Working at a machining/widget manufacturing plant on routing & part grinding. Generally do a good job of things for a couple months, good quality, good rate etc., the job sucks ofc but what are you gonna do (absolutely terrible for carpal tunnel & other hand/arm joint shit). Still, I get compliments on part quality, I get stuff done, and I at least make some (shit) cash. Management is starting to talk about mandatory overtime and all but yknow this is base level US manufacturing shit.

Now, to preface the real jokerfying event, this is the same job where I, as a lighter skinned black person with a fro get asked day one “So what are you? Must have some Indian in ya, wouldn’t guess by the hair though”. Same sort of question I have gotten at pretty much every job I’ve ever had though so I just file it away as another in a long list of the same shit in conservative hell USA. (anyway great guess dude! great grandfather actually was chickahominy - that’s 500pts!) Edit: in retrospect at least I didn’t get any slurs thrown at me that I know of, that’s the benefit of not looking exactly like what these chuds picture in their heads, they usually gotta ask first to precision target the slurs.

Had a couple black coworkers come up to me one lunch break a day or two later and say “oh yeah this place is racist as fuck, we gotta stick together here yknow?”. Good signs no red flags

Status: initial

Later on, my section gets a new part order for several hundred of the same widgets we usually work on, but the shift manager says it’s high priority and to drop everything else and switch over to these. This is a pain in the ass when you’re in the middle of a 600 part order ofc but whatever, I shift the grinding machine over to working on these. I notice they’re the same parts but of noticeably lower quality metal than the usual, which we’re going to auto manufacturers iirc.

I didn’t see the specifics of the contracts unless I asked, and I was curious this time. So they tell me these are part of a contract with General Dynamics! Not only that, but a coworker, ancient old white dude (as it seemed 50-60% of the employees were), tells me they get those specific orders all the time, and they’re being used in M61 Vulcan rotary guns! This mummified fuck then claps me on the shoulder and says “How’s it feel knowing you’re helping protect a lot of people - or kill a lot haha!”

Status: terminal

Quit when I learned that about 50%+ of their manufacturing was military contracted, couldn’t do it. I had to cite “deeply held personal/religious beliefs” when asked for form purposes lol. Ngl I’m still fucked up about unwittingly building parts to killing machines. Shit that’s been used since Vietnam for massacres and imperialist power grabs. Feel like I should’ve idk, looked at their contracts or some shit before taking the job?! But everything here is linked to the MIC, fuck man. Should expect everything in this hell country to be suffused with white supremacy and linked intrinsically to the slaughter engine but fuck was it concentrated there.

Still feel guilty but now I kinda laugh too, it’s just so evil here. Anyway big crisis of faith yadda yadda, I helped the slaughter engine and kinda hate myself for it yadda yadda, I am currently heading to Arkham in the back seat of the Batmobile. Fuck this country

My first job as a teen was dreadful. I’m socially anxious and was incredibly awkward when I was younger, but I was always polite and patient with people. The real problem was my parents. They made me get a job, which you’d think is pretty normal for a teen, learn the value of money and all, but my step-siblings didn’t have to work and got new computers and cars from their other parents, so here I was with no car, expected to get to work and back everyday. I had to go to school, get dropped off from the bus at the church, cross two roads, and go to the other end of a stripmall to the dollar store I worked at. Then I’d work until dark and have to wait in the parking lot for them to pick me up because while they wanted me to have the job, they didn’t want to help me get a car, so they’d consistently come an hour late, pretend like they forgot, and act annoyed that they had to go out of their way to drive me home. And I didn’t have a phone to call and was too anxious to ask to use a phone. So then I’d come home and do all the chores in the house while my step-siblings just did whatever I guess. I was literally the red headed stepchild trope but without the red hair. And the real kicker was, I never saw a dime of the money I made working. My stepmom took the card I got paid on and I never got any of it. One day she accused me of getting a new card to access the money because she had somehow lost track of a few hundred dollars. My money that she lost, I don’t know how you even manage that, it’s on the damn card, you should be able to track where the money goes. Not that I would have seen it anyway. Eventually dealing with my stepmom had me so sick with anxiety and depression everyday I started messing up change and stuff and got fired.

Another time when I was older and not living with those people, I had a nightshift at a walmart where I’d get home, go to sleep, and be so worn out I’d only wake up just in time to go to work again. It was so bad that once they fired me for calling out too much I literally cheered in my car. I wasn’t sure how I’d pay for food or rent but I was just so happy not to have to work there any more.

Then there was a fast food place I worked, Sonic I think.

Then there was the bakery where we were literally working 12 hour days 7 days a week, and I had a 40 minute commute living in a disgusting, moldy, rat infested trailer with my mom and her husband and getting giardia or some shit. When I saved up from the bakery I got my own place, but I couldn’t take working that much for long.

Then I worked at a Food City where I didn’t get paid enough to afford the food I was stocking. I was literally having to live off of 10 dollars a week for food.

