Issue #28

Ever have a sh*tty job that you wanted to complain about in a weekly submission-based column named after Blink-182 lyrics? Send your submissions to worksuxiknow[at]gmail.com!

I work at a retirement home serving food. There’s the occasional grouch but usually everyone is pretty content to eat what we’re serving. Today, when I offered a woman a slice of coconut cream pie, she declined. In standard fashion I asked her if there was anything else she wanted instead, and she replied “Take my pain away!!!” and began to moan. All I could do was force a smile and serve pie to the women she was sitting with.
-Laura, Kingston

I retouch photos on the side. A while back I was sent some files of a semi-nude session an older woman had taken of herself for her boyfriend. The woman was the person who does my taxes every year. I had to resize her nipples.
-Anonymous

I decided to get a babysitting job to help pay for my new place. While watching the 5 year old at my apartment, he pissed on my brand new couch. Then proceeded to wipe it around with his already pissed in pants he was wearing on the parts of the couch that didn’t get wet. Awesome.
-Lexi

Today I overheard one of my co-workers saying to someone on the phone (apparently trying to tell them how to spell his last name) “No, no. That’s G. As in Jingle Bells.” I work for an English education R&D company in Korea. The co-worker is from Ohio.
-Donghee, Seoul

The week of Christmas, my coworkers and I were talking about bonuses and if anyone had heard whether or not we were getting them this year. We had gone back and forth speculating for a week and a half or so, and we all decided that we probably weren’t going to get one since it was so late in the year. Lo and behold, at around 11:00 on Christmas Eve (we worked that day) we were all called into the boss’s office separately and given an envelope. Excited, I ran back to my desk and opened the card, expecting a check for at least a couple hundred dollars. I opened the car and to my chagrin, there was a personal message written from my boss, with a packet of evergreen tree seeds stapled to the inside of the card.
-Eric, Buffalo

I work at a popular restaurant in Ithaca near Cornell and Ithaca College. A couple years ago I was the day bartender, which is typically a slow shift. One day a woman in her mid 30s came in for lunch. I noticed that she was staring at me after she had been in the building for about 10 minutes. She continued to come in for lunch for the next couple weeks and behaved similarly. Finally, she stops me and says, “Eric, I’m going to be blunt. My husband is 65 and can’t get it up, and I want a child. I’ll pay you if you can get me pregnant.” I assumed she was insinuating that I jizz on a petri dish and we’d go to a lab. She then said “We can go to a nice hotel, have some lobster, then…” She wasn’t attractive either. I think she just wanted to have sex.
-Eric

I work as a dishwasher/waiter at a catering hall in my town. One night I was training this kid as a dishwasher and I went our for a smoke break for about 5 minutes. He thought I left for the night (this is about 45 minutes into the 6 hour shift). He took the wedding cake and smeared it over the table spelling “DIE F**KERS! I QUIT” Not only did I have to clean up after the 350 person party by myself, but my manager didn’t pay be me charging me with “vandalism in the workplace”
-Ryan G.

When I was 17 I worked at a ski park. My twenty-something year old manager thought he would be cool if he showed me a cell phone video of his girlfriend giving him head. While I was eating dinner. It was a hot dog…
-Josh W., Union College