Reading this sub has reminded me of a story from about 2003 or so.
I was the Night Sous Chef at a pretty busy chain restaurant in Vancouver. We paid the usual poverty wages that restaurants do but attracted some decent people anyways. We had one guy apply, get through the interviews, and agree to come on board. I'm pretty sure his name was James. He had his Red Seal training and just needed the apprenticeship hours. I think this is a Canadian thing for all sorts of trades.
So James was told that all kitchen staff have to start out in the dish pit. This wasn't entirely true, some exceptions were made. I'm guessing that we needed dish pit staff at the time. Usually anyone halfway decent was only washing dishes for a few weeks before they got promoted to appetizers.
So James showed up for his first shift to wash dishes on either a Friday or Saturday evening in the summer. There were two dishwashers on, we were usually balls-to-the-wall from about 5:30 until 9:30 in the kitchen.
Our restaurant leader (front of house guy in charge of the place) comes up to me and says, “You're new guy back there has music going, he can't have that.” So I went to the back to see. James indeed had some music going at a reasonable volume. It wasn't anything offensive or anything like that. I said, “Hey man, sorry, but we can't have people listening to music back here.” James replied with, “Look, I have my Red Seal training, I know how to cook, I don't mind putting in some dish pit time but I'm not going to do this mindless work without music.” Fair enough. I went to the restaurant leader and said, “Can you just let the guy have his music? It's not loud or Creed or anything.” Restaurant Leader said he didn't want anyone bringing in their own music, he didn't want to have to draw lines at what was a reasonable volume or what was reasonable music. Also fair enough.
I went to the back and told James the bad news. James said, “OK then, I don't think I want to work here in that case.”
I went back to the line and asked one of the guys if he could close the dish pit that night, I explained the situation and pretty much everyone on line (about seven other people) were all aware. When James came out after getting changed with his ghetto blaster, he got some applause. We all know that the job was crappy enough, so even though someone had to make up for him leaving, it was still cool to see a pretty quiet guy stand up for himself like that.