Saw a post recently about this sub not talking about anything other than office work and I've personally noticed that most posts are American, so I thought I might finally share this story to offer perspective from the catering business. Sorry for formatting.
I got a job as a waitress at my local pub (very rural England). The landlord was a relatively well-liked man who had made it clear previously he wanted to sell up and move elsewhere, but was still hiring. The pub is small so he asked me to come down and do some “training” on the job.
I was told it was a waitressing job, so when he started showing me around the kitchen and how I should be using the sinks I was a little confused but stuck with it. This was very informal and was only really a trial.
Landlord essentially doesn't tell me how to do my job. I like to think that I'm good at improvisation and having experience as a waitress anyway, I tried my best. Didn't know where anything went, where the cutlery/plates were and there were no table numbers. I'm just getting used to where the tables are and taking orders when the landlord takes me aside and asks why the washing up hadn't been done. At this point I'm getting a little mad, he expected me to take orders, take out food, tend the bar AND do the washing up.
Bearing in mind the absolute state of the kitchen (definitely wouldn't pass a health and safety visit) and the fact that everything had to be washed by hand, I wasn't all that keen to participate.
Should probably mention now that this pub was literally 5 minutes away from my house, a commute that short being massively uncommon in the countryside. This is why I held on as long as I could- would've been hugely convenient.
After an hour or two, landlord comes into the kitchen and starts yelling at me for “not listening” to the non-existent instructions he was giving me. Honestly I thought I was keeping on top of everything pretty well considering the circumstances, but he was clearly already angry. He shouts in my ear for long enough that I manage to finish the washing up (I think me ignoring him may have riled him up more, but I was already committed to the role).
At this point I'm over this job but I hold on just long enough for a table of 6 vegans to enter the pub. Order a 'scatter platter' each. This means a variety of vegan cheese and various vegetables I guess (waitress not a chef!!) The point is these are especially terrible to wash up and nobody else was working that night aside from the landlord, chef and myself.
Waited for the vegans to eat, letting a large amount of plates pile up in the meantime. As soon as they had finished, I slipped out the back door and made my way back home without telling anybody.
My dad, a very distant acquaintance of the landlord, got an angry phone call about 20 minutes later which consisted mostly of landlord shouting down the phone about the alarming amount of vegan cheese he had to clean up. To this day I have no idea how he got that number, but I imagine he had to pull a few favours.
I bumped into the chef that was on shift that night at a later job, who told me that the landlord had always treated younger women employees terribly- so much so that he avoided making any sort of conversation with them because he knew for a fact they wouldn't be staying long. He also told me that despite my brief encounter, I was the waitress that had riled him up the most 🙂
It's also worth noting the pub was later sold and I had a lengthy conversation with the new owners on how difficult it had been to remove the amount of dog feaces from the carpet in the flat above the pub where the landlord had lived. They also completely redid the kitchen as it was quite literally cheaper to replace everything than to clean the place.