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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Zipzesty on 2024-02-29 05:38:40.

To start off the story, I’m a cook and have been grinding away at my career and culinary school for the last 1.5 years. I worked at one restaurant for a little over a year and quit due to the stress a new manager was giving me. After that I told myself that I wouldn’t take a new restaurant job until the end of school or unless it was stable, organized, and stress-free. I was out of work for around 3 months when an old supervisor from the previous restaurant “Joe”, who I thought had retired, called me about a new restaurant he was opening with a friend “Tim” who is the owner and investor. I originally told him I’ll come talk to him but I’m wary about working as a cook again. When I went to talk with Joe, he told me I would be his Sous-chef and would be a manager. Also I was being paid $15/hr and would get 1 day PTO for every month. This doesn’t sound good to anyone who has a normal job, but working in a kitchen that’s not corporate, this is huge.

Fast forward to opening day, it’s only me and Joe in the kitchen cooking, with 2 guys helping us prep but they have no real experience cooking, and the place is full. