basically at this seafood restaurant i worked at, there was an employee of the week program & the winner would get $5 or $10 or whatever.
as is often the case with franchisees, the management & owners were pretty much demons. they'd make us "rent" crab leg crackers from them & pay if they accidentally got tossed away, so it wasn't unusual to see a miserable server up to their knees in the dumpster tearing through garbage bags to save themselves $15 (well over an hour's wage, obviously). they'd sit at home & watch us on the security cameras on their phones & text us if we didn't empty the mop water enough while cleaning at the end of the day (which they wanted us to do every two rows of tiles, because they'd installed utterly impractical & joint-destroying flooring that was impossible to keep streak-free, especially in a place where the air contained that much ambient garlic butter). one time i took a bad fall on the floor & when i limped to the back i found one of them rewatching the footage several times instead of helping me??? food service girlies who have worked at these sort of fast paced table churning chains, i'm sure you know the type (& how they have their own unique evils distinct from the unique evils of the demons who operate 85-95% of smaller independent restaurants)
so pretty quickly they started coming up with reasons that disqualified every staff member from winning the coveted employee of the week prize. being three minutes late on one day because the street car lit on fire despite otherwise perfect attendance & having saved a customer's life that week & that sort of thing. when it hadn't been updated in several weeks i took the picture on the left above to reference for my own goofy machinations
during crawfish season, the restaurant got live shipments of them (quite the experience for "vegetarian for nearly two decades already at that point" me). they lived their last hours basically right beside the staff area, so we got to see them being very silly & blustery as we walked by them to clock in or out. we all loved to see them! so i thought it would be very funny to honour one. i was literally just being silly
unfortunately i never got a chance to get a picture of it on the board, because the vibe at that place was so unbearably toxic that the first person who saw it thought it had been put up by management to be snarky about no one being Worthy of the Grandeur of the employee of the week prize, so rage spread through the staff like wildfire. someone took it down & hid it underneath the old one to try & minimise damage but it had already exploded. i took the first chance i got to sneak it back into my apron so i could remove the evidence from the building, as if they were going to do like printer forensics on it & determine that i'd lit the spark that ignited the kindling that particular day
about two months later, i think probably when i was just about to quit anyway because i was moving away, i finally confessed to my friend who was a supervisor & had had to weather the various shitshows that come with being ~promoted to that kind of position in that kind of management environment. he absolutely erupted "i fucking KNEW IT!!!!!!!! i told everyone!!!!!!!!!!! you are the only person who would find that funny!!!! no-one believed me & i had to give up trying to convince people it was a joke!!!!!!" & i kept trying to get apologies out through my laughter as he grumbled that management had tried to get him to find out Who Did It for weeks & he'd had to pretend he wasn't 100% sure it was this specific weirdo making a very stupid joke with unintended consequences
& then yeah a couple months after i left i got a message from that friend like "remember we thought they were probably skimming tips? we've been tracking it for a few weeks now & they definitely are. if we sue them do you want in" & i was like "yeah man fuck em" & they ended up paying the money back to settle out of court. i expected to get like a couple hundred bucks but the cheque i picked up was for over a thousand dollars, so i'd estimate they'd taken well over $15k from us collectively. sooo you know. i can understand ultimately how things were just too rancid there for my tomfoolery to land as intended. yes it's been seven years & i still have stress dreams where i have no choice but to work at a new location of that chain opening near me
This is at best a tangent on the far more incredible story above but it reminds me of when I worked at lowes and we had a big thing up on the wall declaring that if we went 3 months without any injuries there would be a pizza party, with a little day counter next to it. The store manager went out of his way to point it out to me when I was hired, as if it was a huge perk of working there. About 6 months into my lowes career it was starting to get realllll close and someone in management must have noticed because the next day it had been replaced with a sign saying "1 year without any injuries". The next month two new employees crashed the store's forklifts into each other and the manager made a huge show of resetting the counter, saying we had "been doing so well".
You might wonder how they got away with this brazen of a system but the answer is simple: employee turnover at the store was so high that almost no one was around long enough to even notice. A truly magical retail experience
