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And I Thought Working at a Florist’s on Valentine’s Day Sucked

True high school story. I have never in my life had a worse day at any job, and I’ve had jobs where people threatened to fuck, sue and kill me. I don’t know what the owner was smoking asking me to start that day. I didn’t know how to do anything. I didn’t know what flowers were what, how the cash register worked, how the order system worked, what to say when I answered the (one, non-cordless, incredibly loud) phone. I had no idea who any of the florists were so even when I did answer
the phone I couldn’t identify who the call was for, I didn’t know the
delivery drivers’ routes or their names or the hours they worked.

Certainly no one was in a position to train me. When I asked questions people yelled. I couldn’t blame them. The customer sitch was like that scene in I Am Legend where the creatures keep throwing themselves on the glass. I didn’t understand why these baseball-capped douchebags were coming in at 9 p.m. freaking the fuck out because they’d forgotten it was Valentine’s — like, it’s kind of inescapable, read a calendar, Chipster — and we didn’t have any roses left for them. Men kept coming in demanding something, anything, buy me out of the doghouse somehow. The cherry on top of this shit sundae was the woman who came in hauling an arrangement sent by an apparent stalker and THREW IT AT US. I felt for her, but Jesus.

I wish I could say the job got better, but note to the job market newbies: A boss oblivious enough to hire a 16-year-old with no experience to start on Valentine’s Day without any training is not a boss that fosters an environment any more hospitable than the inside of Satan’s asshole. I lasted six months because I hated quitting anything, but I quit the shit out of that job. It was giving me an ulcer.

But working at a sex shop on Valentine’s Day is apparently SO MUCH WORSE.

“Should I be weirded out by the fact that there was a box of Girl Scout cookies in the lube shipment?”

Oldie but goodie via, in a roundabout way, Metaquotes.

A.

9 thoughts on “And I Thought Working at a Florist’s on Valentine’s Day Sucked”

  1. My worst job evah: working as a Dean & Deluca cashier. I lasted all of three days and got yelled at by the Indian fellow who was my supervisor when I quit. To this day, it is still difficult for me to go into ANY Dean & Deluca, and the one in SoHo? Forget it. Noooo way.

  2. I worked in a flower shop once, when I was seventeen. It was a much smaller operation, much more laid back. It was a fun place to work. It was the 70’s…
    My worst job was…well, perhaps I should save the story in case A. wants to use it for a weekend question thread.

  3. My first paid job, at age 16, was working in a vegetable processing plant. My job? Culling beets. I was dressed from head to toe in rubber to keep from going home red and spent the day bent over a trash-dumpster-type container where a conveyor belt dropped a continual drip of beets into the bin. I had to root through this mess and pick out the culls. The people were kind enough, but the actual work was a killer. I was paid $1.80/hr and did the job for an entire summer. But I didn’t eat beets for a verrry long time.

  4. I worked at 2 different florists as temp jobs. One was a 1-800-Flowers type place that just did roses. That was fun, no dealing with customers, mostly a warehouse gig. I would spend hours ripping the thorns off of huge bunches of roses with this specially designed machine and would take home dozens of roses that just bloomed and couldn’t be shipped and give them to random people. The other was a commercial florist loading trucks and doing delivery and setup at fancy hotels for their holiday decorations. Both were fun but I have never had to do intense customer service with the public. I’d be bad at that because you can’t tell people to chill the frack out.

  5. well, one job my boss was a dick, but no customers at that one. the other one had customer’s i dealt with on saturdays. for 3 months. the cash register sucked and the boss even suckier as he was a dittohead. but can”t say i had a worst day. maybe the fri evening where no customers and didn’t let me go home early EVEN THO WE HAD INCHES OF SNOW AND I HAD TO GO AT LEAST 15 MILES HOME. but NO! took me over an hour. and yes, HIS NAME WAS DICK!

  6. Wow. That sounds like a terrible job.
    Not to get all political about it, but the neocons really like when we send jobs to other countries, those people don’t complain. They are just happy for the work at 30 cents an hour.
    Personally I would like to have some tariffs on goods from other countries or just say, “We won’t accept stuff that we don’t know the history of the labor that went into the product and the environmental record of the company.
    But that will never happen.

  7. My worst job was working for a real estate agent for a summer. She fired me before I could get up the gumption to quit, and I’ve never been so relieved (pissed, but relieved). Why was it so bad? Well, I think this one example says it all: I was her gopher, and she always had these stacks of scratch paper with notes on them of things she needed me to do. One day, I went in, and about halfway down the stack was a note that read, “Buy a present for a 7-year-old boy.”
    I found out that afternoon it was for her son. The (ahem) woman couldn’t be bothered to go shopping for her son, so she had her assistant do it for her, an assistant who’d never met the son, had no idea what the son liked, and who the woman couldn’t have known would have a clue what to get a 7-year-old boy.
    What an awful excuse for a human being.

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