Typically, people need some time to determine if they enjoy their new job. However, these folks spent less than a day at their workplace and immediately knew they had to get outta there. Content has been edited for clarity.
Fun Place To Shop, But Not Work
“When I was 20, I was hired as a temporary floor member for Forever21 during the holiday season. My training began a week before Black Friday, so the store was already 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 the store layout.
Afterward, I was assigned to shadow a veteran floor member to get an idea of my job and duties. As soon as I was assigned, the manager disappeared and was never seen again.
An hour and a half into my shift, my shadowee received an emergency family call and had to take a week off. When this happened, I approached some other floor managers, explained the situation, and asked them whom I should shadow.
The manager’s response was, ‘Just do the best you can by yourself; you’ll be fine. Everyone else is busy.’ I figured I would give it a try.
I don’t know if any of you have shopped in the women’s section of Forever21 during seasonal sales, but they often have multiple articles of clothing that all look almost exactly the same but with slight differences. The challenging part was that these different items were often placed in completely separate parts of the store. It was the dressing room’s job to return the unpurchased items to the correct section so that employees could put them back on the shelves. However, these employees were not very effective, and I didn’t know if they were a part of my section or not.
So, I would spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to find where the items belonged before realizing, ‘Wait, this isn’t even my section. I’ve checked literally every rack.’
I’d put the items back on the sorting rack and move on to the next one. More than 50% of the stuff I was told to reshelve wasn’t even from my section. I did my best and prepared for my next miserable day.
The next day, when I arrived, the store manager called me into her office and criticized me for being slow the day before. She told me that if I wanted to keep working there, I needed to be much faster. I explained my lack of training and unfamiliarity with the store, but she told me that if I didn’t know where the clothes were in the sections, I should come in during my free time and memorize where everything was. I spent the rest of my shift placing clothes in random locations and never returned for a third shift.
I had had enough of that place and its management. “
Where’s The Shovel?
“During my summer job working for a landscape architect, I arrived at the job site, and he asked me to dig a hole in some rocky dirt. I requested a shovel, but he didn’t have one. I then asked for a hand spade, but he didn’t have one of those either. Instead, he instructed me to dig the hole with my bare hands and promptly drove off to another site, leaving me completely alone.
I began to dig for a little while and then thought, ‘This is ridiculous,’ and decided to leave.
If the job had specified that I needed to supply my own tools, I could have done so. However, since it didn’t and I wasn’t willing to work for someone who expected individuals to dig through hard, rocky soil with their bare hands, I decided to quit.”
Terrible Trainer
“I worked as a cashier at Lowe’s for less than a full day. I managed to complete the multi-day training, but there was so much absurdity happening that I began to wonder if I was on a hidden camera show.
All the employees were complaining about the heavy workload while, at the same time, not getting enough hours. No one understood why they were hiring four new people (I was one of those four).
It turned out that this was due to an ongoing sexual harassment complaint that necessitated the restructuring of the store and the termination of some employees. HR knew about this and explained it to new hires (against company policy), but the regular employees were kept in the dark. Some of them, including the person who was training me, still worked there. She behaved inappropriately and advised us not to worry about the sexual harassment issues. She assured us that everything would ‘return to normal’ soon, and we wouldn’t have to ‘be so uptight’ about it. However, they fired her the day before I started, along with one of the cashiers who trained me.
She also provided me with terrible guidance during the application process. The store was seeking part-time help, and I had two days off from school out of the three days they needed help. I informed them that I could work most nights, but daytime availability was only possible on those specific days. She insisted that if I were too inflexible, they wouldn’t keep me on. She even lied to my boss about my availability to make me ‘even more appealing’ and suggested that I try to charm them to increase my chances. She assured me that, in the end, it wouldn’t affect anything, and I would get those days.
However, when my first week’s schedule was issued, I was assigned morning shifts every day I had school, and I wasn’t given any hours on my days off. Not only did they give me twice the hours the position required (while other employees were shorted), but my work schedule was also virtually impossible to reconcile with my school schedule.
On my ‘first’ day, I only went to work to inform them that I was quitting and that their application process was a complete mess. They couldn’t understand how everything had gone so wrong, but when they asked who had trained me, everything became clear. They thanked me for ‘at least showing up to quit,’ unlike the other three hires who had simply stopped returning calls and no-showed on their first days.”
