Started a new job, when I arrived on the first day they didn’t know where to put me and didn’t know what I was going to do. So they sat me in the boss’s office and told me to read a book. After a few hours, the boss showed up and immediately started on “imagine starting a new job and not wearing a plain shirt!” (My business shirt was white with widely spaced faint grey stripes). Sacked immediately. They still paid me for two weeks though.

Most of my working adult life has involved struggling with untreated ADHD. It’s one of those things that a lot of people failed to understand, and when I’d explain my symptoms to them, they would often just say that it sounded like I was depressed, burnt out, and overburdened at work. While all of those things were true, executive dysfunction is more complicated and nuanced - for me, it manifests in the form of procrastination, seeking stimulation, and difficulty carrying a thread of consciousness from one sentence to the next. It can also mean that your self-esteem is constantly in the toilet.

In spite of this, I had a lot of success in early stage tech startups, which are often chaotic. You have to switch roles at a moment’s notice, going from customer support and technical resolution to product development and logistics. When things are on fire, customers are angry, and things are broken, I tend to be at my very best. It’s the slower, more tedious, repetitive tasks like manual data entry that I tend to struggle with. I have been forced onto Performance Improvement Plans more than a few times in my career - despite glowing performance reviews - and have never gotten off of one.

In spite of dropping out of college, I had managed to make a career for myself. I worked at a few tech startups, and had a really good reputation among my team members. As I continued to climb a corporate ladder and move to bigger and bigger companies, I found myself becoming burdened with larger responsibilities. I can accomplish anything I set my mind to, but I gradually turned myself into a workhorse for the entire team. My manager eventually saddled me with an enormous task where I had to develop a deeply technical presentation from scratch and give it to a live audience of over 300 engineers. To be clear - no such resource had ever been developed within the company. I guess this stemmed from me rewriting so much of the documentation so that ordinary people could understand it?

I did the best I could. I solicited advice from just about every department in the company, rewrote the whole thing several times over, and practiced my presentation in front of my manager over and over again, as they nitpicked every aspect of it. Presentation day finally came, it ended up being a huge success. For me, this was a massive accomplishment. Unfortunately, my work performance had been languishing in other areas, and I once again ended up on a PIP. My manager drove the team into the ground, and I tried to make the case that I was just about done with being treated this way.

I ended up in an HR meeting that I thought was initially being done to hash out our differences and find a path forward, but it was actually just the company kicking me out. I got a severance package, struggled for months to apply for a new job, faced a ton of rejections and self-sabotage. I smoked pot and got drunk until I had to sell all of my belongings just to survive, and then had to move back across the country to live with my dad and apply for the military. Four years later, I’m married, going to school full-time, and living a pretty okay life as a veteran.

Worked at a place that laser-engraves funeral urns. Owner was a huge Trump fan, but fuck it, I figured I’d just never talk about politics.

Turns out that every fucking day, he would sit down and spend 45 minutes talking politics, MAGA bs, blah blah blah.

So after one of his long sessions, he sees me kinda ignoring him (actually trying to do the work he hired me for!) and he says, “So you a Democrat?”

I told him no, but since I was only paying half attention him, I blurted out that I was actually a Socialist.

So after that, every fucking day, he reads me some article on his phone about how horrible and terrible Socialist theory is.

After several days, I’m in full ignore mode, just working. And then he says something to the effect of if I didn’t like what he was saying, not to let the door hit my ass on the way out.

So I brushed it off, and just said, “nah, all good. Your politics don’t bother me.”

But the more I thought about his pissy attitude, the more and more pissed I got. So when I took lunch, I just didn’t go back. No calls from him. No texts. Nothing. And I didn’t call or text them either.

I got a new job the next week, and never thought much of it. Then all of a sudden, I realized that even tho I was telling myself I quit, the reality is, it probably counts as being fired.

And I went my whole life never being fired. So I was kinda bummed that I let him talk me into just leaving. I really should have given notice.

But it’s not like I worked there long enough to even up on a resume or anything. So I guess I can just pretend I never worked there. lol

I worked in a scuba dive shop for a few months. My first day I was told to come in for orientation. I showed up and the manager was very suprised to see me there. He didn’t know I was coming because nobody told him. I thought “okay mistakes happen” then he handed me an employee handbook and told me to sit in the back and start reading.

An hour later he comes back in and asks if I had any questions about it. I said no, then we setup an app for timekeeping and I went back home.

I had my first shift a few weeks later. I had 0 retail experience and they just said go help that customer. I had no training at this point. After making a fool of myself i was mocked and asked to put some stock away instead.

After a week of that nonsense, I was moved into their smaller shop that I was to work by myself. I got 1/2 a day of “training”, zero direction on what to do in my down time and was told that the owner liked to watch the camera and if I was caught doing nothing, I would be fired.

This smaller shop had a “manager” that was never around, about 5 customers a day asking where the toilet was, and not much else to do. I wanted to quit simply because of the boredom but it got worse after I started working on their dive charter boat 2 days a week.

I a piece of equipment was found to be broken or not put away properly it was automatically my fault. We had to refill all of the dive air tanks after each trip, about 50 of them. It took a long time and I would get talked to if it took too long, or if the tanks weren’t filled correctly. You can only do one of those things safely.

Then one day my timekeeping app sends me an SMS that one of my shifts was deleted, so I went and had the day off. I came in the next day to them asking where I was. They actually changed the shift without asking me, the app said it was deleted and again that was my fault.

In summary they never trusted their staff to do anything right, and blamed us when something went wrong, even when it was out of our control like a faulty pressure gauge, or customers breaking rental equipment. I quit shortly after someone almost lost their foot on the boat from a falling tank. It’s likely only a matter of time before they have a bigger accident and I don’t want to be anywhere near that place when it happens.