just quit. I noped out of there real fast!
Had two interviews to work housekeeping at a hospital. Got a call the night of the second interview at around midnight from the guy saying “I was just so excited I wanted to call and tell you I’m gonna call you to offer you the job tomorrow”. Should have taken that as the first red flag but I needed the job.
I go in for my first day of training and he has printouts of my Facebook wall and my boyfriend’s. He started asking me how long we had been together and made it clear he knew everything so as not to lie to him. It was so uncomfortable.
I leave his office and do some training. We break for lunch and he sits with me in the cafeteria asking how it’s been going so far, etc. Then tells me he expects to see me at his church Sunday. I haven’t gone to church in like ten years at this point.
We all have a quick meeting in our main room and I stay back after everyone had left. I put my badge, keys and walkie on the desk and walk the f*ck out. I felt bad but it was no wonder why they can’t keep anyone.
He call me for MONTHS afterwards asking what had happened, he was worried sick, he deserves answers, blah blah blah. I had called their HR the day after I had walked out to tell them I quit and why so they had to have told him. He had no reason to keep contacting me.
My very first job was at a buffet restaurant that was popular with senior citizens and known for its desserts. I was asked to get another coconut cream pie from the back and as I was getting it out of the fridge, another employee bumped into me and I dropped it on the floor, pie side down. This employee’s (someone who’d worked there for years) solution was to just scrape off all the whipped topping and replace it. I was horrified they served pie that had been on the extremely dirty floor and never went back.
Neighbor I knew approached me and offered me $20 to stack a bunch of bricks he had in his backyard. I jumped at it because it was the 80’s and $20 bucks was a lot then (it’s still a lot to me now, but as a kid, it was more impressive). I stacked up a lot of bricks, took me over an hour to get it all done.
I went to tell the man I was done and to get paid, and his wife told me that I had done it so fast that they were only going to pay me $10. I protested, but she wouldn’t budge. So I took my ten bucks and went home, and late that night I snuck into their yard and knocked over half the stacks I’d made.
The next day they were pissed off, but when they came to complain I’d already told my parents they shorted me. My mother just told them they paid for half the work, they got half the work. They tried to hire me for yardwork and stuff later on but I always turned them down.
Me and a buddy got a job at a Maytag assembly plant making ovens/stoves. They put me on the assembly line clipping wires to the stovetop and like 8 hours in I literally couldn’t close my hand anymore. We had a scheduled break at that time, so I approached the line supervisor and told her my manual dexterity was flat gone. Told her I understood it’d take a bit for the finger muscles to adjust and I was happy to continue working, just asked if I could swap positions with someone else on the line for the remainder of the day. She said no, I reiterated that I was incapable of doing the task anymore, would come in tomorrow and do it for as long as I could, hopefully, the full ten-hour shift, and again just asked to be swapped with the person standing next to me for the rest of the day. My friend, who was standing there listening, offered to swap spots. Again she refused, so I quit, and my buddy (working on the same line) says “well if he quits I do too cause he’s my ride to and from work.” we just strolled out of there. Guess they’d rather lose employees than just let their muscle groups get conditioned to tasks.
I had a job for one day selling home security equipment door to door. The whole idea was basically to make it seem like you’re doing them a service and then lock the customer into 5-year contracts.
My supervisor and I were in this one home of a family that hardly some English. The father said they had been struggling with finances but my supervisor kept pushing it on them, and the customer seemed like he didn’t fully understand what was going on. I couldn’t in good conscience take these people that were already struggling and put them in a worse position.
Was working at Wendy’s. The manager didn’t believe me when I told them my blood sugar was low and that I needed to get a sugary drink from the drink machine to get my blood sugar up because “I’m too skinny to be diabetic.” They thought I was a slacker.
Not my first day, but my second. Fellow coworker touched me and I said “please don’t touch me, it makes me uncomfortable” and he proceeded to step closer and said to our manager “hey, Joey, touch her she doesn’t like it” Managers eyes got so big and he told the idiot that he could be fired and sued for sexual harassment. I didn’t go back. It was my first job, I was 15.
I met a landscaping crew at a 50-acre cemetery at 8:00 am. The pay was just $5/hr cash (in 2001), but my hours at Pizza Hut had been cut and I wanted to make a little money before going off to college.
After 3 hours straight of weed-eating I couldn’t feel my hands. I was filthy and hot AF. It was miserable. I was 18 and headed to a prestigious school in 2 months, the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze, as they say.
At lunch, I told the guy “Hey man, I’m just gonna go home and I’m not coming back.” And he had a totally awesome response “No problem, I wouldn’t want to do this sh*t at your age either, I’ll pay you for the time you worked and drop it off at your house.” $20 showed up about a week later.
I took a holiday job at Toys R Us. I was scheduled “until close” for my first shift. I asked when “close” was and they said, “oh we’ll come to get you when we’re done.” Ok. Cool. Lock my personal belongings in the locker (including my cell phone) and get on the floor. So I’m reshelving Blues Clues toys, Bratz Dolls, Hot Wheels, and bike helmets… really getting tons done. And it’s like… I’m getting A LOT done. And my feet hurt. And I’m tired and hungry and woah super tired. So I sneak off for a bathroom break and to check my phone. And the staff door is locked. Weird. But then some dude in a flannel shirt comes over and had a key. Great, thanks mister! I unlock my locker and see my cell phone… 13 missed calls from my mom demanding to know where I was and oh yeah it’s 1:46 AM. The store had been closed for almost THREE HOURS and oops! Management forgot to come to tell me “we’re closing.” Couldn’t get out the front doors because they were locked. So I had to exit the store through the truck loading dock, where the man with the flannel shirt was working to unload the new toys for the crew to set out in the morning. Yup, done with that place after that.
