You're fired!

I was given the opportunity to immediately resign from a job once, which is just a method corporations use to save face.

I worked at a video arcade for six months and had become assistant manager. My manager and I worked under a man named - and I swear this is true - Rodney J. Hogg. He was an unfriendly, obese man and we didn't get along well. He expected that I should know things that were well beyond my means, such as how to properly resolder pinball machine wiring.

One day, I got to work and my manager was having a fit. A pinball machine had gone missing. I closed the previous night and it was suspected that I had something to do with it. I told him that there was no way I could carry one of those, and even if I could, I walked to work; how would I get it home?

The mall checked the cameras and saw that I closed the gate as per the norm, then left through the side exit. Nobody else was seen coming or going until my manager showed up in the morning. I was mostly off the hook, but since I still couldn't explain the loss, I was looked upon suspiciously.

One week later, some bigwigs from the regional office came by to audit our expense books. There were some questions about how many prizes were being ordered and how many were actually making it to the display case. Indeed, there were discrepancies and somehow, over $5,000 worth of prizes had disappeared over time.

The next day, when I came in for my shift, the bigwigs were back. They approached me, with my boss in tow. It turned out that Rodney J. Hogg had been embezzling prizes and money from the store for a couple years and they had enough to prove this. When confronted, however, Rodney named me and my boss as accomplices. I can't say my boss was innocent, but I was, and I got pretty pissed.

But the bigwigs said that they didn't really believe Rodney. Unfortunately, there were too many losses at our store, including the entire pinball machine, so they were going to have to let me go. They were letting my boss go too. Their intent was to clean house and hire an all-new staff that they felt they could trust.

I was stunned, and had little recourse, since the job wasn't unionized. So they gave me the opportunity to turn in a resignation instead of officially getting fired. But they recommended that I not use them for references, as they'd have nothing of benefit to say.

So yeah, basically I was fired for shit I didn't do.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I see that walking out of a job constitutes an entry here too. I've got one of those stories.

In 2002, I was hired as a cook at a newly opened Perkins restaurant. I received crash course training and was sent on the line, which was fine by me. And as the restaurant was well-known, the grand opening drew a lot of people during all shifts.

Initially, it was fine. Hard work, but the pay was decent and I got a worthwhile discount on all the menu items. The trouble was that there eventually came a case of having too many chiefs and not enough indians. I shall explain:

The cook's line was seperated into four sections: egg grill, meat grill, bread grill, and fryer/broiler. I was particularly good with the meat grill and the fryer/broiler. And when left to my own devices, I managed both easily. Unfortunately, a lot of the other cooks thought their own methods were better, so they'd always meddle in my section. I'd return from the freezer to find the sausages turned perpendicular, or the bacon and hash browns would be moved all the way across - always something different. Then the offending party would tell me that this was the way I should be running my grill, not how I'd set things up. As soon as I'd turn around, someone else would touch my food and rearrange it to their own preferences.

The same thing always happened on the fryers. I'd get harangued about the order in which I dropped rings, fries, cheesesticks, etc. I always got the stuff plated in time, so it didn't matter, but no. Everyone else knew better than me.

Don't think I was a wimp. I yelled and shouted and told the others to back off plenty of times. But that had little effect. I was merely told that if I'd do things they way they showed me, they wouldn't need to meddle and yell at me. And when I'd acquiesce by following someone else's system, a third party would come along and jump down my throat because their set-up was the one I should've been using. I couldn't catch a break in either direction, and god forbid I should try to take charge of the section to which I was assigned.

So after a few months, I began to get very pissed. I went to the managers but they didn't seem to care. They chalked it up to being a new store and everyone needing to work out a rhythm still.

Then a couple of the cooks, who were brainless stoners, decided it'd be fun to randomly call my name out real loud, in that mocking sing-song way. They never needed anything, they just sang my name real loud and musically. All night long. Day in, day out. As far as I was concerned, it was harassment, and I filed a complaint, but it was dismissed as "friendly co-worker banter". Fuck that.

Things were beginning to boil over, but luckily I had a vacation coming up. When I was hired, I told the managers - right up front - that I'd been planning a 10-day vacation to California and wouldn't be available during the last part of May. They said that it'd be fine, they had enough people to cover my absence and since I'd already purchased the tickets before being hired, it was an acceptable reason to take unpaid time off.
I reminded them every two weeks, for three months. "Hey, do you still have it written down that I'll be gone from May 23rd until June 3rd?", I'd ask. "Yup, yup. It's right here. You're good.", they'd reply.

Two days before I was to leave, the new schedule came out. I didn't bother looking, as I knew I'd be gone for the duration. However, a friend told me that they'd gone ahead and scheduled me for 44 hours during my planned vacation. Incensed, I stormed into the manager's office and asked what was going on. "We need you to work." was what they told me. I said that my tickets were non-refundable and that I'd asked them repeatedly if I was okay to leave, to which they'd consistently replied "Yes". My manager looked me dead in the eyes and said "Ooooooh, what do you expect me to do?"

I told her I expected her to do her job and correct the oversight while I was gone.

Ten days later, I returned to collect my back paychecks. I was greeted with angry faces by the other cooks who couldn't believe that I had the nerve to just jet off to California - with no warning whatsoever - and have a ball while everyone else had to work double shifts to pick up my slack. I explained my side of the story, but one of the cooks wouldn't have it. He called me a lazy, arrogant cocksucker and told me that I was an absolute fool to expect that it'd be okay to take a vacation three months into a new job. Not when management repeatedly told me it was fine, it's not foolish. He threw some pots at me and told me that everyone enjoyed not being around me.

Fine. I can take a hint. I calmly collected my schedule for the new week, notified the managers that I'd returned, and left.

I never went back. I didn't serve them a notice of my departure. I didn't tell a soul other than my two friends who worked there also. I didn't have to take that sort of abuse. Three months later, when it was obvious that I had no intent of working there anymore, I returned. The managers saw me and asked what in the hell happened.

I told them all about the asshole cook who called me arrogant, lazy and who threw pots at me. I told them about the stoners who mocked me by singing my name incessantly. I told them about the idiots who constantly tampered with my grill set-up. I told them about having received permission to go away and then being expected to abandon those plans at the last minute.

Then I told them about the nice conversation I had with someone at the Corporate HQ in Minnesota about the poorly run franchise in Western New York and all the instances of harassment I had encountered, and also some of the more heinous health code violations. I told them how I gave the representatives in HQ the names of all the managers who ignored my complaints and forced me to call Minnesota with my grievances.

Then I left as they stood there, jaws agape, speechless.

Within four months, all of the managers who worked there when I quit were no longer with the company.

Fuck Perkins.

There's nowhere I can't reach.