‘I don’t get why you won’t just quit,’ he would say. ‘It’s just a job.’
‘Well, what would I do if I quit, Dad?’ I would snap back, close to tears. ‘I can’t quit! I need to earn money!’
‘Yes, you need the money. Yes, you need a job,’ he would argue, almost pleading with me. ‘But if you’re going to come home every night and complain and sit there in tears, you should at least be looking for another job! You’re doing nothing about it!’
This was also true of my time at the fast food restaurant when I was eighteen, working weekend shifts while I was at college. Every Saturday morning, my dad would drive me to the restaurant, and he would have to sit and watch me almost break down in tears, my stomach churning with anxiety due to the stress of the job and the bully that I had for a manager – more about her later.
It really wasn’t until I was able to break the cycle and become my own boss that I realised how downtrodden I’d truly been. Again, this is not to say I think you should all quit your jobs – but merely realise that your employer cannot get away with as much as you might let them. For instance, I would often volunteer to work extra shifts at the café – not because I wanted to, and not even for the extra money. I did it because I was afraid that by saying no I would be fired, or anger my bosses and get another black mark against my record, giving them more ammo to use in order to fire me later on down the line. My job was my life. I was doing all the roles that a supervisor would do (and often, I acted as the role of ‘manager’ when my own boss was taking a day off) and still being paid the same wage as my colleagues with far fewer responsibilities. I was overworked, underpaid and depressed. The feeling of being trapped and at the bottom of the pecking order often made me lash out at customers, leading to more disciplinary hearings, which then led to me working even harder in order to avoid being fired. If I’d known then what I know now, I would have refused the hours I didn’t need – there is no way you can be fired for not taking extra hours, so long as you still complete your minimum weekly hours as per your contract. You’ll never be fired if you abide by the rules of your workplace. Anything that goes above and beyond what you’re contracted for is optional. I also would have demanded a pay rise to match the wage of a supervisor, or else I would have refused to carry out supervisor tasks such as audits, stock orders, break delegation and till overrides. Most importantly of all, when I was sitting opposite the store manager’s desk, shaking with fear at being chastised for something small as she threatened to file a disciplinary hearing against my record, I would’ve said to myself, ‘It’s just a job.’
Again, and I’m getting sick of writing it, I’m not saying jobs aren’t important. We have an economy to run! We have bills to pay! However – losing your job doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world. Of course, it would be stressful (I have actually been fired from a job and the worry on your mind sucks) but for me, the toll that was being taken on my mental health in order for me to stay in my bosses’ ‘good books’ simply wasn’t worth it. As an employee, you have certain rights, and your managers know it. If they breach those rights, challenge them on it. Take it higher to head office if you need to. Do not let any employer make you feel scared for your future in order to get you to do more than you’re being paid for. If you do, this is your message telling you to jump ship. Look for a company that will value you as an employee.
Would I ever go back to working for someone else? Sure. Only next time around, I’ll be equipped with the knowledge of my rights. I’ll know what I can and can’t be fired for. I’m not the doormat I was five years ago. From now on, I will only work somewhere that makes me feel valued and respected. No amount of money will make me stay somewhere that beats me down. After all, yes, we need money to live, and I was lucky not to have a lot of mouths to feed (and I was still living at home) but ultimately, it’s like my dad tried to tell me throughout my time of being bullied, trodden on and threatened with being fired when I legally couldn’t be: ‘It’s just a job.’
High School Never Ends
At my school, whenever I or a fellow classmate would protest to our teacher about homework or our uniforms, we were always met with the same response: ‘School has these rules in order to prepare you for the workplace.’
Have you ever heard a teacher say that? I’m starting to wonder whether or not this phrase was pinned up on a memo board in the staff room for my teachers to recite like zombies during lunchtimes. However, they kind of had a point – whilst it was hard to make those comparisons whilst I was still at school, the similarities between school and work become increasingly obvious after a few years in employment:
You have to go to a place you don’t really want to go to.
You have to wear a uniform you don’t really want to wear.
You have to meet deadlines for things that seem unnecessary.
Your peers can be dicks.
Your superiors can be dicks.
You can be bullied by either class of dick.
I’ve spoken already about some of the experiences of bullying I had at school, and I also stressed the importance of not allowing a bully to ruin your school life – after all, once you leave, they’re out of your life, right? However, just as with school, the more ruthless workplaces will have a social circle from which you can most definitely be excluded, and they can be filled with gossiping and bullies – but in the very worst of them, the bullies are your superiors.
