This is a LONG one, with a lot of context. You have been warned.
Back before my grandfather passed, he had connected me with a friend of his who had a friend willing to give me a summer job when I turned 18. It was a pretty solid gig to do in the summer before I went to college, and it paid well- $15/hr in Ohio. While it's not record-breaking, it certainly beat working fast food. I only worked about a month between my birthday and when I started college, but I proved to be a good worker who got the job done faster and better than anyone else.
A couple things about this business: this friend of my grandfather started it himself in the 80s. It has something like 40 employees, and is a machine shop that mostly deals in government contracts. They do everything from gun stocks and computer casings for the military to chemical wash tubs and lamps. Your average guy here was a 40-something dude, and there were only 2 women in the whole place, the secretary and a lady in quality control.
When we got sent home for the pandemic in March 2020, I pretty quickly came to be strapped for cash and went back. Since they fulfilled government contracts, their business was deemed necessary and they stayed open. I worked from early April until August that year, and made a pretty decent chunk of change as he raised me from $15 to $17/hr and put me in the shop running CNC machines. Before that, I had been putting something called HeliCoils into machined parts, which basically just make the threads where bolts go heavy-duty. Not a very hard job, but very time consuming. That being said, I was very good at this job. On average I'd finish twice as many parts a shift as the next guy, who'd been working there for about 25 years. This will be important later.
We didn't go back to school in Fall 2020 as the pandemic was still happening, but I'd saved up enough cash at the place to be comfortable for a while. I took that fall off of school, hoping that by spring we'd be back on campus. In the meantime, I signed up to volunteer with the Red Cross. I drove vans for them, transporting blood from their donor center/lab in Cleveland to area Hospitals, as far out as Sharon, PA. I absolutely loved it, as helping people and doing fulfilling work is very important to me. Soon enough, I was the team leader out of the location in my city and was running 3 shifts a week, which would each span anywhere from 5 to 8 hours.
In Spring 2021, I also moved into a new role as the Chief of Staff for an ESports org on my campus (I'll post another story about that later), which ate up a LOT of time. Nobody else on our board did much work, and I was the only one with experience talking to administration, so I got nailed with a ton of busy work. But again, it was something I loved to do, just to see all the happy folks at the events we (welll, I…) organized. Both the Red Cross and this ESports thing were also very important resume builders for me, as they gave me leadership and bureaucratic experience that looks really good on a Political Science/Communications resume, which is what I'm studying in college. Needless to say, the machine shop work didn't do that for me. It was money, and little more.
Then there's also my family's insurance. The reason I had stopped working the prior fall was because if I'd made any more money, I would have risked my parents losing their medical insurance. My dad takes a whole range of medications for dozens of issues, and sleeps with a bipap (I think?) machine, so losing insurance is not an option for my family. Once I go to college, my income doesn't count towards the household, but while I'm at home it does. So earning above about $500 to $1000 more would pose a significant risk to my family's health.
In the month leading up to Fall 2021, it became clear to me that, with the savings I had, I wouldn't be able to afford to finish college. I would have to work while I was in school, something of 30 hours a week, to make it work. At this point, I decide to go back to the shop for a few days to make a little extra cash before I head out, and line up 8 days on the schedule to work, 4 weeks working Thursday and Friday. I'm doing this because I am still taking 3 or more volunteer shifts a week with the Red Cross, plus my responsibilities with the ESports org. My boss does in fact know about both of these things.
Mind you. I am not working these shifts to pay for college. Whether or not I work these 8 shifts, I am still stuck working 30 hours a week while in school.
The shop put me back in the assembly room, installing those coils in some wash tubs. Each part has about 50 different coils in 3 different sizes, and each part is so heavy that have to be moved with a small 1-ton crane in the assembly room. Then, on top of that, the coils had a nasty habit of not going in right or otherwise failing, so we'd have to remove and reinstall 5 or more coils a part. Because of this, most people only finished 5 or 6 parts a shift. I, however, am particularly efficient and take pride in my work, so I'd get 10 on most days. The shipment had 80 tubs left when they pulled me in for those 8 days, and I was going to work on those tubs the whole time. My boss reckoned that with just me on the tubs, I'd be able to finish the shipment before I left, whereas he'd have to put two of his other workers on the job to do the same without me. I promise you he knew this going in.
On the 5th day of work, I'm starting to get pretty burnt out, and the stress of affording college was starting to get to me. I had one job lined up, and a number of applications outstanding. I wasn't necessarily worried, just a bit wound up, tense, and exhausted. I voice my frustrations to my boss, and my worries about affording college. That's when this guy, a 70-something multimillionaire who just pushes papers all day, decided to piss me off.
Instead of consoling me in any way or offering reassurance (which he had indeed done for a separate issue in the past), he decides to go with “There's 168 hours in a week. Work as much as you like.”
To me, this read as him telling me I had poor time management. Maybe it's a misinterpretation, but I digress. I'll also note here that he knows about the predicament I'm in with my family's medical insurance. As such, I note that I don't have the time for more shifts and was just frustrated with the situation.
After I decline, he goes on to lambast me, saying I'm lazy, disrespectful, and have poor work ethic. Then, the line that really gets me.
“I just don't think you've worked for anything in your life.”
My family of four subsists on about $25,000 a year. In NE Ohio, that's enough to get by. It's little enough, however, that functionally everything I owned and used at this point, I'd bought with my on money that I earned. I'm one of a seldom few in my high school who paid their own phone bill and car insurance instead of saving my part-time job money for college. Everything I own, I've worked for. And he knows I'm a hard worker. If I wasn't, he wouldn't have invited me back every time I'd asked for work. I do not have any idea how he came to the conclusion that I've been handed everything when that is literally the exact polar opposite of the truth.
I rounded out my shift, really pissed off. By the time I headed home, I really rationalized to myself what I was doing there. If I was going to be stuck with 30 hours a week of labor whether I worked this job or not, why am I here? After all, I was making $8 an hour less than the next lowest paid guy. What's the point of being underpaid and disrespected? Other employees in the shop also often looked down on the fact I was going to college for one reason or another, so I found few if any reasons to finish my shifts.
I knew he was relying on me to finish this order, so him calling me lazy and unproductive was the final straw for me. The next morning, I texted him and told him I'd not be coming in for the last 3 days.
The contract I was working on ended up being a month late, and because of how this shop runs things, they refund 1% of the contract per day as a “late fee” of sorts. For this contract, 30 days of late fees would've totaled somewhere in the $200,000 to $250,000 range.
When I woke back up a few hours later, I was met with a wall of text and two missed calls from this guy, who is furious that I left. He's cursing left and right, telling me he can't believe I'd put his business in jeopardy like that and all about how much I'd fucked him over. All from the guy who was trying to preach financial responsibility less than 24 hours prior.
Maybe, just maybe, if you were financially responsible, you wouldn't have hinged a 3/4 of a million dollar contract on the excess productivity of a 20 year old kid you didn't respect.