I was actually at my wits end again a year or more ago when I lost my car and was coasting on Covid rent relief to not be homeless. Luckily, there was a place within walking distance where I work now. I don’t have to work too much, I don’t have to interact with too many people, I get to dick around a lot and my boss is pretty cool as far as bosses go. So who the fuck knows where I’d be now if not for pure dumb luck. I’m pathetically allergic to work and I know full well there’s no assistance for people here, so I don’t know what I’d do if this job stops working out for me.

Getting paid under min wage to develop and deploy software that if wrong could ruin people’s lives in a cowboy dev shop with no guidance or tools with a boss who proudly told me his teenage pass time was throwing bricks at cars from an overpass.

No automated deployment manual installing bug fixes onto 140 tablets one by one in a hotel room the night before the event, working the entire weekend unpaid and then being expected to turn up on Monday.

oh and long car journeys to said events with boss driving he demanded i sit there in silence no radio and can’t look at my phone for several hour drives. I learned how to lucid dream cos i was tempted to grab the wheel and crash us into something.

He radicalised me as well by writing down my wage and his wage on a piece of paper and telling me this is why I need to work for free over my weekends to deliver x because the money paid needs to cover his wage.

Permanent psychological damage.

I have so many. I could talk about the time when I worked in ice cream. We had a dollar cone day, all cones (regular sugar and cup) were a dollar. Waffle cones were still like 4.50 because bigger cone more ice cream. Almost everyone understands this but I explained it anyway to every single person that came up to the window all day. So I’m like 6 hours in with no break at this point (I was clocked out for my break but told to keep working anyway). Some lady comes in with her family of 6 and orders 6 waffle cones. I start explaining and she snaps at me 'I know I know go do your job." Okay. 6 waffle cones out that window and that total is like 30 bucks or whatever. She hands me 6 . I try to explain again and she says it’s 6. So her response is to cuss me out, a 17 year old. And then throw her ice cream in my face. My manager did not let me go clean myself up, wrote me up for being rude to the customer, and then took the bill that lady just ran out on out of my paycheck for the day. Which was probably most of it because I was only making minimum wage back in the early 2000s.

My last day at that place I left an hour early, without doing any of the clean up tasks, with 6 pints of ice cream, some cones, and some scoops, to go to a party. I did not pay. I still have one of those scoops too real nice scoop.

I started that job a Rules Matter Republican and ended that job jokerified and fully believing that society was beyond repair and that it was specifically western governments fault for it. It wasn’t until like a decade later that I unlearned the rest of it through a host of other radicalization moments and realized oh huh I’m communist. But that was one of the first.

Starting my first job ever, as a server, on my first day, there was a huge blow up because the manager, who was also married, had been sleeping with two different servers and they both found out at the same time. I guess not really jokerfying but I was like oh damn there’s a real power difference here

Not a radicalizing moment for me, that had already happened long earlier, but the moment I went full joker and never returned was during the beginning of covid. I watched a Walmart employee grand slam slug a chud dipshit with a plastic Wiffle bat at the door for trying to shove him and an old man out of the way and run into the store without a mask. Watching that sack of shit flop like an overpaid soccer player and hit the fucking concrete like, well, a sack of shit was like seeing the face of god. I finally knew the dictatorship of the proletariat would be realised beautifully by arming retail workers.

Worst job I ever had was in high school during the summer at a catering business in Chicago. I had to work in a walk in refrigerator opening boxes of raw chicken and toss the pcs into a large stainless cement mixer then open a bag of breading toss that in and run the mixer for 10 minutes. Then I had to reach in and pull the chicken parts out of the mixer and put them in stainless steel baskets and put them on a shelf in the cooler. There was a puddle of chicken blood on the floor and after the first hour of my shift my gym shoes and socks were soaked in blood and I could feel it squishing between my toes. By the end of shift my pants were also soaked with chicken blood and raw chicken juice and I had it all over my arms up to my pits. All I had on was a t-shirt and jeans so I would freeze my ass off for 8 hours and then I had to walk 2 miles in 90 degree summer heat and by the time I got home I smelled like a bio hazard.

I am a software dev. My first company was a dumpsterfire that I continued working at for way too long due to being young and high on impostor syndrome. What drove me to finally quit was a one-two punch of bad experiences.

I was being paid significantly below the market average for my position and seniority. Company gets a big contract and the owner calls a big meeting with all hands when he boasts about how amazing it will be for our growth. Manager on my section has a meeting with me and my teammates telling us about how our next raises will be significant and how our division will have a booming expansion. In a 1 on 1 meeting, calls me their top performer. Two months later my raise comes in. It ends up being smaller than the one I received the previous year and still puts me way below average.

Context for part two: my company was doing outsourcing. I am also a woman who up to that point had somehow avoided the general shittyness of the tech industry towards us.

I quit at the end of that month and almost doubled my salary.

Not sure if this counts but just LOOKING for a job and ALWAYS getting told “no”, if not ghosted.

