When a restaurant is busy, all the employees need to work together to make sure things are done to meet the needs of the customer.

What would you do if your manager never lifted a finger to do any work but was always upset that you weren’t working hard enough?

That is what happened to the employee in this story, so after the manager got mad and sent them home, they complied and watched the restaurant turn to chaos.

Let’s read the whole story.

You want me to go home? Okay!

I worked at a restaurant. We had a front salad bar, a buffet with a salad bar, as well as things like a juice bar and ice cream counter and a small alcohol room with a bar.

It was so popular and also a bit expensive but somehow so underpaid, understaffed and poorly managed.

Jenny is the daughter and the only child of the owners of the restaurant. She’s extremely spoiled, she almost always gets her way, and she has a temper where she will get upset and just lay into the person for an hour straight.

Wow, this person would be horrible to work with/for.

She used to come in screaming at everyone for nothing and made racist or nasty jokes. She’d pushed people to come in sick then ask why they were so slow.

Marco, one of the kitchen managers, is the son of a family friend and a beloved member of the community.

His management consisted of micromanaging, criticizing our work, blaming random people for things, giving extreme time constraints for tasks, encouraging everyone to smile, and going around asking people (while they were in the middle of working their 3 jobs) when they wanted to come in the next day or if they’d like to cover a shift on Saturday or whatever.

He would forget to do things and then blame other people, then he would go around criticizing people for their time management or responsibility.

Anytime we reported that something was broken or something wasn’t working, he just told us to figure it out and nothing would be done about it until Jenny came in screaming at everyone and narrowed it down to Marco.

Nobody would want to work in a place like this.

We had other managers coming in and out, they couldn’t take it. There were people who were suddenly hired to take on big positions despite having no idea what they were doing or joined with less than a full day of training just because the place was desperate.

The waitresses were paid less than $4 an hour and some of them were doing part of the dishwasher’s duties, front manager duties, cleaning jobs including kitchen and employee bathroom.

What a horrible workplace.

I want to say dishwashing was the worst as three different people would come to work drunk or high everyday just to tolerate everything.

My coworker DJ kept up even when other dishwashers weren’t working, helped me or the waitress clean, and literally had to monitor food that was cooking and he’d keep track of orders because the manager Marco and the chef wanted to mess around or go stand by the door and smoke.

There were days where staff members would break down or get sick pulling a double shift and he did everything for them, there was no choice.

This would make for a very busy day.

My job was preparing and filling food items for the main salad bar in front everyday, and some days I also did salad bar in the buffet. I had other things to do as part of my normal salad/buffet job including making food for reservations, preparing and stocking juice bar, and helping move stock into the freezers and fridge.

On top of that I was packing non salad food for delivery and takeout, helping maintain and stock up to half the buffet, helping waitresses keep up with serving and bussing, doing ice cream and desserts, cleaning the whole kitchen and storage areas and customer bathrooms, helping the bar staff, helping at the front desk whenever I was out, and preparing ingredients or fetching things for the normal chef/buffet chefs.

All for a little more than minimum wage.

Are these even legal working conditions?

I fell every day because I was running on wet floors and I had a heat stroke and even had to go to the ER for injuries.

On buffet days I had a partner but that didn’t matter, she just stood around right in front of the manager Marco, talking to her cousin who worked there while watching me work and both she and Marco would take breaks every now and then to criticize my work or my speed.

This restaurant is lucky that these two workers are there.

Everything was held together by DJ and me. We were teenagers on Rockstar drinks so we took whatever was coming to us.

We kept everything going so well that we got scheduled to work almost every day then every weekend.

Hey, at least they got a couple raises.

Jenny gave us free soda privilege and we got raises two times in 5 months, which were only 10c, but did look good to me because my dad praised all of my paychecks, he didn’t know what was going on and that I was working crazy hours and he thought I was overpaid.

Most of the customers were very sweet so we tried our best to be of service, and a lot of them were regulars or people who came in to support Marco or everyone.

So much should not be expected of teenagers.

There was always so much pressure on DJ and me.

