Reply #9: several...

[Tom Kitten]

Cashier at the old Newberrys at Lloyd Center, especially at Christmastime....for minimum wage you were told if you saw shoplifters to run out the door and apprehend them yourself! I was shortchanged once $40 and realized it seconds after it happened, alerted management but they were gone...I was told I had a choice...pay the store back out of my own paycheck or get fired on the spot...I took off my tie and said, ok that's it, but was talked out of it by a sympathetic asst manager in training...they took 10$ out of my meager paycheck every week but I quit soon after (3 armed robberies in a week in the store made my mind up)...After I quit I got a check in the mail from from for the money I had paid out of my own pocket plus a note "Perhaps this will teach you to be more careful with other people's money"...

Dishwasher at infamous Poor Richard's Restaurant in NE Portland...16 waiters and buspeople would drop busboxes full of dirty dishes, often metal steak platters with uneaten food piled on top of wine glasses (many of which were broken as a result) onto a conveyor belt that would enter your little niche in hell...If you got behind it was a living hell, a growing mass of uneaten food and dirty dishes and silverware...Plus, we were responsible for replenishing the salad box, waiters would ring a bell if the salad supply ran low...we were to run in the walkin and scoop salad from trash cans full of tossed salad made in advance into boxes for the waiters to sccop the salad bowls in, and needless to say there was no time to wash your hands between chores!
After a while if you survived that you could move to other tasks, like buttering garlic bread (slices of stale French bread buttered form another trash can full of whipped garlic butter kept in the walkin, to keep it nice and hard!) Stupid asst. manager once actually stood by me with a stopwatch counting the number of pieces of shitty bread I tossed in a bucket to see how well I met quota (I happened to do so that time, "Good job, Brown!" he said, yes they called you by your last name there, which always rankled me also...All I can say is they are still in business after over 20 years since I been there, don't ever eat there!

Those 2 jobs from hell make the days at the microfilm company seem like a picnic in retrospect!

But I've had some good jobs too...many a topic for another time...
especially since it looks like I've killed yet another thead!