In between handling food, drinks and customers, food workers have enough to deal with already. Add on a terrible boss, and that can lead to some negative emotions and reactions. Just ask these people.
Food workers on Reddit share how they got their terrible boss fired. Content has been edited for clarity.
He Took Advantage Of The Situation
“There was this sweet 18-year-old girl who used to work in the kitchen I worked at through college. Heather was her name, and she had a massive cognitive issue. Cognitively, she was probably 8-10 years old.
One day on her lunch she just, in conversation, told me she thought our boss was cute and that they had been talking a lot. So she started showing me the messages between the two of them.
‘What are you wearing,’ ‘Take a picture of your bra,’ ‘I’d love to kiss you right now’, etc.
Probably 25 or 30 lewd texts, and several more that were clearly in the ‘grooming’ territory. As far as Heather said, she was never physical with him but she was going to go have dinner at his house in the near future.
This seemed very not right to me. Most importantly because Heather was physically old enough, but she was a child trapped in a teenagers body. Secondly, because there is a power disparity there for even someone with age appropriate cognitive function. I thought the guy was awful anyways, so I made it my personal mission to get him to go.
I had a meeting with the administrator of the kitchen I worked in, and all she said was that Heather was old enough so there was nothing they could do. I understand that but it still just felt wrong.
So I had a meeting with the president of the facility. She was absolutely appalled. She was appalled that my immediate manager was taking advantage of a situation and appalled at the fact the kitchen administrator did absolutely nothing.
Within 2 days she had fired them both and put me in charge on an interim basis.
I had to stay there over the summers in college but I was the administrator there for two years before I left. Paid a heck of a lot better than washing dishes and cooking some food.”
He Did Not Think This Through
“At my old job, we got a new food and beverage director. So he was in charge of our restaurant/bar, as well as our conference area. He couldn’t care less for the conference area, so he focused his time on the restaurant. Got rid of busers, and made every server become their own bartender. Made a new drink menu, and worked with the head chef for a new food menu. Fired the people he didn’t like, and hired his drinking buddies from old jobs to be servers there.
He was an heavy drinker and he would always disappear into his office with a drink and leave us servers out to struggle. I remember one shift in particular, I was scheduled to work lunch and dinner, and I was the only one scheduled during lunch. We were showing the local college football game, in our college town, and it just so happened to be our rivals we played that day. Every table was full. Every bar stool. I even had people standing and just ordering drinks from me. My chefs were running my food for me.
He comes out from his office to see how things are going, I’m eyeballs deep making drinks and had just finished one of our special drinks, and he complimented me on how well I was doing. I turn around and he’s gone. My drink is gone. Didn’t see him again until he complained about his table in the restaurant, and asked me to take that table.
After a few months, everyone started hated him, including his ‘friends’ he had brought over with him. On New Year’s Eve, we would have a huge party, and everyone was expected to work. Even his boss was there. Halfway through the night he said he had to go home because his wife and daughter were sick, but he had told his friends he was going to a concert right across the street. So we told his boss, went out to our wrap around patio, and sure enough you could see him with his wife waiting to go in.
He didn’t return to work.”
He Dealt With It Himself
“Large restaurant was being run terribly – in large part due to their hiring of almost anybody instead of quality waiters and hosts and such.
One Saturday night, I am shift manager/head waiter of about 35 servers and five busers. By coincidence, my 30 people at five tables are all leaving about the same time. They’re really just sitting around and drinking after dinner, so I have no control over it.
So I tell my (problematic) door staff that when these people get up, do not seat 30 people at once. The restaurant is slammed, and no waiter can get 30 people drinks and food reasonably. Fast-forward 10 minutes… There’s 30 new people demanding drinks!
I ask my manager for help, he says ‘Deal with it’ so I walk out.
‘Serve them yourself,’ I said.
Next day I return, sit down with the owner and that lowly manager. I point out that I have been complaining about this very topic for months and that a restaurant needs a decent manager or it falls apart. That manager tried to explain himself but was fired on the spot.”
