This story a bit long but I really felt like sharing.
I'm also using text to speech and it can't really understand my strong accent (for some reason it changes work to walk a lot and I don't know if I caught it all)
I keep seeing stuff about how gen z stand up for themselves when it comes to work, and I always thought there's no way I'll be able to do that because I am such a people pleaser and I was never able to stand up for myself, so I thought I would be stuck in a horrible job where I would be miserable, but today I realized I literally have a story when I stood up for myself and Low-key kind of proud of myself.
So here's the story.
So I was working in this absolutely awful job, I was supposed to be a sales person which is the absolute worst job for someone who's a people pleaser because I couldn't sell anything to anyone especially when I knew how much what we were selling sucked. It was and extremely overpriced one year subscription to do something that you usually don't do often (I will not specify what it was because honestly I'm terrified one of them is on Reddit because they will definitely figure out it's them).
My working conditions were actually okay, I had AC I most of the time had a place to sit (other than that one time when they decided I should be standing all of the time because it was also sort of like a cash register and they figured I should be standing there. By the way I was standing for one day and shut that up real quick, because I found out there's a law against it), the pay was okay, it was minimum wage (unlike America here minimum wage is actually livable and even though it's a bit lower for teenagers it was still quite good) and for every subscription I got a 7$ bonus.
Now, the problems start with the son of the owner, he was maybe 13 or 11, and he was fucking annoying, he used to come almost every day and sit next to me and be extremely annoying, he really wanted to be a part of his father's business so he wanted to prove to his father that he can sell, unfortunately he wanted to do it while I was selling. There is a reason why there was only one salesperson at a time, that was only one register and not a lot of people showed up in the first place. So over the time, when I try to sell to a person the kid was jumping and start selling instead of me, my problem with that was that he took all of my opportunities to sell as well as all of my bonuses and the credit for the sells. Unfortunately, I couldn't do anything about the kid.
The second problem was the illegal shit they used to do. Well it didn't happen often I saw several very illegal acts while I was working. For example one time I saw them committing tax fraud, and they lied to their customers about the conditions of the subscription constantly. During one of the sales, my boss lied to a customer that the subscription she bought will last forever, while in fact only lasting for a year. Another time was when he was arguing with an entire family that the adult son of a woman can't use her subscription since he is an adult and has his own family, and it's one subscription per family.
After working there for about a month, they realized I wasn't profitable since I wasn't selling any subscriptions (I had other duties that I was good at, but my main job was the subscriptions and I was awful at that), and decided to move me to a different department, but they decided to also not tell me. The HR woman called me and explained that they're a man down in said department and asked if I can fill in. Stupidly I agreed. For the next two weeks they put me only in the other department, and during my last day at the register (which I didn't know was my last day at the register, or… Drum rolls please… at the company) I found that they took my name off of the register. Now, I normally wouldn't mind, since the other department was nice and the kid mostly didn't show up there. There were bonuses for selling stuff there, which was easier considering people actually came in there to buy what I was selling, and in general I had to interact with way less people. But I had 2 days there before my last day at the register, and I realized it was just as bad.
On the first day, they tried to tell me I can't sit there, but I quickly shut it off, the manager there did illegal stuff too, for example, (at this point it's kind of hard to not reveal what the other department was, it was an arcade. I guess you are confused about it now, but yeah and arcade had nothing to do in the place I worked in) one customer gave us their arcade card so we would take some points off to buy a prize for his son, but forgot the card with me, after a while I figured he didn't want the card back so my boss deleted the information and put it back in the blank cards pile, Later, the man came back for the card, so instead of remaking his card with the leftover money and points that were on there, my boss just gave him an empty card.
I decided I'm quitting after one incident that I will tell you now:
Next to the arcade some water spilled, one customer came to me to complain, and I found two different people who worked there (one of them was the kid) and ask them to find the cleaner so he would clean it. The kid told me to just clean it myself, and I guess every reasonable person would, but I hate cleaning in my house and there is no way in hell I would become a cleaner for half the salary of a normal cleaner, so I said no and told him it wasn't in my contact, and I never agreed to clean. A day later we got a text in the work's WhatsApp group “reminding” the employees the terms of work for everyone who wasn't a salesman, they specified that we are not like the salesmen, and we have to do stuff like cleaning. There were more stuff in this text message but at this point I was fucking pissed, I was hired to be a salesperson, so the terms I agreed to were the terms of a salesperson. That was the point I said fuck it, there is no fucking way I am working as a cleaner, I intentionally looked for a job that didn't include cleaning since cleaning other people's mess discusses me, there was also no fucking way I would work under this kid again, since he kept on acting like a jerk and giving me orders, like he is under the legal age for a kid to be employed, he is not my boss.
On my last day at the register I got a phone call from the HR lady who asked me about my days at the arcade and basically tried to imply that I would work only there form that day forward. I disagreed and was basically fired on the spot (I say basically because she never really said I am fired just implied it again, but I completely agreed and she told me to tell my boss to replace me at the register).
My firing was also definitely illegal but at this point I just couldn't handle another day there, and honestly don't really care about them enough to do something.