by Hiking Fox » Fri Sep 18, 2009 8:22 pm
Dramatic exit #1
I worked at a riding stables over the Easter break while still at school, cos I had put down ‘anything to do with environment/animals’ on a form passed round by the headmistress. On my last day, the boss had a real go at me for being veggie and went off on a vicious rant about how all the people who worked there were into hunting. I tried to respond with a shy teenage lecture about animals having rights, but gave up, joined the local hunt sabs when I was slightly older and got stuck in to the smug bastards.
Dramatic exit #2
After a spell of unemployment aged about 21, I got put on a job-seeker scheme that gave you the dole plus £10 if you agreed to work full time to get some experience that would hopefully lead to a full time job. A small media company took me on, as I was doing a journalism course.
I quickly realised that the boss was a complete and utter crook who was screwing over everyone he could manage, owed money to loads of other small businesses and stringing his staff along on £2.50 an hour on the basis that he was about to hit it big and would reward them. I handed in one day’s notice, told most of his contacts on the last day what a lying twat he was, nicked his expensive books and even took the plant in reception home with me.
Dramatic Exit #3
There’s a vegetarian place called 'The Alley Café' in the very centre of Nottingham that prides itself on being ‘funky, independent and ethical’. Basically, it is run by a gurning, baby-faced ex-vegan cock who wants to make as much money out of vegetarians as he can, while screwing his staff over for every penny. He’s the kind of person who will promote a member of staff to be ‘permanent’, put them on a monthly salary as opposed to the usual weekly cash in hand pay catering workers get, then slowly ramp up their hours until they are on less than the minimum wage. The downright bastardliness of the guy is widely known through the town, mainly due to the way that his two long-suffering ex-girlfriends made sure to put it about, but the place remains in business due to the fact that Nottingham city centre is a very corrupt place and you have to know the right people to run a successful business there, so it is the only vegetarian place in town that is open midweek daytimes and so gets no real competition.
My dramatic exit involved a whole succession of events worthy of a Shakespeare play and makes entertaining reading, but I suggest you PM me if you want the full story, as I don’t want to totally dominate this thread!
Dramatic Exit #4
I worked at a long-established veggie workers’ co-op in Manchester that on the whole is a decent, caring place, but it consists of a successful shop upstairs and struggling café downstairs, and there was always (possibly still is) such infighting between the two that the atmosphere was stifling and it certainly didn’t feel like a co-op.
There were two women in the café (both since departed) who were fish-eating ex-vegetarians with a real grudge against vegans. Especially vegans who like wholefood things like dates and brown rice. They did their best t make my life hell and spoil the very popular vegan cakes I’d introduced to the range, so that the customers would request the ‘old cakes’ and they could claim vegan cakes didn’t sell, plus other ‘control freak’ type stuff such as forcing me to lift 25Kg sacks of spuds from the floor and carry them up and down stairs, even though I insisted that any more than 20Kg was too much for me. (NB. have since found out that under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, this is seriously illegal!)
After sleepless nights and panic attacks, I just dramatically slotted my knife into my belt one day, said ‘so long’ to everybody and fucked off to the pub without working my notice.
etc.