A Disgusting Thing To Say
“When I was a teenager, I worked at a popular pizza joint. My boss laughed regularly while the other (mostly male) employees liked to harass me. I wasn’t hired as a delivery driver, but he would often make me go on a run and tell me to flirt with the customers to make a better tip. Disturbing to hear a 50-year-old man tell an 18-year-old.
One day, HIS boss came in and saw the state of disarray that the restaurant was in, and my boss decided to blame it on me. I wasn’t going to put up with that. I calmly confronted my boss, told him that he was going to make things right or I would quit. I ended up quitting on the spot, and then emailed his boss the story. He was fired a few weeks later.”
Her Boss Should Have Cared About The Situation
“When I was 16, I had a Saturday job in a bakery (the place where food was sold, not the place where it was actually baked – it was all baked at the ‘head office’ and delivered to the three shops every morning).
There was the shop manager, another Saturday girl and me. I became really close friends with the other Saturday girl, and we hung out when we weren’t working and stuff. Then another girl got hired who was a bit older than us and had worked there before. She was friendly with the manager.
The manager had always been a bit.. not great. She’d pull faces at customers when they turned around, even if they’d just done something totally normal like ask for a sandwich. I told her we had a bug infestation (these little beetle things were all up in the office and I’d started finding them under the fridges), and she just told me not to tell anyone.
So this new/not really new girl started. Her and the manager would stand and drink tea all day whilst me and my friend worked our butts off. One day, the new girl asked my friend to sweep up. My friend told her to do it herself because she hadn’t done anything all day. The manager fired my friend on the spot for being disrespectful.
That night I went home, wrote a letter to head office spanning two pages of A4, documenting everything the manager had done wrong in my time working there, explained the situation with my friend and gave my two weeks notice.
I got a phone call a few days later saying they were hiring my friend back, wanted me to withdraw my resignation and the manager was getting moved to the head office bakery so they could keep an eye on her.
It was 12 years ago, and it’s still one of my proudest moments.”
A Great Birthday Present
“I worked in a restaurant where I was originally hired on as a supervisor. I noticed right from the beginning that our general manager was a bit of a sleaze bag, because from my first day he told me that he expects all of his girls come to work ‘done up’ and looking good. If that wasn’t enough to put me off of him, I soon noticed all of the women in the restaurant called him ‘Papi,’ and would frequently give him shoulder massages when speaking with him.
Despite being the general manager, the man was very unpredictable when it came to showing up for work. He’d come in for a total of four hours during the week. It didn’t matter what he had on the schedule he sent to his boss (he put himself on for every day except Sundays), he was impossible to nail down.
My first night closing, he was supposed to train me and left me to do all of the procedures by myself. Thank god I had experience in a smaller setting that lent me to being a fast learner. I also noticed he was giving away a lot of ‘rewards’ to certain staff (gift cards, buying food, bringing in coffee), and always took money from the till to do so. I knew we had a discretionary fund from corporate that managers could spend on staff but I never saw him take money from that, never even saw that money actually, despite the fact that I was a part of management and technically could use it on my shift to reward my staff.
At one point, he told us he would be covering another general manager’s vacation at a location 30 miles away and would be there all week. We got a call on the third day of him ‘covering’ from said general manager’s location, asking where our boss was as he was late to relieve them. Turns out our general manager was only scheduled at the other location for two days.
In the general manager’s last month, we received a new district manager who was much more hands on than our previous one, and most importantly wasn’t friends with our general manager. The district manager noticed very quickly it was very hard to keep track of our general manager. He had no clue what time his staff was starting in the morning, or what we were doing in our shifts.
The breaking point actually came on my birthday. Our general manager was scheduled but not in the store. He instructed me to send two of our line chefs home even before lunch hit as he wanted to ‘cut labor.’ Someone very high in the company decided to drop by our location, and saw that we were slammed with not enough staff. Cut to a week later where the district manager shows up right as our general manager is leaving on an errand. My general manager looks a bit nervous but leaves anyways.