Florist shop, I was 19. Hired to do deliveries. I was observing the owner while he showed me how something was done in the back room. I had my hands in my pockets, just to keep them out of the way. I was a very quiet, yes sir/no sir kid. He yelled at me that hands in pockets were disrespectful and physically grabbed my arms and pulled my hands out. Nope, not worth $5.15/hr. Never came back, except to demand payment for that first day. When I walked in, his old hag wife yelled “Roy, THAT boy is back!” I got my ~$20!
I agreed to pay $10 per hour. I walked in the first day and my boss goes, “About your pay… instead of $10 per hour, it’s going to be $8.50 per hour. Sorry.”
I was the only one working my whole first shift. My coworkers sat in the back while I did literally everything and suffered through three rush hours… completely untrained because according to my boss – “my coworkers would train me.”
I was graduating high school and community college the week after I started and told my boss in advance (before he even offered me the job) that I would need that week off due to final exams and the graduation ceremony, but that I could work whenever needed after that week. On my first day, he released the schedule for the next week and what do you know, I’m scheduled to work double shifts every day the whole next week.
I worked the minimum I could (3 shifts) and never went back. I never got paid.
I went in one afternoon to this upscale restaurant with an open patio (it looks like a walk-up bar kinda); looking for weekends part-time bar work, like a bar back or kitchen help, something “turn the brain off”.
I speak to the bar manager, tell him what I’m looking for, tell him I have experience and am clear that I’m only looking for Friday/Saturday nights only, as I had a full-time job at the time.
He says to come back tonight around 8, has dress shoes and a black tie, a white shirt, and black pants. I say no problem and head home. Get there at 8 and he shows me the bar, shows me where the glasses are, and where the booze is, then says “any questions I’ll be near the kitchen”.
OK, I start taking inventory of what we had, what we needed, etc. when a waitress comes up and punches in order and then stands there. I smile and go back to my counting and she says “hey, are you going to get those?” and I tell her I’m only the bar back and don’t know where the bartender is.
I don’t even have my smart serve, a license required to serve alcohol in Canada/Ontario, so I couldn’t even grab the drinks if I knew how to make it. The waitress walks off and a few moments later, the boss that was showing me around earlier comes over and says “hey, can you tell me what happened?”
I look dumbfounded but told him what I was doing (inventory) and that the waitress wanted me to get her drinks. He asks why I didn’t, and I tell him I don’t know how to make the drinks she wants. He then shows me how to make it and says next time tell him that so she (the waitress) can come to get me sooner. I ask what it is they think they hired me for, and the manager and the waitress both said, almost comically and at the same time, “bartender and front-end manager”.
I didn’t even give them a resume, and they wanted me to manage their front end and be the only bartender. They didn’t even know my last name.
I took a job at janitorial work at the Vanderbilt Wilson County Hospital. My “first day” was constantly put off due to the boss not having the right staff to train me. After about a week and a half of delays, I get put in the ER. It was definitely one of their busier days, and I was just in everyone’s way without a clue about what to do. I then get a call to go clean a room that a Covid positive patient had just been discharged from. Of course, I have no experience and no clue what exactly to do. But I did my best in around 35 minutes to turn the room around to find the assistant director telling me to go clean three others. No training, no Introduction to anyone, no PPE. I walked right out the door.
Laboratory scientist. Was on my second day, getting trained on assisting with bone marrow processing after bone marrow aspiration. I’ve done it before but still had to be shown, of course. Basically, I just take the bone marrow collected by the doctor, usually the pathologist, sometimes the surgeon, and prepare slides bedside and take them back to the lab for processing.
If you’ve never had or watched a bone marrow aspiration before, it’s pretty violent. First, you lay on your side, then the doctor locates the landmark on your hip (posterior iliac crest), then lidocaine is injected from the outside into the surface of the bone, then a large bore needle is inserted forcefully into your bone to access the marrow because the bone is incredibly dense and strong. Usually, the doctor is trained and it is a routine procedure.
At this hospital, however, the person performing was a radiologist. I was thinking, weird, but there’s no reason radiologist shouldn’t be able to do it. It was actually done in the imaging room, too. Before starting, the pathologist – my boss – popped his head in and said “did you look at the PowerPoint slides I sent you? You’ll be fine.” Warning bells started going off in my head, especially when after needle insertion, everybody was told to exit the imaging room so a CT can be taken to see how close the needle was to the bone. The sterile field was broken, of course. After a few tries, and a few CTs later, the needle is finally on the surface of the bone. My trainer was feeling uncomfortable because this was highly irregular. The patient was sedated the whole time, which is not usually the case. The procedure was completed, and the trainer and I came back and complained to the lead pathologist. We were basically told to keep our mouths shut and our heads down, and it wasn’t our job to tell other doctors how to do their job.
I called and quit the next morning. I wasn’t gonna get thrown under the bus for something else in the future if this is how they do things in their old boys’ club. That hospital closed down a few years later.
