I was scheduled to work on Valentine’s Day. Didn’t go in. Called in half an hour before my shift started and said I quit. They screwed me over the night before so an eye for an eye right? The night before, I walked out with -10 dollars. Yep, negative ten dollars. Means I had to PAY to work. The whole day was a mess. Not sure where to start, so I’ll set the foundation to what went down. Crappy training, manager, boss, (I’d also say bartender but half the time there isn’t even one), and quite simply the motto “the customer is always right”. I’ll start off by saying there’s a high turnover rate: new people (teenagers with no restaurant experience) are hired almost literally off the street every two weeks. This is a touristic restaurant located in one of California’s “must visit” attractions. It’s a fast paced environment run by employees who don’t know what they’re doing. They usually start off as busboys so they’re supposed to help out with the usual: clear plates off the table and refill drinks. But the ratio of bussers to servers is small, 3:6, so they’re usually overwhelmed. Next, the manager. She drinks on the job AND she’s a chain smoker. This means she has to go outside every hour for 15 minutes and us servers don’t know where she goes. Our customers often have to wait for 15 minutes to get their check because we have to have her pin to void some items off of our iPads. So, that night, while I’d get my food from the kitchen, my tables would walk out because of the long wait. The boss doesn’t help, he merely just looks over everyone and acts like he’s too above waitering. The bartender also has to serve so they usually can’t make drinks and that means we have to make drinks ourselves. That adds some more wait time for the customers for sure. I could go on forever but I’m just going to finish this up by saying how I lost money while working that night. Super long story short they made me pay for the bills of the people who had walked out which means that I had to pay out of my tips and out of my own bank account so basically I made no tips that night even though it was one of the busiest nights of the year. And to top it all off a table went and complained to the manager about me and tried to get me in trouble by saying I had ruined their night by being “rude” (in other words talking to them the same way they were talking to me) and man it felt good. I walked out that night knowing that it was going be my last night there and I felt so free.
Tl;dr I quit on Valentine’s Day after having to pay to work the night before
Edit: on a different note, if anyone looks at my profile, you’ll also see that I posted a question wondering if what my now ex job did was illegal (mysteriously taking money away from the servers). Still wondering what that’s all about.