The District Manager pulls me aside and asks me what the heck is going on in the restaurant. They knew about the fiasco that was the previous week’s lunch service which had me in the kitchen with one chef. Now, I had recently been told that I was being promoted to the assistant manager as our old one left. I revealed I was informed me I would be working 80 hours a week while the general manager worked 20, and that I would be required to pay him 40% of the tips I received in my paycheck. I was to give him cash every pay day so he could ‘have his cut.’
To me it wasn’t a surprise that general manager was not there for a scheduled shift. I told the district manager everything I’ve said here and they were speechless. Within half an hour of the general manager returning from errands, he was taken out of the building and our staff were told he was to never come back. More crazy developments unfolded in the aftermath, but basically due to my honesty and unwillingness to be taken advantage of, someone lost their job that day.”
Not A Good After Hours Activity
“I’ve fired two bosses over the years, both in the restaurant industry. Boss one was the chef, so hammered he was testing pork chop batter by throwing it to the ceiling. If the pork chop sticks for a few seconds, the batter is thick enough. I just pulled him into the office and fired him. Told him to get out of my (his) office, and had already called his wife to come pick him up.
Next day he calls and asks if he got fired. I told him yeah, you did. The food and beverage manager just sighed deeply and discussed my new position as chef. That was Bob’s big day.
Second time was years later and miles away. I had to go to HR about the general manager snorting narcotics off the baby changing table in the men’s room with the owner, HR’s husband. Considering the owner had just gotten slapped with the very public problem of showing his member to our bartender then urinating on a neighbor’s front door when they cut him off, I figured to strike while the iron was hot. Owner became absent, general manager got liquidated for enabling him and they brought in a new one who drove the place into the ground like a tent peg.
Truly wild times.”
No One Wants To Draw With A Headache
“When I was in high school, I was a busboy in a hotel restaurant. It was a pretty fun place until a new manager took over. He was arrogant and condescending to all the employees, but a suck up to the hotel manager and treated all the customers well.
A few months after he started he found me on my break in the staff room where I was just doodling to pass the time. He liked my style, and asked if I would make a sign for the hotel lobby announcing the specials and featuring the company mascot. When my break was over, I drew the sign on a big paper easel and went back to work. Apparently he really liked it and so did the hotel manager. Over the next month, he asked me to do a few more and I did, no big deal. I liked to draw.
One day I came in and was very tired with a headache but fit enough to clear tables. The restaurant manager again asked me to make a new sign and I said ‘Actually, I don’t really feel like it today. Bit of a headache.’
This infuriated him off to no end. I was out busing tables, but could hear him complaining to the kitchen staff about me. Finally, he confronted me and told me if I didn’t make the sign I was fired. I told him I wasn’t hired as a graphic artist, but he wouldn’t hear it so he told me to go home and never come back.
I changed back into my street clothes and walked through the atrium and past the front desk while the hotel manager was handling some issues with staff. I got his attention and told him what had happened. He shook his head and told me to go home, but to come back for my next scheduled shift.
Two days later I was back and heard from all the happy staff that the guy had been fired right after I left. I never did signs for them again.”
Caught On Camera
“A few years ago, I started working at a high-end steakhouse. I started off as a server and eventually ended up as bar manager. Right off the bat, there was favoritism. The manger was this truly awful person. It was very annoying. He was even taking the credit card tips and giving himself a bigger paycheck and everyone that would become his minion.
Since I went from server to bartender, I didn’t notice the tips missing because I knew how much I was making and nobody was messing with my tip pool then. But many servers quit because he would not sit them tables for entire shifts and they weren’t making money.
Every shift he would come in late, show off on his social media like he was super cool or something, drink in the office, and probably slept with the server that he made ‘assistant manager.’ In fact, he got the other starting managers fired by throwing them under the bus. After the two-year mark, corporate was scheduled to show up because they wondered why the restaurant wasn’t making it. It was probably because he was drinking and stealing drinks, but nobody ever said anything.
