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.
Nothing spectacular for me, but I worked a 0-hour contract for 9 years. It’s not too bad if you’re still called in regularly, but it wears you down after a while. You’re never fully part of the team, you have very limited rights, you’re the first to be disposed of, you’re never entirely sure of income, etc. I decided to get a teacher’s degree after a while to have something on the backburner. When I wanted to go for an interview my boss gave me pain because, even though I wasn’t scheduled to work, I had to keep the day free for them! That was the final straw, decided to quit. We have a decent welfare system where I live, but it’s been crushed by decades of neoliberalism, so I expected nothing of it. Amazingly, they decided that I had a good reason to quit and I was still entitled to unemployment benefits based on the last weeks of salary. Nothing came of the teaching job (too many people with my degree and too little openings) so no luck there. But then I moved two years ago and now I’m at a new employer, a very small one, and this time it’s on a good and steady contract. Glad I said “fuck you” to my employer and left. I get that that’s not a luxury that every worker can afford though, so solidarity to anyone who is in the situation I was in.
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…
You seem to have a weird job. So you design guns for rich kids?
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.
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.
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.
That’s messed up. Making you eat the cost… damn. Ppl don’t realize sometimes how fkn difficult it is to get paid from a client who doesn’t want to.
Major fkn props tho, gunsmithing is probably the coolest profession I can think of. I’ll hit you up and ask you for recommends when I build my next AR, which parts / manufacturers you like and such.
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