Greeting r/antiwork, I hope you are all doing well in today's capitalist hellscape. What I have for you today is a rant that's been brewing a good long while.
To start, I don't have a bad job. If you want to boil it down, I am a specialty barista. I take a big fancy cart to events, namely weddings and corporate offices, to serve fancy espresso-based drinks to guests. It was good, my aunt owned the business originally. She was very good to her workers, very patient in training me. Because of that, and my Italian lineage, I was proud to do it. Coffee keeps the average American going, and even for anti-social nerd like myself I could stand tall and square my shoulders behind that cart, because there I was king. I knew what I was doing and I could pride myself on being a hard working class that brightened the days and nights of everyone I served. Are you a coffee aficionado? Good, you'll love my product. Don't know jack about beans? Even better, I'm trained to help you find a drink you'll enjoy. Hell, I'm full of random trivia about man kinds's favorite caffeinated drink. I am very good at what I do.
Then she sold the company, assuring me the new owner would take care of me. Quickly, 7+ years of experience and connections with people in the events planning/catering industry around my area might as well been worth dirt. The wisdom of working closely with the previous owner went in one ear and out the other of this little man with a napoleon complex. Bossman used to be a DJ for weddings, it's how he first came into contact with the business and eventually made an offer when my aunt wanted to get out of it. What used to be events scheduled months in advance with a very clear spreadsheet at the warehouse became work orders sent through Google Calendar, often missing half the information I was trained to work off of. Before this bumbling idiot, I would get a list of supplies, how many servings expected, detailed instructions of when I arrived on where to set up the cart and who I could contact in order to clear up any confusion. Things a queen does to make things easier for her valued worker bees. Now? I get an address and a time, if I'm lucky it's 48 hours in advance of the job, which are frequently on weekends because that's when everyone gets married. Often when I arrive I have to track down the lead contact (because he never gives me their phone number, above my pay grade I guess) and often look like a complete moron because I'm not even sure what the event is before I arrive. I can't count the times I've been red in the face with embarrassment/rage because people coordinating the event treated me like some kind of half-wit simply because bossman can't be fucked to communicate with them or me. The carts of which we have 4, are rarely kept in order, things are missing from them constantly and often hardware is on the brink of failure, because rather than spending money to maintain the business he bought, dipshit drops hundreds of thousands buying more small business in the same vein of work.
Between these 3-4 businesses he owns is the same cast of employees, many who are basically flunkies trained to drive big trucks and lift heavy shit in and out of them while acting like a bunch of frat boys. I myself have trained more baristas for the coffee side of things than I can remember. Retention is awful because as I tried to tell him, nobody wants to work on weekends being frequently warned only 24 hours in advance of the job, especially if they are the young, attractive girls he keeps hiring who want to have a social life. I've tried to tell him people make plans, and he claims he has no control over it because the jobs come in that fast. I know it's a lie, he's the type that drives through life on macho energy, agree to do a thing then figure it out when it's a problem. I know for a fact he has calls weeks in advance, but doesn't consider them literally until the night before because he's to busy trying to juggle multiple businesses and raising children at the same time. He's the “Just get it done” type, literally after he acquired the business he was talking about how much more work we'd be getting because “everyone in event planning is women who are trying to backstab and be catty with one another, who'd all be happy to work with a man like himself that gets shit done”. Quite the opposite, most of my aunt's long-time customers dropped him like hot slag, leading him to where we are now with taking frequent shit jobs out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere just to keep the calendar full.
I'm starting to lose my mind. End of the year is always busy, I'm used to it, but being kept in the loop is what helps keep my stress levels down. Just this week I had to literally ask the buffoon about each individual day whether I was working or not because the last 4 fucking shifts were a surprise to me, being sent texts like I was in the loop when the work orders never came in on Google calendar. His response? “I sent them, did you not get them?” No bossman, you know I reply to them, if you really sent them a week ago, I would have hit yes or no immediately. You always call me the second I hit no on one to ask why, so how is it you didn't seem to notice that I haven't done either for an entire fucking week. r/antiwork, I can not tell you how stressed out I am. Every day is a nightmare wondering if I have a surprise shift I didn't know about, or if he's going to call me in a panic realizing he didn't do his schedule right and needs a miracle in the shape of one pissed off me.
The worst part about all this is my pride. This business was my aunt's. She worked to get it where it is, I bled burned and sweat along side her and now it's falling to shambles because it's just another point of income for captain dipshit. None of the other baristas clean the machines properly, it's always gross when I have to work on one used by someone else prior. Nobody in the company knows what a backflush is on an espresso machine (anyone who works with one should be mortified to read this), and even when I'm half-assing it, my service is still leagues better than anyone else he's managed to hold onto. I'm so tired, I don't know what else I can do that pays this well and gives me this much free time, but I don't know how long I can keep it up. I wish I had any other marketable experience besides making a damn fine cappuccino and driving a 16 foot truck.
Various edits for spelling because fuck autocorrect.