【饭前勿看】员工们自述工作中的恶心事

Pushed through a telemarketing call with a roughly 80 year-old woman with Alzheimer's who couldn't remember her last name, her birthday, her social security number, her address, or any relevant income information, with my supervisor standing over my shoulder and patched into the call. Had to remind her three times that I wasn't her son. She was immediately approved for a $5000 MasterCard she absolutely didn't want or need, and I made an extra $75 that month in incentives.

I worked in restaurants as a cook when I was in high school. The worst thing I ever had to do involved cleaning and prepping soft shell crabs for the dinner menu. Oh, and they are all alive. The chef comes over and hands me scissors explaining just how I am supposed to prepare them. The first part is to cut off their sexual organs which are a flap like piece of shell on the bottom. Then you have to cut off both of their eyes in a perpendicular motion. I didn't always get both eyes and often had to go back and clean them up. The last thing was lifting up the soft top shell on each side and cut out their lungs. Keep in mind that they are squirming the entire time. I needed a break after that.

Used to work at the fairgrounds when I was 14-16. 4-H has hundreds of baby chickens they hatch during the fair and sell for 1$ each. Well as we grabbed the trash and took it to the dumpster that night, the bag burst open and their were hundreds of dead baby chickens in it that had died. Had to clean it up.

I was managing an Abercrombie & Fitch, when it was considered 'cool' (early 2000s), and the worst thing they had me do was 'Grade' everyone on my staff on a scale from 1-4. '1' being good looking with great body. '2' being good looking with average body. '3' being average with an average body. '4' being average or below average looks with an average body. If you had a less than average figure and asked for a job application, we said you were out of applications. Store managers, like myself, that had lots of '1's and '2's were rewarded for recruiting the best 'talent' with better bonuses and promotions. Additionally, when it came to everyday business, I had to make sure that '1's worked the front rooms, '2's worked the middle and back rooms, '3's worked the stock room and were used as filler reps when '1's and '2's were on break. And '4's were only used during restocking and back office activity. I happily quit that job and vowed to never shop at a store whose values were so blatantly superficial.

Mine just happened this morning, and I'm still feeling a bit queasy about it. I work on a golf course that has a public road that runs through the middle of it. While I was working, I heard a loud smack and a screech of tires, and assumed that a deer was hit. I get in my cart and go check it out and sure enough a lady in a brand new SUV just took out a deer, or so I thought. Its back was broken, but it wasn't dead. It was screaming, and if you've ever heard a deer in pain, it is eerily human-sounding. I wanted to put the poor thing out of its misery, as I've done so in the past. Deer get hit all the time along the road, but normally I do this when I'm in my car which has a gun in it. No gun today, and all I had in my cart was a shovel and a box cutter. I call the game commission, but they couldn't send someone for an hour and the local cops said they had more important things to do. So I did the only thing I could, and slit its throat with the box cutter and pet its head until it was gone.

I have to give short-term, high-cost loans to pensioners with gambling addictions. I can't refuse them service, and when they inevitably default on the loans, I have to go after them to collect. Some family member who can never afford it always ends up paying it for them and telling me not to loan them anymore, then they're in the next day getting another one, and I (again) can't refuse them service. It's not so much that it's mandatory as I could get fired for refusing them service for any reason other than a pure policy reason (i.e. missing paperwork or insufficient clearing time). 

I worked at a fancy restaurant and it was about an hour before we closed, but no one was in there so the owner said "start breaking the kitchen down". About 45min later a family of 8 walks in and gets seated by the host. Instead of telling them to leave he has us pull most of what they order out of the trash and heat it back up. The only fresh stuff they got was whatever protein they ordered. These people were paying $50+ a plate to eat food out of the trash. I felt horrible and quit the next day.

When I was a lifeguard, I had to go underwater in the deep end to find a section of a kid's finger. He was going off the diving board and decided to try and do a handstand at the end of it (against the rules...blew my whistle at him but it was too late). His finger somehow got stuck under the end of the board. The finger stayed and his body went into the water. But then we couldn't find the finger on the board. We called 911 and they told us to look for the section of the finger in the hopes that it would reattach. We skimmed with the net and no dice. It was too deep. As the manager, I had to strap on goggles and go underwater to look for it...latex gloves on of course, as if that was going to help. There was blood in the water, but it had dissipated by the time I entered from the opposite side of the pool...it wasn't enough to cause any kind of pathogen problem for me. So I found the finger at the bottom of the pool, brought it up, put it on ice, and gave it to the EMTs. They were able to successfully reattach the finger, and the kid wrote me a thank-you letter with the funniest picture I've ever seen.

I was dressed up in a bear costume handing out candy and balloons to little children. It was in a shopping center to advertise for our restaurant. Felt good to make these little kids day. Later on a security guard tells me that the balloons are a fire hazard if they get caught in the ceiling and that they can press charges. So he demanded that I found every balloon I handed out and popped it on the spot. I have never seen so many children cry.