In an age where job dissatisfaction is rife, but the cost of living crisis persists, it's not always possible to leave a role where the pay is low and the exploitation is high. The result? Seeking payback in subtle ways, Kate Brayden writes.
An evil genius colleague of mine once drove to the English pub franchise she worked at and stole 300 eggs from the freezer when the COVID-19 lockdowns were announced.
Though she probably prevented them from being thrown away during the pandemic closure, her motivation was purely revenge-driven. My colleague was cursed with an egg allergy, which is how I’m sure her actions were not in the name of anti-waste.
When it’s proving to be nearly impossible to quit a job and find a new one to maintain financial stability across most industries, workers are having to find creative ways to cope with their employment situation without losing their minds in the process.
Gone are the days when we could work for a few years and have a house as a result, or could make rent without fear. When there’s often no concrete payoff from years of being exploited, underpaid and stressed, why would we expect people to give an exploitative job their all?
According to Forbes, 86% of Gen Z workers see purpose as pivotal to their overall well-being and job satisfaction. That (overly analysed) generation also scrutinises potential employers' societal impact before applying for jobs, with 75% considering this a key factor in their decision-making process.
It makes complete sense that jobs devoid of meaning, where your manager or bosses are paid triple what you earn, despite likely having the same skillset (or less, in some digital cases, especially) would lead to some minor villainy.
Petty payback
Speaking to members of the public outside of my circle (and the media circle has stories, as you might imagine), petty payback to secure the paycheck isn’t uncommon. The following stories feature true moments of minor vengeance, but names have been changed.
"My work made me take annual leave to cover my granny’s funeral," Anna*, who worked in a corporate office job at the time, told me. "I photoshopped a few hospital letters together to get some extra days off, got my hair done and treated myself."
"There was a woman in my old job who hoarded the fancy teabags in her drawer and only brought them out for senior staff," Jack described. "So every time she went on her lunch break, I’d swap some of them for cheap knockoffs and rearrange the rest to make it look untouched. It probably made very little difference to her life, but definitely gave me a boost."
I heard numerous tales of tea and coffee mind games when I issued a callout for this piece. Another category of workplace weaponry was meddling with the ambience of an office.
"We had an open-plan office with one shared Spotify account," Harry recalls. "My boss loved Coldplay and wouldn’t let anyone else touch the playlist. So I queued 75 minutes of 'Irish rebel ballads’ every day at 4:45pm, just as he was wrapping up. He never figured it out because he wasn’t exactly tech savvy, but he did start leaving the office a bit earlier."
"My manager would hijack the speaker to play motivational TED Talks during the busiest part of the shift as some kind of weird morale booster that nobody wanted," another friend told me. "So I downloaded a remix of Joe Brolly’s most chaotic Sunday Game quotes layered over a techno beat and played it one morning on loop. The TED Talks abruptly stopped."
Tasty tyranny
The old-fashioned stereotype of spitting in someone’s drink is likely more of an urban myth these days, but food sabotage is still at large, according to Eimear*:
"I worked in a boutique café in Cork where the manager was obsessed with the 'presentation' of our baked goods. One day, she shouted at me - with plenty of curse words involved - in front of customers over how I plated a fruit scone. The next week, I started baking one scone with a massive air bubble in it and placing it dead centre on the tray. Still looked perfect on the outside, but inside? Empty."
A void - just like her customer service skills.
A former kitchen porter at a large chain hotel in Dublin shared: "They made us prep the breakfast buffet at 3:30am, but refused to turn the heating on in the kitchen until 6am. One of the chefs started placing the butter dishes directly under the hot lamps so they’d melt into soup by the time service started. Guests complained, managers were mad, and nothing changed. Still, it was something to laugh about at 4am when our fingers were numb."
Bars are notorious for difficult working conditions (the shock to your body clock alone is hard enough). I once had a customer throw chips at my head because they were cold when I was only the waitress and didn’t exactly taste test anything I brought out from the kitchen.
Tomás, a bartender in Limerick, found a way of bringing down the upper chain of command online: "Management kept saying we were over-pouring Guinness and started docking our tips to cover 'wastage.' We got our revenge by deliberately pulling the worst pint imaginable when we knew an inspector or reviewer was in. Flat. Warm. No head. The mystery of our tanking Google rating? That was us."
Photos of those pints probably went viral.
Another kitchen colleague discovered that the owner of the franchise bought toilet paper rolls without the cardboard in the middle to save money, and yet wouldn't pay staff a few hours overtime when a riot happened that led the bar to open hours later than it should have. He later asked a few teenagers in the neighbourhood to pelt the owner’s Tesla with food waste from the bins, which they readily obliged in return for a few free beverages.
Do we condone small acts of thievery? Or messing with people’s purchased food/drinks? Of course not.
Joining a union is always recommended, but personally, I support workers' rights and workers' wrongs - if the boss is rude enough or the pay is low enough to warrant it.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ.
*Names have been changed
