What is the worst work environment you ever experienced?

I worked for a logistics company and my desk was to the left of the company owner and my direct manager was to the right. The owner was racist and yelled and swore at everyone. My manager had substance abuse problems and would stay in her office most days with the door locked and lights off while she nursed her hangover. If something went wrong, my manager would blame me and the owner would call me every name in the book. Manage to stay there four months before I was fired for “all the mistakes I made”. At least I received unemployment.

I was Assistant Director of Institutional Giving for a major arts center that was under construction. My ambit was fundraising for the endowment that would support educational programs at the Center once it had opened. I was recruited for the job because I had successfully authored an NEA Challenge Grant that netted the institution where I had previously worked $10M . So...I kind of knew my stuff.

The Director of Institutional Giving had been a bigwig at the local UJA and was--without a doubt--the laziest bitch I ever worked for. I kid you not, she once called me out of a meeting with a Foundation Officer to tie ribbons on an invitation that had just come from the printer and required some assembly. "Can you tie these? I just had my nails done and I don't want to mess them up before they're completely dry." She would hang in the hallway outside my office while I was on the phone, and then demand to know who I was talking to. "I was talking to the Director of Giving at X Foundation about the possibility supporting a schools performance program."...."Oh, no no no...we're going to make an application to them to underwrite the snack bar." "But ..that's not the sort of thing they have a history of supporting." "Doesn't matter. You can't ask them until they've been approached by me and said no."

Suffice it to say, I realized pretty quickly that I was screwed. I left after 8 months. When HR called me in to do the "Exit Interview" they listened to my tale of woe and told me that, at 8 months, I had lasted longer than anyone who had held that position before me. I took a little bit of a pay cut, but landed at a small museum about an hour north where I was cherished, and where I was successful in gaining them a small national reputation. I still have nightmare about my eight months under the Lucrezia Borgia of fundraising.

A Security job where no one was happy to see me hired. They had been gobbling-up overtime by working the vacant job's hours, and were pissed it was going to end. They were artificially cordial at first, but that ended fast. They figured out I was gay and it was like chum in the water. They found fault over trivial things, gossiped, ostracized, backstabbed... I quit after 3 mos.

A year later management got rid of all of them except one guy watching mutiple cameras.

Sorry you have to rely on overtime to make a decent paycheck. But you should have thought about that before you left high school with no plan.

OP = key word, woman

Boss at a law firm asked me in late December to prepare some documents and get a cheap associate to send them out for signature. I told the associate to the send the documents by FedEx overnight and include pre-addressed return overnight envelopes so people could return them ASAP. 3 days pass and the boss asks why no one has returned the documents. I email the associate who says "it takes a week for mail to get somewhere by US postal mail". I get the email on my blackberry while I'm driving in blizzard to Boston, and I send it to boss. Boss calls me, tells me the client will leave our firm, and that I'm the worst attorney he's ever worked with. I pull over to the closest hotel and spend the next 8 hours sorting everything out.

At 4 a.m., the client finally calls me and says "your boss is really pissed at you! But I don't know why. I asked him to get those documents signed in August".

^Same boss the next year. In September, he asks me to do some work for his client for the end of the year. I email the client and tell him I'm going to help. Client emails back "I told your boss we don't want that work done."

I forward that to boss who emails "don't do any work on it until I tell you". I hear nothing, so I send a follow up email in early December to boss asking if I should do anything. He says "no".

On December 31, I emailed boss and said "just to remind you we didn't do this work". Boss emails back "who told you not to do this work?" I sent him the earlier emails he sent me telling me as much. In 2 seconds, he was in my office screaming bloody murder about "how dare you countermand my orders for you to work". Apparently, boss and client had talked earlier that week, and boss thought everything was done (forgetting that he told me to do nothing).

That was my worst work environment ever.

And I worked at a restaurant in college where I was held up at gun point twice and threatened with “I’ll blow out your fucking brains”.

Law firms are the worst.

R4 I’m a woman and I concur. I’ve said this many times and no one has ever disagreed: women are either the best boss you’ve ever had or the worst. It’s always either extreme.

Male bosses are merely good or bad.

I worked at a clothing store in the mall for 8 months.

Every time a customer made a purchase you were required to try to get them to sign up for the store credit card. The terms of the card were awful but you had to sell it as some simple, no risk benefit. If you were caught not asking, you'd get talked to. You also had a quota of 25 credit card applications a month. And once you hit that, they wanted 30 applications a month from you. Yet, there was no incentive for hitting that goal - other than not being yelled at.

We had to wear stupid, dorky headsets every shift. There was one obnoxious assistant manager who loved to scream into the headset to inform everyone about who hasn't gotten a credit card application this shift and how the sales volume was dipping which meant we needed to work harded even though she was sitting in the back office eating Burger King all shift.

I was banned from working in the fitting room. Sometimes ugly women would come out of the dressing room and ask "How does it look?" And occasionally I couldn't contain my laughter. I also got sent home once after a woman asked me if we had a particular pair of pants in size 34 in store. I told her we don't go up that high in store. I was later informed the correct way to answer that was "Extended sizing can be found on the store's website."

The store manager was constantly trying to get her employees to donate to some charity drive she was participating in. We only made $12-15 /hour with no overtime, vacation, PTO or benefits (other than the store discount). One time an hourly co-worker almost hit the overtime mark and the manager almost had a stroke. Some employees did work 30+ hours a week and were led to believe that this would lead to insurance benefits. When those employees asked about this, they were told they only worked that many hours because they volunteered to and were not full-time and therefore not entitled to any benefits.

The customers could also be awful - short tempered, rude, demanding. I'd never been groped or sexually harassed until I worked there. My female co-workers told me it happened almost every shift. I also asked to never work past 7 pm because I came to see that everyone who went to the mall after 7 pm on a weeknight was a freak!

