Boss is fired for theft, so he shreds my scholarship paperwork…
Before I changed careers to aviation years ago, I was apprenticing as an auto mechanic. I had a small scholarship funded by a dealership that paid half of my tech college tuition. The manager was a good guy, which is why I accepted this position at a brand I wasn’t a fan of. Unfortunately he didn’t tell me that he was retiring the next month…
The assistant manager filled in for a couple weeks, before the new service manager started. He’s commuting an hour from a much larger city with higher pay and cost of living. Red flag number one.
He would bring in friends cars for work, and handle the bills himself. Red flag number two.
This was during a small recession, and the dealership couldn’t afford to have me apprenticing with a master tech, helping him work much faster than flat rate while I was hourly. He was essentially billing 14-20 hours of labor in a 10 hour day, but there weren’t enough customers to keep everyone working as we knocked out work so fast.
I ended up being split off and relegated to oil changes and tire installation. The new boss decided to start opening Saturday mornings, and the other mechanics would rotate, but I was required to work every Saturday. I was the first one in the parking lot every morning.
One Saturday, not only has he beat me there, but he has a strange van already in the shop, with tires inside the vehicle. He hands me a service slip to install the tires that “his friend supplied” on the friend’s van.
I brought the van into my bay, and pulled out the tires. The tires aren’t the right size for the van. The 4 don’t even match. The entrance to the shop is lined with stacks of tires as display to the customers. Three of the tires were clearly from the popular sedan tires we stocked, and the fourth is from a set that we stock for a different van.
I let him know, and he tells me to just swap that tire out with one from the stack so the set will match, and he will let the parts manager know, to fix the inventory, (which was a mess at the time, and a missing set of tires wouldn’t be noticed).
I wrote down the batch numbers that are on each tire, and while the boss was on lunch the next Monday, I matched the numbers with the others in our stock. I let the general manager know what I found, and the service manager was fired days later.
When a new manager came in, he decided we needed to do layoffs for the recession, and that I was the first to go since I was the last hired. I asked how he could do that when I had a contract for the scholarship, but he said he had no records on that.
I wasn’t happy with the job anyway, so I didn’t fight it. I made two calls, picked up my toolbox the next day, and was at a higher paying shop the second day, even during a recession!