My worst job ever

[pegkerr]

misia is asking people here to recount their worst job experience. I mentioned on my profile page that I was fired from my first job out of college. Here is the full story that I posted at misia's journal:

I'm not sure you will believe this, but it is all true. It was my very first job out of college, and it lasted just two weeks.

The employer was a vo-tech school, and I was hired to do publicity and to help the graduating students find jobs. I was apprehensive about this, since it was my first job and I was uncertain about anything. It turned out to not a problem, because the director of the school was such a psychopath I wouldn't have been able to do the job anyway.

When I got there the first day, I learned that they had no place to put me. There was a tiny two-room office, and two desks, each with someone sitting at it. I was apparently supposed to drift around in the office, constantly stepping out of the other two people's way, and place my work anywhere there was an open counter.

I also learned my first day that I was expected to answer the phones for the whole school. A receptionist??? Uh, not what I signed up for.

The director was an abusive screamer. He terrified me by ranting at the top of his lungs at people and throwing papers around.

At the one week point, he introduced me to someone that he said was a consultant he had hired to oversee the school's operations to see how they could be improved. The consultant, when introduced to one of my coworkers, said, "Say, with tits that big, you don't hit your nose when you fall on your face, do you?"

One day, two weeks into the job, I came in and found a letter in my cubby brusquely informing me that I was fired. The letter said that it was at the consultant's advice. The gutless jerk didn't even have the decency to inform me personally. While I was still reeling at this news, the consultant came in and introduced me to someone I had never seen before, a black man, who he said was a representative of the NAACP, who had come to investigate reports that the school had been giving white students preferential treatment in jobhunting assistance over black students and what did I have to say about this?

I was still in shock over my firing, and I was a young, naive 22 year old and didn't know what to say. I stammered that I had just started with the school and didn't know anything about the school's previous job placements. I frantically looked around for any information I could about the school's job placement history, while the consultant started a string of comments that grew progressively more and more racist, until I stopped and stared at him, and finally, scarlet-faced in embarrassment, blurted out, "Mr. Smith!" Whereupon the two of them broke up in roars of laughter. They had been playing a joke on me.

After they left the office, I left a note saying that they should just send my remaining paycheck to my home, and I left and never came back. But I wish, I wish I had done this: I wish I had handed the letter I'd gotten in my cubby to the consultant and asked him to read it. And then I wish I had said to him, "If this is true, if I got fired today from my job because of you, then the least you could do, the very least that you could do, would be to refrain from trying to make a fool out of me in front of a total stranger."

If you have a horror story like this, head on over to misia's journal to post it there.