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.