Most, if not all, of us work. What’s the worst experience you have had where you work? Can be past or present.
I work freelance in an industry where only two groups are hiring. Companies looking to exploit my brain for their economic benefit, or rich shits who want one-of-a-kind masterpieces and don’t understand the process machining takes.
A lot of my job is absolute shit. NRA union busts, so there’s no defending ourselves. Contractors aren’t employees, so agreements get manipulated. It’s a very unfriendly environment, and to boot, my licencing and certifications cost a lot - with annual renewals - which job-providers use as leverage. It’s not difficult to assume there are many “worst” experiences. But there’s one specific one that I’ll shorten. It was a contract from a daddy’s-money, some 17-year-old who wanted a rifle, but not just any rifle. They wanted one nobody else had. As is common, we held a design meeting. The kid told me nothing useful, all I could get out of him is that he likes Glocks. So, I quickly draw up a Glock-shaped-rifle thingy, he okay’s it and sends me off to begin prototyping. I make a basic functional prototype, and he goes off about how it looked nothing like the picture I drew and that I have to redesign it. This is about $1200 into the project btw, a full rebuild means making new mouldings for the plastic frame/stock, which gets expensive, and it’s out of my pocket so far. Three iterations later he still hates the thing, so I asked him wtf. Turns out, in his words “[he] doesn’t want a rifle, [he] wants a machine gun”. This was never discussed. This is technically illegal. This puts me in extreme debt and threatens my certifications. The guy still hasn’t paid me years later, as well he kept the prototypes.
You seem to have a weird job. So you design guns for rich kids?
Im in academia, my PhD was quite freakish. So the institute I was in decided to turn itself into a company, mostly to easily steal the academics research for patents and get outside industry funding. Basically it still remained 80-90% state funded, but the companies had all control. All groups were working on stuff directly for a company, which then has the rights to their work. I remember some boring simulation was done separately by 3 people in the same building, but each for a different company, so they could not communicate. Also the entire premise was bullshit and could not work, so the institute did not produce the results that the companies pretended have and that were promised in grant proposals. The companies would also not allow the scientists to publish the negative results, so entire PhDs were finished without publishing a single paper.
The environment was really toxic. Abusive professors throwing chairs… 25 year olds being paranoid and afraid because they had a meeting with their supervisor… There were a lot of foreigners, and a professor just decided to kick out 4 PhDs, handing them some document (in a foreign language) which basically made them resign. This meant they were made unemployed in a foreign country with a visa that expires without a job and also no 2 month severance payment and unemployment benefits (since they quit). Just one person didnt sign and with the help of the union was able to keep the position, since a professor is apparently not even able to fire someone…
That was, and i guess is still, a shitty place…
Basically. It’s something not uncommon in the freelance world. You do jobs for individuals that are a little outside the usual meta (normally I’ll work for companies to fix design flaws, or to do manual labor, real boring shit) in the hopes that the person will help spread your name around. Glock rifle kid didn’t, but other contract bosses have.
Having your name spread is great for business, it helps to ensure friends of customers will pick you for their wacky concepts, also helps with finding financiers.