This happened several years ago, but I felt like it was worth posting here.
Back in 2019, I was living in Sacramento, CA and underemployed. I have a Master's degree in my field, but interviews were still hard to get. I landed a phone interview for a sort of fire prevention maintenance worker for a company called Mountain G in Folsom. Mountain G was a subcontractor for a state project; they had large teams of people cleaning up forested areas within the state to prevent wildfires. This was a reaction to the large wildfires, including the Paradise fire, that happened in 2017/2018.
The phone interview for this position was completely unplanned and caught me off guard, but thankfully I was at my second job cleaning a barn, so the only distraction was a noisy rooster. The woman told me that the pay was $17.50/hr, with plenty of potential for overtime. I'd be part of the Santa Rosa team, and they'd transport us to and from the work site. I thought it sounded doable, and 4 hours of overtime (2 hours each way to the work site) for riding in a car was alright with me at the time. She also liked my extensive project management experience, and offered to send over a few contracts to “review” for the company with the hopes of landing me a better full-time job with them later. In the meantime, she offered me the fire maintenance position and I accepted.
Later the next week, I went into the company office to fill out paperwork. They required me to take a drug test, fill out numerous basic skills/personality/safety tests, all of which I got paid for. (To be fair, it didn't take long.) They gave me a phone and charger to communicate with my team who would pick me up the following Monday at 6 a.m.
That's when I learned that I would NOT be returning to Sacramento each night. Instead, the company had “rented out apartments” for their employees and I would be staying with 3 other unknown women in a 4 bedroom apartment. The apartments were already furnished, so I was just expected to bring my clothes and toiletries. The HR lady also told me, in quite the chipper tone, that Mountain G was providing us with a per diem of $40 per WEEK for food. Keep in mind that the federal per diem rates at that time were $130 per day. And this lady made it sound like they were being generous.
I went home and thought about it. Usually I would've rejected the offer right then and there, but the well of interviews had been dry for a while at that point, and I was desperate. Still, I texted the team on Sunday night to let them know that I was pulling out. I called the HR woman on Monday morning to tell her that these conditions weren't originally discussed in the interview, and that I was going to resign. She apologized and informed me that she had been “hearing that a lot” from candidates, and regretted that it wasn't laid out honestly from the start. I later looked up the woman who interviewed me on the phone and found out that she had been sued for embezzlement less than 10 years beforehand; apparently she stole millions from her previous employer to fund her horse showing hobby.
Just wild.