Where to start? At the top with management. I've never seen a place where sexual harassment was tolerated so openly. Decision making was haphazard at best, they literally called overtime 2 minutes before closing times several occasions as most employees were ready to punch out. Safety is a joke, the equipment was so outdated, I used to joke it was probably used by the Pony Express, but everyone knew what I was talking about. The place was filthy, if you dropped a package on the floor, the amount of accumulated dust that kicked up was ridiculous. Some people wore masks, I probably should've as well. The bathrooms were always dirty and smelly and toilets were often clogged and hand driers didn't work. I saw insects several times in the break room. People were generally sloppy, leaving stuff on the floor throughout the building, that I often picked up, but to no purpose.
As a casual, all you get is a paycheck and absolutely no respect whatsoever, no matter how hard you work. Each night I came to work, and I missed only 1 in 16 months due to illness, I had no idea what I'd be doing or what part of the building I'd be working in. In fact, most nights my supervisor wasn't even around upon my arrival to tell me what to do. So I'd wait by his office for him to eventually show up and assign me, sometimes 15 minutes after my shift began. He was ok with me at first, then all of a sudden, without any change I noticed, he began to degrade me and look for mistakes he hoped I'd make to berate me. At my new job, where I will be a supervisor, he taught me one important lesson: how NOT to treat people. Supervisors were basically there to give out assignments to start, then disappear for most of the night, rarely there to answer a question. And I had a few, as a former journalist and one of the few employees with a college degree, I wondered why things worked the way they did unproductively. Any suggestion I had was dismissed out of hand. Other employees told me to just act like a robot and not think. I found this hard to do as a thinking man. Supervisors liked to move people around their area night in and night out, despite the fact that the most productive area was the one where the supervisor kept the same people in the same area night after night, which I pointed out to no effect. All the times I trained new people, placed things in their proper place, even though regular employees didn't bother to or care to do so, or just keep things organized to hopefully run more smoothly, went for naught.
Some of the workers worked hard for sure, but many others hid out when they could, filed for overtime even though they didn't do any work during that period, and would sometimes sleep on the job, when they weren't busy playing games with their phones. But if you were a regular, you could pretty much get away with it, and if you weren't, well if you were an attractive female, that certainly didn't hurt either.