And then his assistant manager stole money from me. And I caught her red-handed and recorded the evidence of her admitting to it, and her saying there was nothing I could do because the manager was on her side no matter what.
So when the CFO showed up, I showed him everything. I showed him the recording of her saying that. I showed him our inventory on how our drink cost was amazing for a high-end steakhouse, because I was in charge of those drinks. On the other hand, other drink costs were almost 50% because this idiot was stealing and drinking it.
The CFO told me to give him two weeks to make the appropriate changes and investigate properly. Except the manager and assistant manger told everyone I ratted on them, and they turned against me. So I put in my two weeks. The CFO told me not to quit, and that he would make me manager. I told him I couldn’t and that this place had turned me very sour. It was affecting my mental health.
So the CFO doubled my last paycheck and gave me a severance check. I left and focused on school. I even got an offer to manage some BBQ joint but they were paying very poorly and demanding long hours.
Eventually I got a job at a seafood restaurant, and I actually make just as much as I was before but with way less responsibility.
A month after I left, all management was fired and replaced. That assistant manager was fired too. I was so happy to hear that he had been fired. The best part was that he couldn’t find a job, and he ended up with that horrible job at that BBQ joint that I declined.
He is real quiet now. Never posts anything about drinking or how cool he was at the steakhouse.
My only regret was not speaking up before. I miss that bar so much; it was beautiful but things happen.”
She’ll Never Forget What He Did
“My manager at a new job, let’s call him ‘Leo,’ offered to give me a ride home after a Friday night shift went overly long. Instead of turning into my street, he went to a bar about a mile in the opposite direction so we could ‘get to know each other’. I had one drink and asked to go home, instead he bought me a second drink. I asked to go home again and he tried to get with me.
I emailed the owner of the restaurant about what had happened, and went to my shift the next day. The owner was outside the restaurant firing the manager – all on the word of a brand-new employee he’d never even met. I was so impressed, and the rest of the (mostly young, female staff) were very grateful for the change. That restaurant was a great place to work.
Two years later, I started my first day at my dream restaurant. Did some training, sat down for pre-shift teaming with the kitchen and who comes out to present the specials? It’s Leo, of course. He sees me and freezes up. Afterwards, he tried to talk to me about working together, but I went straight to my new manager and say I have history with a current employee that they need to know about. I tell my story, I show the emails between the owner and myself. They talk to Leo about it. He is fired again.
We worked in a really specialized food style where chefs circulate through all the restaurants. He later applied to work for me when I was the hiring manager and didn’t get a call back, obviously. I am out of the industry now, but I used to dream of getting him fired again. I want to haunt him the rest of his professional life.”
Always Do Your Job
“I used to work for a pizza chain, and was being trained to be a manager. Suddenly, the new owner brings in this guy from one of his original stores with absolutely no managerial experience but they were buddies. After a while, it’s pretty clear that but he and the owner had no intention of promoting me and just making me do his work while he gets the better pay. I tried to talk to the area supervisor, who I happened to be friends with, to see if I could maybe get transferred to a store that actually does need a manager. I was later told by my manager that he knew of my plan, I wasn’t going anywhere, and that he was going to keep making me do his work.
So I said forget it, and stopped doing his part of the work. One day while he was supposed to be opening, we got an inspection. He knew of the inspection, called me before he came, and told me to make sure the store was clean but didn’t say why. I basically ignored him and went on with the regular duties of our shift. Inspector comes in and my manager sneaks in through the back door and tries to act like he was there the whole time. The grade we got later was so bad due to mold that would have been cleaned if he did his duties he was supposed to.
The only things that saved our grade where done during my shift. He got demoted to driver, and sent to a store we never hear from. I told him if I ever see him again, I’d punch his face in. The owner started talking about finally promoting me, but I walked out of there and into a better paying job after a couple of weeks.”