No one wants to hire anymore. You’ll see “now hiring signs” everywhere, but they’ll snobbishly blow you off if you actually apply. Who the hell are they looking for? Jeff Bezos to step down and work for their shitty bank franchise for 15 an hour pushing papers? Since when did finding something I literally require for my survival have to be such a big deal? Why are jobs only for a small elite of overachievers these days?

Having to take in my estranged dad for two years because he had nowhere to die with dignity. Worst two years of my life and literally no one gave a shit.

And Libs in my life who witnessed those two years to this day keep telling me people’s retirement should be a personal choice even though they know most people’s fate will mirror my fathers.

Yeah. Let’s party.

Shortly after Covid started, my warehouse got a new manager, and he gathered everybody from every part of the warehouse together in the break area and gave us all a speech about how much he cared about our safety. Everybody was right next to each other and nobody was wearing a mask, while the TV displayed information about social distancing. The same day, they informed us about a new call-out policy where if you’re sick, you still have to come in and they’ll decide whether you’re sick enough to go home, because “too many people are faking.” Only job I ever quit with no notice, I remember telling my supervisor “People are dying,” and she replied, “I have a business to run.”

My only regret is not setting the place on fire.

I dedicated a lot of time to a small, local answering service because I cared about the actual business - connecting patients with care outside their doctors’ office hours - but eventually realized that the only people that got holiday time with their family were either personal friends of the owner or just straight up said they would quit if they were forced to work overtime on holidays.

This was my lesson: local and small doesn’t mean it’s good for the community - sometimes they just haven’t found enough people to exploit yet to be an obvious bad guy.

Bonus mini-story!

There was one time where a full blown boomer, making exactly this face didn’t like that he had to be waited to be seated during a combination Sunday/holiday rush hour (ask any restaurant worker about how fucked up Sunday tends to be when local churches disperse their flocks).

He waited, relatively calmly, no yelling for a change… but with his entire ass planted against the register, legs dangling off the counter like a little kid. He just sat there, maintaining the face, for about 15 minutes, even making small talk to the still-incoming unseated people about what terrible lazy people worked there because he didn’t get to get seated until someone vacated their seat.

My first job was working in fast food when I was 14 years old. My parents had applied for me thinking it would be a good way to make some money and get independence. None of my experiences are as bad as some comrades here, but they’re burned into my brain.

It was exhausting work for an out of shape autistic nerd, having to run like mad all day in a hot, loud kitchen. I got a dressing down once because I would clean the grease off the flat top between cooking using two hands until the halfway point, then switching to one at the end. Procedures and rules said two hands the whole time, but I regularly burned my knuckle on the clamshell top and wanted to avoid it. This was an official writing up that contributed to me losing my job, and I could not understand it at the time.

The worst of it was that everyone knew I was a kid and had school, and yet I would often get closing shifts during the week. It wouldn’t be so bad except closing didn’t have a set time. We were open late, and closing was officially at 1 in the morning, but you stayed until the job was done. You were paid for the work, but the end time would change.

Despite being 14, I would without fail be tasked with being the last there, scrubbing all our equipment out, sweeping and mopping the floors, while the managers sat in the back doing book keeping. My mom would sit in the parking lot, waiting, knowing she also had to work in the morning, until I was allowed out. Usually this was about 2, sometimes closer to 3. I didn’t know enough to stand up for myself, and I couldn’t effectively anyway as a literal child, and nobody backed me up. I never had a closing shift where a coworker said “hey, I’ll take this one”.

So I’d get driven home and crash sometime around 3. I’d wake up three or four hours later and go to school, tired as fuck and unable to concentrate, and then go do it again that evening. I vividly remember how my hands just always smelled like onions and cleaning agent, no matter how often I washed them.

It’s nothing like what other comrades experienced here, and lasted only three months before I was fired, but I can still vividly remember how shit my first job was, and how early I learned capitalism will fuck you over.

Just the entire COVID experience as a grocery worker. Being told I was a “hero” and “essential” and forced to be exposed to people who would frequently take off their masks to make their hyper-specific fish order with me. The company treated us like shit, giving us like one month of hazard pay before axing it, and meanwhile they were making record profits. They wanted to sell the company, so they were artificially inflating its value. I got COVID and the first time was told to stay away for two weeks, second time to come back once five days had passed and I was testing negative. Wearing the mask was horrible because they never gave me one that fit properly and I could never find a comfortable one. At the same time the store got noisier and noisier and I was just starting to understand my sensory issues.

And all the while the customers didn’t change their behavior at all. We’d frequently get people half-assing their masks and not being called on it. Some people would come back to the store every day. Literally EVERY DAY. During the height of a pandemic. I saw clearly how little my management cared about me. I fully understood the selfishness and stupidity of the average American. I became incredibly bitter and I’m still purging myself of that bitterness and trying to build a life out of nothing.

EDIT: Also forgot to mention the time I threw out like $1500 worth of lobsters that all died because the company decided to send them all at once even though we only had limited room in our tank. I threw them into the compactor, just thinking about all the fuel burned catching them, transporting them to processing and then to our store, refrigerating them, and then finally compacting them with the rest of the garbage.