Forewarning: my adhd brain doesn’t always connect the sentences the way they need to, and I can ramble while I lose my place and go off in a tangent to without any reason, abruptly bring my thought process back to correct train of thought. So I apologize if these happen as I post.
Over the past 4 years I have worked for the same gas station company while moving around to different stores in my area. In the past two years the franchise side sold back to corporate, which tanked everything in employees eyes. During the two years I have had so many times of being shown I am not a person, I am just a numbered cog, and if I break down they will get someone to replace me with zero issue. I was injured my lower back in march 2021, fought with workers comp until I got an attorney in June to which workers comp finally acquiesced that I was in the right and back paid my wages for the two months that I was unable to work. I received 4 spinal injections from august ‘21 to feb ‘22, where I was finally cleared of the back injury, but during the back injury Sep ‘21, while still being forced to work in pain and what not, I gained an inguinal hernia while working that did not get cleared up until Aug ‘22. Workers comp and my corporate company during this entire time, gaslit me, told me I was crazy, it was in my head, I didn’t have injuries etc. all to get out of the accommodations and at some points during, flat out told to ignore my medical notes and just “do the work”. These were all red flags of me not being valued as a person.
So just recently, I had a CO2 leak in my back room, which luckily I know the risks of and can act accordingly. At 3:07 am I changed a BIB and the CO2 wouldn’t shut off and wouldn’t pull the syrup from the BIB into the line, causing a massive increase in CO2 and frosting of the tanks and lines. I called the corp maintenance and over the sound of hissing CO2 I explained that the CO2 was rising insanely rapidly. For reference I started work with 0ppm, and once the leak started and while on the phone (roughly 3:12 at this point) and it had already jumped up to 2500ppm. So during the course of the next hour, while opening the doors and letting it vent to the outside night air I sat inside my car while periodically sticking my head in to check the CO2 levels and if the BIB has stopped. It hasn’t. I turn away a set of two customers around 4:30 letting them know my co2 is massively leaking and it could be dangerous inside. I was told during the last CO2 issue that I was not to “close down the store nor call fire/ems etc because the sensor was broken at that time.” So I ignored the first part and closed the store while waiting for the “tech” to show up to supposedly fix my CO2 issue.
The periodic checks were as follows: 2500 at 3:12a, 3340 3:15a, 6730 3:40a, 8540 4a, and finally at 4:30a I watched it jump from 9990 to a % of 1.15 then 1.35, roughly 13,500ppm. For reference sake OSHA CO2 exposure is 5000 in a full 8hr shift. Nearly 3 times that amount.
Now at roughly 5 am the BIB has finally pulled product out, is no longer cycling and is finally dropping levels, roughly 5:30a its dropped to roughly 4000 which is much better but still not good, and continues to drop as the CO2 tanks have emptied. Around 6a it’s dropped to under 1000. I feel safe enough to open the store and let people back in.
My “tech” did not arrive until after 2pm. 11 hours after being called for as I would assume a maintenance emergency. Corpo just told me to continue to wait every time I called to inform them of the issue. Looking back I should have just called the Fire Dep, and let them come and corpo deal with the fallout, but I played myself and just “worked it out”. Because after all was said and done corporate didn’t care about my emergency, they cared that I still did business. I was left to die for the last 5 hours of my shift, and only because of the tank emptying out and me ventilating the store, was it safe to continue business. They gave zero fucks about me as a person, if I lived or died. It’s disgusting.
End rant.