I have just worked for 8 months, which is not an amount of time I am willing to waste, scraping for bare subsistence. I held two jobs during that period of time and each one was clocking in at an average of 20 hours per week, sometimes less. If either boss knew I had a second job to cover the bills, they would have started cutting my hours even further or fired me outright. Both bosses publicly announced their dislike for workers with second jobs.

At both jobs I was made to feel worthless. At the first job I held, it was because my boss was obsessive. If anything wasn’t done specifically the way he instructed, he would poke you in the ribs and spend at least a half hour, sometimes an hour, explaining how do it properly. Also, everything was broken. We stuck plastic knives in the slicer so that it would run properly. If the restaurant got busy, the other workers would have to deal with the rush while you got told exactly how many times to turn a screw. One thing I remember my boss saying was “Don’t pump this machine too many times or it will overheat and electrocute you.” Our restaurant served 80 different sandwiches. 50% of those sandwiches were never ordered, which means we never got practice making them, which means we didn’t know how to make them, which means, you guessed it, we got reprimanded. We had to take a test about once a month. If we didn’t know 30 sandwiches, we would be suspended for a week. If we knew 40, we got a $0.25 raise until the next test. He bribed health code officers. He had camera watching us that he could pull up from his iPhone. He would occasionally call tired and drunk at the end of the night to see if we were closing properly. That job was so bad that when I walked into the second one, I thought I was in heaven.

My new boss knew how to do his job extremely well. He would give constructive criticism any time I made a mistake. But, it was still a minimum wage job. Eventually, I was working crazy hours just to make ends meet. I started developing insomnia. I started getting irritable and making mistakes. By the second month, I was so tired that by the end of a given day I couldn’t finish my sentences. If I had to do something like go to the bank or the DMV, it was easier to stay up all night after a shift, run my errands and then continue to drink coffee until my next shift. On days that I didn’t have anything to do, I would lie awake in bed for hours, my body completely confused about when to fall asleep. I was averaging about 4 hours of sleep a night or less. I learned that everyone at that job had gone through this at some point and therefore, no one gave a shit. I had to go home in the middle of a shift because I was so tired that my body was trying to throw up and fall asleep at the same time. My boss continued to criticize me the whole time.

Because my boss was frustrated with my incompetence, I got taken off of the hard shifts, which were also the night shifts. This meant less money and more sleep. I wasn’t making enough money anymore, but I had presence of mind and was finally happy. I started getting back into a regular sleep schedule. The more I slept, the happier I was, the less orders I forgot, the better I dealt with customers and co-workers. However, my boss still wasn’t satisfied. I found that the better I got at my job, the more often I was criticized. He even had two employees focus on me specifically. This meant that when I came in to work, he would sit me down and tell me mistakes I was making. Then, during work, someone else would be pointing out mistakes or telling me what to do every 15 minutes or so. Wash hands. Repeat. It never ended. I was being interrupted so much by criticism that I couldn’t actually focus on getting better. I later learned that my boss’s obsession with criticism was actually a way to make the employees feel worthless. He wanted emotional superiority over us so that we wouldn’t think we deserved a better job, or a raise.

At different times, I sat down with both of my bosses and talked about how the employees were being treated, or how I would like to be treated. This was after months of being called an idiot, useless, and bad at my job. Each time we sat down, I got the impression that neither boss was interested in changing their behavior. They were only interested in changing mine. My first boss would listen to me very sympathetically and then say “Great! I totally agree! You have good ideas! But I’m not that kind of guy. I can’t think like you do… So you should be the one to make all of those changes around here. Somebody’s got to whip all of these lazy kids into shape.” This was what he said to anyone who brought a concern to him. He was constantly playing employees off of each other. My second boss had an answer to everything, which was usually along the lines of “Everybody goes through that here,” “it’s part of the job,” or “you’re just not as good as you think you are.” My second boss also called every girl that worked there “fat” and “ugly,” but quietly, or in private so that it wasn’t obvious. Even the anorexic one. In both places I was subservient to someone who was blatantly manipulative and blatantly incompetent.

This essay is completely ignoring the other general complaints that come along with food service, which I won’t get into, because there are already many examples of them online.

At each job, I had my boss breathing down my neck for very simple things, like how many rolls of nickels to keep in the cash drawer. After I had voiced my concerns, I had each boss asking around the restaurant to see if they could catch me “stealing” or if the other employees thought I should be fired for some reason. At both jobs I had more than one employee stand up for me and tell me what was going on. Bosses like this aren’t typical, but they also aren’t atypical. Many bosses I have had in food service exhibited at least one quality I have mentioned. The average length of time anyone worked at one of those jobs was under 6 months.The average salary at each job was $8/hr.

Here is some math:

• 8 x 20 (hourly wage times hours worked per week) = $160
• 160 x 4 (weekly wage times weeks in a month) = $640
• 640 x 12 (monthly wage times months in a year) = $7680

In case you didn’t catch that, my average yearly salary comes to $7680 before taxes. If I work 30 hours a week, I make $11,520. For my first job I was making less than $7000/yr. For my second job I was making between to $7680 and $9600, depending on how much sleep I got.

More math:

If I spend half of my yearly salary (lets round to $8000,) on rent and utilities, I will have $335 per month for rent and utilities. What this means is that I will use the other $335 per month for:

• Food
• Internet (which is incredibly necessary if you want to find another job)
• Cell phone bills (also needed for new jobs)
• Transportation (bus, car, train, gas, car insurance)
• Glasses
• Doctors visits
• Dentist visits
• Soap and toilet paper
• Other purchases like a new computer or job interview clothes
• Health insurance
• Clothes to stay within dress code at work (pants will wear out if you work in them every day.)
• Anything else you can think of.

What I found was that I was becoming incredibly stressed out. I was micromanaging my girlfriend because it was what I was used to at work. I had less self esteem. I drank more. I became less trustworthy of strangers, more racist, more hateful, less patient, and less creative. I was unhappy enough that I wanted a new job every day, but I was often too drained to actually do it. Occasionally, I would spend a few days in a row searching for work, but more often than not, I just farted around on the internet. I didn’t like the kind of person I was becoming, and I wasn’t doing a great job of finding better work. So, I decided to quit my job.

Unfortunately, this looks bad on a resume. The H.R. department of a potential employer will probably ask you to explain your “gap in employment.” Not having a job makes it look like you can’t hold one down. Whereas sticking through something like this shows that you have tenacity and persistence. I completely disagree with this line of logic. I have personally done many things that show perseverance. I have driven across the country alone, multiple times. I have written a rough draft of a novel. Throughout my undergraduate education, I took classes year round so that I could graduate in 3 years. I have learned to speak basic Chinese, Swahili, French and Spanish. I have continued to practice martial arts from the age of 5 and music since the age of 10. I am currently learning command line prompt, working on movies for free, and–if you are reading this in any major publication–making my mark as a writer.

I decided to quit working in food service because I sincerely believe that it was turning me into a worse human being. I have the personal skills and qualifications to get a better job. If it takes a few months of eating into my savings and explaining this to future employers, so be it. At least when I show up for the interview, I will be happy with who I am.

I encourage anyone reading this to pursue a greater goal in life. My father said to me “If you want to do something, you have to do it. People will tell you the whole time that you are crazy and that it can’t be done. Don’t listen to those people. They don’t know what they are talking about.”