Quote Originally Posted by Suicune's Fire View Post
Yikes, that's terrible. It's so stupid that it seems like nobody is hiring, yet everyone has understaffing issues. Ridiculous.

I used to work at a cafe and a similar sort of thing happened; I was meant to be closing from 3:30pm-8pm, but my manager got sick and asked me if I could cover her shift instead, and the cafe owner would get my shift covered. So I said yes, and started work at 7am. It got later in the day and I hadn't heard about who was covering my 3:30-8, so I enquired with my sick manager who was also trying to work it out, then got a call from the owner saying that he was trying but nobody was free, and tried all these manipulative tactics to make me feel sympathetic toward the situation, and asked if I could do the close as well. So that'd be 13 hours, four of which in the middle were when I had a second person on. But from 7-9:30 I was on my own, and 1:30-8pm also on my own. No I didn't want to do a 13 hour shift but I felt like I had no choice, so I said I'd do it, but began panicking afterwards because I realised I'd been taken advantage of and it shouldn't be my problem if the cafe was understaffed. So I spoke to my manager and she was like "What the hell, call him back and tell him no" so I worked up the courage and did that, and he has the nerve to accuse me of not pulling my weight and not helping out, to which I replied with, "Well actually I have already done my share of helping out today by covering the manager's shift." Legally you can't make a casual staff member work more than 10 hours, which evidently he knew after he realised I was not going to agree to staying longer than 10 hours, so he begrudgingly said I could close it up at 5pm because that's 10 hours. So I was really happy with myself for putting my foot down, but it put a reeeally bad taste in my mouth and I ended up quitting a week or so later after he asked me to work another 10 hour shift (when I normally did 4).
Holy cow. I’m sorry you had to deal with that.

The only other time I had to work a shift anything like that was around Christmas time the deli gets packed with orders for fruit and veggie trays and, in that story, the entire deli (four people at the time) as well as one of the managers stayed until midnight. The store starts closing down at 9 pm and everyone’s supposed to be gone by 9:30 or 10:00. But that was a matter of company policy forbidding us from saying “no” to tray orders unless we literally could not do them, especially that time of year when we made most of our money.

Honestly, in my 13 hour story, the manager and assistant manager both told me that I could do the 13 hour shift if I felt up to it, but that I was under no obligation to do so and they didn’t want me exhausting myself, and even said I could close up around 1 pm to get stuff done and be out by 5 if I so chose because the company hates overtime and 3 pm was when overtime picked up. Because I had other stuff to work on and quite a bit of food left to sell after the lunch rush, I stayed open until 4, and I believe I sold out of everything at that point and shut it all down.

I took my two standard 30 minute breaks (for working a 6+ hour shift) some time before I shut down, my legally required hour break (for working a 9+ hour shift) right after shutting down, and if I recall correctly the extra four hours I had on the clock entitled me to another 30 minute break, but I didn’t take it. In that store, all 30 minute breaks are paid, but the one hour was not. So I was in the store for 13 hours, worked for 11, and got paid for 12. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind doing that again maybe once per year, but only if I got like 2 days off in a row right afterwards to recover. Was making 9 dollars an hour, anything over 8 hours was overtime, and you get paid time and a half for overtime, so I got paid the equivalent of 14 hours.

Oh, and also I had a couple customers come in about 6 (about the time we normally close down) and complain that we weren’t open and I was not going to cut any more meat or cheese that day. I even had the lights off long before they came up. They threatened to never come back. I made sure the manager knew what had happened in case they also decided to report me for not helping them. As far as I’m aware, they never did.