In July 2018, I got a job working the front desk at a vet's office. I love animals, so I was really excited about this job. My first red flag, though, was that everyone working there warned me that the vet was kind of a d**k, but was an okay guy when you got to know him. There was a sign in the back room that said something like “I'm the boss, I make the rules” or something to that effect. I noticed the problems, but I really wanted to work with animals so I decided to take the job and stick around.
The vet tech who normally worked at the office was on maternity leave, and immediately I was doing work that was not in my job description. I was putting blood samples through the centrifuge, counting out pills for prescriptions, and at one point was taught how to give an injection (while being yelled at for not pulling the medicine into the vial right, which was fun). I'm pretty sure some of this stuff was actually illegal for me to be doing as someone with no actual vet training.
A lot of the time, I felt like the vet would give me conflicting instructions just to make me look stupid. We had a quarantine room outside, basically a truck where he would see animals that couldn't be in contact with other animals for whatever reason. He told me once to go out there and wait for him while he wrangled a dog, and then came to find me and laughed at me for doing what he asked me to do by waiting by the truck. He chastised me for just “sitting at the computer all day” when 99% of my job was calling clients, scheduling, and taking notes on visits. Tf else was I supposed to?
This guy was beyond just an asshole, though. I once heard him joke about him getting scolded by another vet at a different hospital for breaking a sterile field during a surgery and saying “we both know there's nothing sterile going on here” so basically admitting he doesn't sterilize before operating on people's pets. He once told me that I had to get a client's dying cat into a crate because it was “policy” even though the thing couldn't even move. The owner was sobbing just wanting to hold his cat that was about to be put down and I was forced to tell him to put him in a crate. I went out back and broke down after that one. I was already pretty sure I was going to quit, but the final straw was when a co-worker asked me to bring a big dog around the other side of the building so it wouldn't cross paths with a smaller dog he was moving. No problem. I did what I was asked, but my co-worker had accidentally gone the wrong way with his dog and we crossed paths. My co-worker apologized because it was his mistake, but the vet yelled at me saying I was the one who did it wrong even though he *wasn't even there* to witness anything that happened. He was always on a power trip. I quit that day and worked there for a total of 2 weeks. So yeah, be careful where you bring your pets, everyone.