What is one of your weirdest, most unpleasant, or Jokerfying working class job experiences?
I thought of this question because someone joked about double-dipping their hands in the chocolate fountain at Golden Corral and boy did that invoke one of my least favorite paying-for-college memories.
Yes, someone did dip his hands into the chocolate fountain at the Golden Corral. Worse, he was a repeat offender, a man that was at least in his 30s if not older slurping it off of his fingers and all, sometimes while making eye contact with me or my coworkers. Worse, there was no enforced rule against doing so, at least at my location, so my manager just told me to let him do it, don't make a big deal out of it, and hope he doesn't bother anyone else.
That same manager once insisted on me making the place extra clean a little before Christmas, so they insisted that I use double the amount of cleaning bleach in the same bucket. I explained that's not how cleaning works or how OSHA compliance works. I got a write-up. I said that wasn't an offense that qualified for a write-up, and what they said was "thanks for the tip, I'll find something that is. Your word against mine."
That same manager punched me out early without telling me, because the place wasn't perfect enough before I left over an hour late, missing my family waiting to pick me up outside by that long to go out to do holiday stuff. I did call that in on the supposedly anonymous tip line later, but you can guess what happens when an anonymous tip about wage theft is called in on a manager that already knows who would call in that tip in a "right to work" situation.
That same manager was fired a week later for embezzlement, and not the cool kind. They were writing up and firing people for months for money missing from the register. I found out when collecting my last check and noticed someone new.
I work in Healthcare. It is wild what gets money and what doesn't. It used to bother me that there are entire industries around keeping braindead patients alive and making money off their slow deaths. It is still wrong but I can't bring up the energy to hate it anymore. Millions of dollars in costs to people that can't enjoy it, and likely suffer most of the time. Life support, dialysis, feeding tube, waste tubes, housing, nursing, transport, medicines. The staff aren't well treated or respected either. It is just literally grinding down the sick and the old to take the tax money from the poor and give ot to the rich.
When I worked in healthcare I noticed pretty quickly that "big name" diseases got a lot of funding and subsidies but stuff people suffered every day in larger numbers got next to nothing.
And that, while terrible. Is still rational. People who don't know or care about Healthcare decide spending and they go for the big charismatic names. Everyone e wants to cure cancer. Even though heart disease is a bigger threat. Understandable human emotions though. It feels like every week I learn some new horror. We just had a lady that fell and will likely die because she was going blind and the insurer wouldn't approve the surgery to fix it.
It was always ridiculous. Thr best way to controll a narrative is to make it up. There is reason they always pick issues that are fake. That way there are no existing facts to contradict them. I had a coworker say something about those once. I was too stunned to speak. We have to change thing singularly based on the whims of insurance people and they were so deep in ideology that they couldn't compare the two