I’ve spoken already about my supervisor ‘Mel’ from the shoe shop. She was the one who stood toe-to-toe with me on the shop floor over some stupid email forms for a newsletter, but in the grand scheme of things, she wasn’t actually in charge. She didn’t run the day-to-day operations of the store and there was nothing she could really do to mess with me. However, at the helm of that same shoe shop stood the store manager, who had the attitude of a pissed-off grandma. She had been running the store for over ten years, and from the second I met her at my job interview, she gave me the heebie-jeebies. If you’ve seen the film Matilda, she was comparable to Miss Trunchbull (I’m fairly sure my fellow teenage weekend employee and I actually referred to her as ‘Trunchbull’ when we knew we could get away with it). For the most part, she didn’t work on weekends. However, on the Saturdays and Sundays that she did work, or whenever I agreed to work on a weekday to earn more money during school holidays, I was in constant fear of doing something wrong. This store manager had both the bark and the bite, snapping at anyone who was standing around for more than five seconds, berating employees in front of customers if they weren’t selling enough shoe spray or if they weren’t getting enough email addresses for the newsletter. Compared to her, Mel was like a best friend.
Whilst our store manager believed in equality (by which I mean she spared no employee from her wrath when we weren’t meeting our targets), there was something she did towards the end of my time at the shoe shop that was far beyond what could be deemed acceptable. I’d been working there since late 2007 (just after my sixteenth birthday) and a year into my employment, in the summer of 2008, I kindly requested that my holiday dates (none of which I’d taken up until this point out of sheer terror) be over the August Bank Holiday so that I could attend a music festival with my thenboyfriend ‘Ben’. I knew the store manager wasn’t going to be best pleased. August Bank Holiday was the ‘back to school’ weekend, when hordes of frantic parents would swarm to the store in order to buy some last-minute school shoes for little Jimmy, whose feet had grown six sizes over the summer. There was an unspoken, informal rule that every employee was to be on standby over this weekend and called to work when necessary. However – it wasn’t in any part of our contracts that we had to be available. After some convincing from my dad to ‘just do it, stop being afraid all the time’, I left my request in writing and put it on the store manager’s desk on Sunday evening, a month before the August Bank Holiday. A month’s notice! Surely a whole month is a respectable amount of notice in order for my manager to prepare for one pair of hands be
ing absent for that weekend?
On Monday evening after school, I received a call on my mobile from the store’s number.
‘Hello?’
‘Hello, is this Emma?’ my store manager barked, knowing full well it was me.
‘Yes, speaking . . . ’
‘This is [Trunchbull]. I’ve just read your request for a holiday over the August Bank Holiday. As you know, no one’s allowed that weekend off. If you can’t be available, you’re going to have to hand in your notice.’
Hand in my notice?! Was I being fired? Was this even legal?!
‘I’m sorry, [Trunchbull], but it’s the weekend of the music festival I’ve had planned for months.’
‘Right, okay. Come into the store and hand in your notice tomorrow.’ Click. My store manager hung up the phone. Bear in mind I was sixteen years old, and this was my first job. I burst into tears and ran downstairs to tell my dad, sobbing.
‘She can’t do that,’ my dad said, outraged. ‘That’s not legal! She can’t fire you for that. Don’t hand in your notice, she’ll get over it.’
I wiped away my tears, praying my dad was right. Only, the next evening, another phone call.
‘Hello?’
‘Emma? Hi, it’s [Trunchbull]. Just calling to see when you’re going to hand in your notice so I can hire someone who actually wants a job.’
My manager had called my mobile out of work hours once again – and she did the same thing the next night. In the end, I was a mess, stressed from the thought of confrontation and the punishment that I would receive during every shift if I didn’t resign – and so I gave in. On Thursday evening after school, against my dad’s best pleas, I handed in my two weeks’ notice of resignation to the supervisor on duty, worked the next two weeks alongside the young girl who would be replacing me, and left. I went to the music festival, had an amazing time, and then returned home to face the fact that I no longer had a part-time job, and there would be a gap on my CV for all future employers to see.
Now, there may be some of you reading this particular story who will side with my store manager – she wanted me to quit so that she could hire someone who could be there for that weekend. However, regardless of what you think about my desire to go to a music festival, I believe what she did was not legal, and called ‘constructive dismissal’. Due to the fact that I had not broken any rules within my contract, my manager couldn’t legally fire me, despite her best efforts.
Hindsight is always 20/20 – and if I’d known then what I know now (another saying that I’ve found myself repeating increasingly often) there is no way in hell I would’ve quit the way I did! At the age of twenty-five, I wouldn’t have answered my manager’s calls out of hours. I wouldn’t have handed in my notice, and pressed for my manager to accept my notice for that weekend off. I would have quoted my contract like gospel. I would have gone to head office, to hell with the consequences. I would have kept my job, like the megalith for stubbornness I have become, in spite of feeling any pressure – and would have found another job on my own terms, and in my own time. If conditions at the workplace had become unbearable in the lead-up to me quitting, I would have taken them to court. Read up on what your boss can and cannot get away with – you have a right not to be harassed or forced out of your job.
Unfortunately, my experience with my superiors didn’t improve going into my next job. In fact, they got much worse.
