A first real job can be exciting, but in today’s story, one recent college grad’s first real job ends up being bad for his mental health.

It’s a sales job, and while the job itself is sometimes fine, the owner makes life miserable for his employees.

Eventually, two of the employees get revenge.

Let’s see how the story plays out…

Chocolate Hell

About 10 years ago I worked what you would think would be a dream job.

I was a traveling chocolate salesman for a small family owned chocolate company.

If you told 8 year old me I would have freaked out.

I get hired in late summer, and it’s my first big boy job after college.

The guy who interviews me the first time is the owner’s nephew, nice young guy who I am still friends with to this day.

Interview goes well and I’m invited back for a second, this time with the owner who is the most intimidating man I’ve ever met.

I can tell in the first few minutes that this dude is wild, but the interview goes well and I get hired.

I’ll never forget accepting the job, the owner shook my hand and said “I’m going to break you” with an evil grin.

Definitely a red flag but I had been job hunting for so long I just went with it.

The state fair wasn’t a fun place to work.

So I get sent off to a state fair with his nephew who ran the outside sales portion of the company.

Outside sales there focused on working state fairs, trade shows and any other place you could setup a booth to sell chocolate by the pound.

Nephew is an absolute boss and a pleasure to work for, but the state fairs were terrible work.

14 hour days for two weeks straight, little to no breaks and on your feet the whole time.

By the end you have no energy left and just want to go home.

They would send new hires there to see if they could hack it.

A work trip with the owner was also unpleasant.

I make it through and have to go on a trip with the owner the very next week, basically out of the pan and into the fire.

I’m stuck in a truck with owner for a 14+ hr trip to Colorado while delivering product and making cold calls on the way.

This was where I really found out how crazy owner is.

Dude was on me 24/7.

Everything I did was criticized, and he was basically always yelling or lecturing me, but at the end of the day he would build me up and talk about how great I was.

He almost perished, but the boss ended up liking him.

I had one night to escape the guy while in CO because I had family there and went to dinner with them.

Cousin and I get T-boned on the way to drop me back off at our hotel.

I was about 2ft from being directly hit by the other driver and would have been done for.

Was called a wimp the next morning when I could barely get out of bed for work.

I could literally go on for days about the crazy stuff I’ve seen and heard this guy do, and there are probably people on here who will know who I’m talking about because he’s just that wild.

Somehow though over the year I worked there the guy really took a liking to me.

It didn’t save me from being yelled at and honestly made it worse because I worked closely with him more.

He was promoted.

His nephew left for obvious reasons, and I replaced him as the outside sales manager.

There was a good 6 months where I rarely saw him and we were breaking previous years sales at every show we went to.

After about 8 months in as Director, state fair season was coming around, and I knew it was going to be rough.

We did 3 state fairs each year and the last one was the worst because owner travels out with us and he is the boss for the show rather than myself.

We struggle through the first two and the last one was the worst two weeks of my life and it’s not even close.

The last fair was horrible, but then it was supposed to get better.

During the fair, myself and my normal crew had considered flying home unannounced because owner was so awful to all of us.

We even half joked about making him “disappear.”

Somehow we make it through and get to go home.

My next show was supposed to be a breeze.

It was a festival of mostly old people and was considered a vacation to the last director.

On my way down to the show, I get a call from owner that he feels bad for me and wants to come help at that show.

My stomach sank because I was literally unhealthy with stress at this point.

I call the lady who ran operations (a complete saint, I loved her) and told her he can’t come down or I will lose my crap.

She can’t do anything and he is definitely coming down to help.

He and his brother stopped at McDonald’s to think.

I held on to that job because it was more money than I could possible make anywhere else at the time, and I felt like I couldn’t leave.

Plus the owner had spent the last year brainwashing me.

He would break me down and build me back up, and I was weirdly dependent on it.

I was so broken that I had to pull over off the highway and just stop for a while.

My brother was working with me and driving the other truck down to the show.

We stopped at McDonalds and tried to eat, but I wasn’t hungry.

My brother being there is probably the only reason I was able to think clearly.

Neither of us wanted to deal with owner for another two weeks.

He and his brother decided to quit.

I looked at my brother and asked him if he was down to just bail and deal with being unemployed later.

My older brother is known as “the dude” for his Lebowski like demeanor, so we both said “screw it, let’s go bowling” and that was it.

We drove the rest of the way to the show, unloaded the booth and then drove the small truck home in the middle of the night.

I got all my stuff out of my office and left my key to the factory and company credit card on owners desk with a note that said “I quit, you are going to be alone if you don’t learn how to treat other people” or something along those lines.

Blocked everyone from the company on my phone so they couldn’t try to bring me back.

According to other employees, his quitting “changed” the owner.

That was it. Never heard from owner again.

The show started the next morning with no booth setup.

Owner got my note the same morning and apparently flew out the door when he figured out what was happening.

I’ve talked to other people from the company, and they said I actually changed him and he’s not as bad as he used to be.

I’m apparently a legend there and receive discounts at his stores if they know who I am.

I should also mention that the owner was such a legendary jerk that he called his son “weak” while being wheeled on to an ambulance after he tried to unalive himself.

It does sound like a dream to work for a chocolate company, but sales isn’t exactly easy.

The owner in this story sounds crazy, but it’s great that it sounds like he changed for the better in the end.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story…

You can learn important lessons from bad bosses.

He learned life lessons.

Are all chocolate bosses crazy?

The boss could’ve gotten his own revenge when he quit.

I’m going to think about chocolate differently now.

Well, probably not.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.