The worst thing though was when old people shopping for shoes would sit down and wiggle their foot at you. They wanted you to take off their shoe and put the new one on for them. Even sandals! One time I had to barehand an old woman's bare foot which had a corns on it.

All of them shockingly and sadly

For a summer job during college, I worked at a meat packing plant.

One time I walked by a lamb that was standing there being quiet not sure why it was there. Then the executioner leaned over and shot him in the head.

Not fun. That was 56 years ago and I remember it like yesterday.

Last job? Someone wandered in and asked if we were hiring. I wasn't sure but I passed on his contract information to the business owners. Dude gets hired and gets paid in cash. He counted and signed for his pay, pocketed the cash and then came back the following week to say his pay was short.

This incident wasn't even the worst part of the job.

contact info not contract

Still at this job but there’s a new regime in place. The main boss was nice but a space cadet and his underling was one of those women that is always sick. My favorite ailment of hers was one-day shingles.

Anyway, that left a guy who considered himself third on the totem pole in charge. He was an uneducated bully who walked around with a baseball bat. I stayed away from him…because actually I would have been running the place, but the other managers told me to let him do it. The atmosphere was really bad, but this was the first - and not the last - time in my life where I said …ok, not my s itshow.

Mr. Tiny Penis Baseball Bat was later fired for dry humping a woman, bending her over a desk. Someone else witnessed this and made the report. That was a good day.

😂 😂

R11, Clarice?

In high-school I worked at a taxi company where my uncle was the manager.

The place was a shit hole. It stunk of cigarettes and ass.

My co workers were 2 fat fraus, an elderly lady, a Jamaican woman who swore and hung up on customers, a fat black chick who ate chicken, did her nails, fight with her boyfriend, chatted with friends on the phone all day. She did everything but take work calls, and two older dudes who worked as the dispatchers. The call centre was In the back room of an abandoned building. It wa the 90s.

I was a temp in the legal department of PG&E in the 90s. My whole job was to fill in for a legal secretary when she called in sick, and she called in sick about once or twice every two weeks. When she didn't call in sick, I had nothing to do. I sat in a tiny, windowless office and once in a while someone would give me a complicated Xerox project. I'd go to the copy room, and be in the middle of sorting and collating 45 back-to-back stapled copies of some bullshit, and an attorney would walk into the copy room, knock any loose papers off the machine onto the floor and cut in front of me to make copies. The first few times I was like, "Hey, wait a minute," and the attorney would reply, "You're a temp, I'm a lawyer, fuck off."

R5, you or someone posted that same exact story here before.

Through private banking then big ticket philanthropy I fell into consulting for the spawn of the worlds richest families. It was interesting work and highly paid but egos must be served. One of my clients was the son of a billionaire dictator. He was a normal young man, affable, and it was a great year. The dictator insisted on passing me to another son, the black sheep of the family. I tried beg off as this wasn't a full time job anyway, and I already knew this dude's reputation but pressure and money was piled on and I caved. I endued a few months of hell, but after the first week I started reaching out to psychiatrists, Interpol, and the U.S. Department of State and I realized how internecine some agencies are. I took the shrink's advice and extracted myself but it wasn't easy as other actors, including private banks, were pressuring me because they had money on line in maintaining appearances and the status quo. The world is corrupt at the top.

Shop bottom. I offered to order a size not carried in the store to a potential customer emphasizing free shipping and return. He needed something to wear right away and declined the offer. Minutes after he left the store, managers took me in the office to accuse me of fat shaming. His wife had "called the store to complain". When I tell you all of my previous jobs were toxic, I am not exaggerating.

It was at a volunteer position. For a non profit charity that has nothing to do with the terrible woman that was managing at the time. She treated all staff as if they were disposable.

I had a terrible boss for a year and a half. My first experience with one. She tortured staff to the point of physical and mental illness, resulting in many eventually leaving the organization. When my employer could no longer deny her treatment of employees in the unit, they transferred her (like a Catholic priest) and she eventually left the organization. I replaced her and have led the unit for the last 10+ years. I’m not perfect, but I don’t treat my staff like garbage.

Sad that she tortured anyone for as long as she did, but my employer ignored it until they couldn’t. I’d never seen that type of behavior up close, nor experienced that type of treatment, before. It’s hard to even describe it now. But it’s a terrible thing.

People have to work. They should not have to be abused while doing it.

Yes it compounds the misery when the horrible boss is ignored by his or her horrible boss. It's usually been a narcissistic women in my work history. But I had a good friend who had a horrible male boss in investment banking where there are also a lot of insane men. I suppose in Show Biz, too.

R3's post reminded me of a story from a friend. He started working in a USPS mail sorting facility. During the first break he was outside smoking and a group of workers approached him and told "new boy" he needed to slow down his work pace. It seems as though he was "showing up" the career slackers. He stayed for a week and quit.

R25 that one of the problems with a union job. You can do an excellent job and the slackers get the same pay. If they do screw-up and are ready to be fired, the union will find a similar case from 20 years ago when the other slacker kept his job, so this guy stays with the company.

When I got my dreads ripped out!

I have a great job now, but in my younger years I waited tables at truck stops, worked in nursing homes and I worked as an in-home companion for angry and confused people with traumatic brain injuries-- I was hit, pissed on, cleaned up vomit and barely made enough to keep my electricity on-- in fact my water got cut off twice and I had to pay HR Block $100 fee to get an instant tax return once when my dog had an earache, and the vet bill took all but $60 of that, I cried and cried but at least my dog felt better.

But the worst job I ever had was Costco Food Court off Dallas Parkway in Plano, Texas. Not a fucking thing good about it.