I work as a line cook/kitchen manager. Yesterday, my Assistant General Manager had asked me to clean the wall behind the fryer whenever I got the chance to do so.
So I get behind the fryer and I’m doing my thing cleaning the wall. Suddenly my friend and coworker looks over at me in horror and tells me to go look at my hair in the bathroom because there’s something in it. In my mind I’m thinking it’s some debris from being back behind the fryer. Nope. An entire chunk of my hair is burnt off from the heat behind the fryer.
I’m almost immediately in tears. I take out my hair and there’s a huge chunk of blackened hair that falls into the bathroom sink. Everyone saw it happen.
I ask to leave because I HAVE to go get a haircut to fix this; I have an important celebration coming up so I’m not trying to be eternalized in these photos with a chunk of my hair missing. My AGM let’s me go, but asks for me to clock out first. I was gone for maybe an hour.
The thing is that I’m dead broke. Job doesn’t pay enough, and I was lucky that the card was even approved after the haircut. I understand that getting burnt, cut, or whatever is all part of the job. Reading through this thread, and seeing what some have to say about certain workplace issues, I wonder if I should be compensated for the time I was absent so that I could fix my hair. It was only burnt as a result of doing what my boss told me to do, and I’m not even asking to be compensated for the haircut itself, just the time I spent trying to fix the incident. What do you guys think?