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.
As far as shitty work experiences tho, one that I’m remembering right now.
Its me and all my coworkers (techno-libertarian brogrammers), and they’re hiring a new team leader type-person who would help organize our work. Giant boardroom table, this guy sitting at one end begging for this job, everyone else grilling him with questions. He seems like a nice enough guy, just moved to the area, has a few kids, and needs a job.
They start asking him really trivial questions, gotcha type things I never would’ve suspected, even out of the meeker people I work with.
Afterwards, he leaves the room, and all the pettiest shit I’ve ever heard starts coming out from people I’ve worked with for a year, scrutinizing every word of his answers, saying he “doesn’t fit the company culture”. I’m staring daggers at everyone, grinding my damn teeth at how utterly selfish and repulsive they are, because this guy didn’t use the right synergistic tech corporate terminology they were looking for.
Whatever respect I had for my team went out the window. The individualism, lack of class consciousness, the selfishness of these fkn dorks.
And even after all this, a year later my boss wanted me to beg for my job (we had to write “reviews” of all our co-workers for management, and a few gave me bad reviews); he wanted me to defend myself by snitching on them, which I refused. I fkn hated that place so much that being let go by being snitched on was incredibly liberating.