Also DJ isn’t white and he would always get racist jokes and comments towards him, Marco and Jenny either did nothing or were the offenders.

Most of the criticism or Marco’s projection went to him despite him doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing and occasionally messing up due to extreme stress or time constraint.

After a certain point almost every criticism was race-based in some way.

They will regret firing one of their best employees.

One horrible Saturday, there were 3x as many reservations as usual, on top of all bars and buffet being open.

I clocked in and found out one of the managers let go of DJ the afternoon before. Absolutely no one knew why, including DJ, and I’m really assuming it was Marco.

I already had zero hope for the day and the only thing fueling me was the customers and my paycheck of course.

In just the first hour, I passed Marco at least five times trying to get things done. There was one time we accidentally made eye contact while I was helping a waitress.

She is running around doing everything, and the boss still isn’t happy.

But at some point I went to the freezer in the back to help load some ice cream in and he happened to walk in at the same time that I was standing there for 3 seconds ‘doing nothing’ waiting for my coworker to bring in the dolly.

He gave me this frustrated look like “Get back to work”.

He caught me maybe a half hour later while I was coming into the back of the kitchen (near the freezer) to mop up some spilled water.

The final time he caught me, I was in the freezer again looking at the inventory to see what fruit we had enough of, because I could only serve what we had enough of in case people requested more, and Marco had enough.

What is wrong with this guy?

He said “The place is busy and you’re in here just standing in the freezer for like 4 hours. Go home.”

I gave him this look like WHAT?! And he reiterated that I was done for the night.

I was not arguing with Marco. This was not my problem.

I just said thanks, took my apron off, and headed out. Both the employee doors were blocked by trash cans and my partner standing there with a whole cart of things talking to her cousin, so I went to use the main side door in the front of the restaurant.

This is too funny!

Jenny saw me and asked where I was going.

I put on a smile and said, “Man, Marco is the best guy ever. He just randomly came up to me and told me to take the night off.”

Jenny’s face went from confused to shocked to livid in the span of one second.

She quickly told me “Don’t go just yet.” and she stormed into the kitchen screaming “MARRCOOOO!!!”

Yup, the boss says go home, go home!

I pretended to not hear her over the music and customers, and I just turned around and left.

I got over 10 phone calls but I simply let my phone ring. I waited until my partner updated her Facebook status with “FINALLY closed, girl night time!” or something like that.

Why would you apologize to this guy?

I finally texted Marco back and gave an apology that sucked up in the most condescending way, but in a way that was personal that only he would understand if he were to show it to someone.

I came back the next morning and it was a complete disaster. Marco and Jenny came in looking dead tired because they spent the rest of the night and overtime, trying to keep things going.

Hopefully now they realize how much work this employee does.

There were actually dishes and trash bags piled up and both the buffet and kitchen were wrecked because Jenny and her dad didn’t want to keep the workers late and pay them overtime.

The restaurant had to close for the summer. They posted all these job opportunities in schools and on Facebook and eventually opened back up, but I never answered and DJ didn’t accept amends so it was a whole spiral.

What? Did this person quit?

Because of me leaving and DJ being fired, they had to close down their ice cream and minimize their buffet and they now close earlier because they can’t handle it.

There are less customers supporting Marco and there were even customers saying they aren’t coming back until Marco or Jenny leaves.

There’s a waitress who joined during my time there and it was her first job ever, now she is the only previous employee left, and she ended up getting appointed as a manager at some point.

At least someone benefited from this mess.

I think they had to offer her a lot of money to stay because she bought a new house.

Marco is the only other manager now.

Marco is still asking me to come back and since I deleted Facebook, I kept that phone number open with prepaid service on my old phone just for the purpose of reading his texts during my lunch.

Did Marco ever learn his lesson though? It sounds like he is still working and he’ll just find new employees to abuse.

At least some of the employees escaped though. If only the owners would figure out the root of the problem.

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

He has no idea.

Is this common with restaurants?

Hey, now this person has a great idea.

This commenter is exactly right.

Restaurants with bad managers are the worst.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.