Somehow, I survived almost a year at the fast food restaurant. To this day, this goes down in my own history as the worst job I ever had. This particular chain’s system seemed based on gender – young and pretty teenage girls working the tills facing customers, and the males of any age working in the kitchen. At seventeen years old, for my first shift, I was immediately put to work on the tills . . . on a Saturday morning. Fast food restaurants are hell on Saturday mornings. Without any training on the till whatsoever, I was told to take over another employee’s till account and begin taking orders, without making any mistakes (the store would only be allowed a few till refunds per day, and if you made too many mistakes, you would be fired for incompetence), with the aim of completing any order within ninety seconds. Needless to say, I had to ask for help finding every single menu item on the massive system, shaking as I apologised to the waiting customers.
‘Excuse me, Heather, where is this burger, I’m sorry . . .’ I stuttered, turning round to face the shift manager, who was scowling at me.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ she spat, slamming down the customer’s drink on to the tray before proceeding to jab buttons on the screen in front of me. ‘Look, burgers, savers, no cheese, done. Fucking useless.’
As she walked away, I stood there in shock, quickly looking down with bright red cheeks and taking the customer’s cash. Despite all that my shoe-store manager had put me through, she had never sworn at me or called me useless. As I once again struggled to find another menu item, Heather barged me out of the way.
‘Fuck’s sake, I’ll just do it, shall I?’ she hissed, immediately taking over the till duties with a big smile on her face for the customers.
‘Okay . . .’ I said, close to tears. ‘What do you want me doing?’
‘I don’t care, just go and do something else.’
I walked away, cheeks burning with shame as Heather took over, her eyes not meeting my gaze as I looked back at her. Truth be told, at this point I was just relieved to be away from her – but without any instructions, I walked around the restaurant, at a loss what to do. Over the next few shifts, Heather would put me back on the tills at busy times but being new, and only being assigned to them on Saturday mornings, I would never be able to fully grasp how the system worked. Eventually, I was assigned to cleaning duties, and keeping the restaurant tidy became my main task until I was able to get a new job.
However – it felt to me like Heather had already decided that she did not like me, no matter how busy or quiet the restaurant was. She would ignore me at every opportunity, talking over me when I asked to go on a break, only really acknowledging my presence by barking at me or ordering me to do a task that was completely demoralising. One of my worst memories of the restaurant is being ordered to clean the dirt in between the tiles with a small, wooden coffee stirrer – right underneath her feet. On other occasions, I would be sent to stand outside to greet customers – rain or shine. Whenever I would start my shift and find out she was the shift manager, my stomach would lurch. I felt it was always me who got the grossest, most demoralising tasks, and as soon as I was able to put my feet up, she would bark at me to finish my lunch break as early as I could, meaning I only really had five minutes to shovel down a quick burger before heading back out to clean tables. Whenever my shift was over, I would need to ask her if I could go. I remember countless times when she would refuse to let me clock out and made me leave my dad sitting outside in his car while I did another disgusting job before being allowed to go.
However, as time went on and I began to befriend my co-workers, I realised that her antics weren’t doing her any favours – absolutely no one had a kind word to say about her, and she was always left out when it came to social events outside work. Eventually my colleagues from the kitchen, who had worked there a lot longer than me, began to stand up for me, telling Heather to let me go home at the correct time and take my lunch breaks. With their support giving me the confidence I so sorely needed, I began to tell her that it was the end of my shift and leaving before she could stop me, instead of merely asking for her permission. I began to take my full break which I was entitled to, and often just stayed out of her sight so that she couldn’t find something disgusting for me to do. As soon as I was able to leave college and look for a full-time job, I left to work in the department store café and never returned.
Working at the fast food restaurant was the worst job experience I’ve ever had, and it was only when I started to gain confidence in my abilities that I began to treat my time there as more of a job than a punishment.
The moral
of this story is that, ultimately, there will be superiors that try to assert their power over you – but bullying in the workplace is illegal, and nobody at your place of work, boss or not, has the right to make you feel pathetic or inferior to them. If you have a difficult boss, report their behaviour to their own superiors, and if the job isn’t your passion, look for a new one as soon and as often as you can if no action is taken. In the meantime, stand your ground – if there is a task you’re not trained for, you can refuse to do it. If there is a job you feel violates health and safety (such as unblocking a customer toilet with just a pair of gloves – yes, I was asked to do that), then you can and should refuse to do it. Bullies are only bullies whilst they can get away with it – whether that’s at school or in the workplace. Stay strong, remember that you are not the problem, and don’t let anyone make you feel inferior without your consent.
10
Self-Worth
You Are A Miracle
I’m not gonna spend too long on this part, but I want to remind you that the chances of you coming to be in this universe were so small, so immeasurable, that the fact that you are here, as you are, is nothing short of a miracle. I’m not trying to push a religious agenda on to you here – take the word ‘miracle’ as you will – but whether you believe it’s by coincidence or by design, there is a reason you are unique, and that there will never be another human exactly like you (unless you want to bring up identical twins, in which case, you’re really reaching here. I’m trying to make you feel special, for fuck’s sake).
Let’s get a little gross. You know how babies are made, right? If not, well . . . go and ask your parents and then come back. I’ll wait.
Feel Good 101_The Outsiders' Guide to a Happier Life Page 17