When you get your first job, you usually don’t know exactly what to expect, so you just go along with whatever your boss tells you.

When the 14-year-0ld girls in this story started working at a tea shop, their boss left them to work alone for full days at a time, forcing them to deal with upset customers and more.

On the occasion written about here, she left them alone for so long that they ran out of inventory to run the shop, and then got upset with them for trying to find a way to keep customers happy.

Let’s read the whole story.

My first job as a waitress: boss used to leave two 14 year old girls to run her business for days on end.

I’ve worked on and off as a waitress since I was 14, and I have a few stories I thought I’d share.

I first worked at a retro/vintage-themed tea shop. It had just opened and the only employees, apart from the owner, were my best friend and I who were 14 at the time.

The owner was nuts – I won’t go into great detail because that deserves its own post. But for the purpose of this story, I’ll reiterate that we were two 14 year old’s, the shop had just opened, and she regularly left us alone for days on end.

Literally, she’d open up in the morning and only come back to lock up.

We might see her when she’d drop off her two young kids for a few hours of unpaid babysitting, courtesy of us. But I digress.

Wow, the owner must have really trusted these people.

She had provided us with very little training.

Neither of us had worked in the food industry before – being 14 – and the menu items were elaborate “afternoon teas” and such that we were expected to prepare from scratch.

Somebody once ordered a “ploughman’s lunch” but as there were no descriptions on the menu, and we had no idea what it was, I had to go and ask the customer what it was they were expecting on their plate, at which point they promptly walked out.

A mom and her daughters wanted tea.

My favorite story takes place on a quiet afternoon.

A woman had come in with her two daughters, adorable little blonde girls all dressed up for their “afternoon tea”, and they were ooh-ing and ah-ing at the decor.

My friend and I were in a pretty good mood that day having had no angry customers storming out, as was the usual.

I was washing dishes in the back when my friend comes in with a worried look on her face saying that the woman had ordered the afternoon tea.

This is a big problem.

We hadn’t seen our boss in a couple of days – she’d given my friend keys to open and close the shop with no warning – and we’d had no deliveries. We didn’t have any of the cakes you’re supposed to serve with it, we didn’t have any bread or fillers for the sandwiches, and no fresh scones.

We’d run out of everything basically, even the little paper doilies you put on the cake stand.

Due to it being a “themed” venue, presentation was everything; and as prices weren’t cheap customers expected the ‘experience’ as well as the food.

We tried to call our boss but there was no answer on her phone.

Hey, at least they were trying.

She’d told us before that if we had run out of fresh scones, we should use some of the left over ones from a summer fete we’d had a stall at a few weeks ago, which were in the freezer.

She hadn’t said what to do if we ran out of everything else.

I was trying to use my initiative so I took money out of the till and ran across to the nearest grocery store to buy bread and fillers for the sandwiches, but it wasn’t exactly the high quality ingredients we were supposed to be using.

We ended up serving her scones that we’d hastily tried to defrost in the microwave – which she must have heard us using.

The sandwiches were frankly a mess, as even though the boss would happily leave us alone in the store she wouldn’t leave us any bread knives to use “in case we got hurt”.

The cake we used was probably a bit stale as it was from the day before – which we felt bad about but there wasn’t much else we could do.

Everything seemed okay.

But the woman didn’t say anything when we put down the cake stand, when we poured her tea, when we chatted with the little girls about their lovely dresses with big fixed grins on our faces in the stupid, retro dresses we had to wear.

We kept an anxious eye on them as they started eating but they seemed happy, chatting away and giggling with each other, so we finally relaxed a bit and got on with some cleaning.

They were shocked that the customer wasn’t upset.

When they had finished the woman came over the cash register to pay.

We were so relieved that it had worked out okay, that there was not a scrap of food left on the table, we were both grinning from ear to ear.

My friend said “Was everything okay for you today?”

The woman, still smiling, said “That was the most …

“Finally”, we were both thinking, “we’ve actually done well with this impossible job…”

Ouch, I guess she wasn’t happy after all.

“…disgusting thing I have ever eaten. I can’t believe you would have the audacity to serve that to anyone.”

But she was still smiling. And she wasn’t yelling. So my friend and I just stood there with shocked looks on our faces, not really knowing what to do.

I sort of realized at this point that she didn’t want her daughters to know she was ticked off.

My friend recovered a bit and said “I’m very sorry about that – I can offer you a ten per cent discount if you’d like, as we weren’t up to our usual stand…”

Honestly, can you blame her?

The woman literally SNARLED in her face and, still smiling, said “Oh, we won’t be paying.” And stormed out the door.

Our boss showed up a few hours later and when we told her what happened, shouted at us and said she was taking the cost of the afternoon tea “we” had messed up off our wages. She also screamed at me for “stealing out the till” and took the money I’d used to buy bread and stuff off my wages as well.

Needless to say we didn’t work there for much longer, and even less surprisingly the cafe went out of business about two weeks after we left.

This owner is not only a terrible boss, but she was almost certainly breaking the law in many different ways. These poor girls deserve the money they earned and so much more.

Keep reading to see what the people in the comments on Reddit think of this story.

Did the parents even know?

I was thinking the same thing as this commenter.

It just doesn’t make sense.

This was really funny.

This commenter says a lot of this is illegal.

You have to wonder what the owner was thinking.

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.