One of my closest friends has worked at Panera for about a year now and I joined 2 months ago, it's been pretty fun working with him but management is absolute dogshit and because of this, they're perpetually understaffed. I also received essentially no training for what I'm expected to do while managers treat me like an idiot for not knowing–you know the deal. Generally a shit environment.
Well on Friday I worked an opening shift (have to be in at 6, which means waking up at 4:30), picked up an extra shift yesterday and had to come in for an opening shift today. It's true that most people would be able to handle this much work, but generally speaking my mental and physical health aren't great so I'd been looking for a little less work, and this amount of work in a weekend was a lot more than I was really hoping for. Not only that, but I was suffering intensely from insomnia last night and only got about an hour of sleep.
I messaged the group chat that my friend and I are both in, in the middle of working today and kind of having a mental breakdown because the manager wouldn't let me leave early. My feet were aching, I was dizzy and dangerously close to passing out, and the shift was looking incredibly daunting before me. Then, at around 9:00, three hours into my shift, in walks my friend–prepared to take my shift for me so that I could go home and get some rest.
But our manager had other plans. We're shortstaffed, she says, so my friend had to stay to work on salads–and I also had to stay up front, taking people's orders when I was barely conscious. She would not let me leave early or else I would be fired on the spot.
So he and I both stuck around, I somehow made it through the shift, and like the incredible friend he is he made sure I was still standing by the end of it. It was literally the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me, thwarted by an asshole manager.
I have indeed put in my two weeks notice, and considering that he's been there a year and is technically a team lead but makes the same hourly pay as me and has been denied a raise over and over again–I think he'll be putting in his two weeks soon too.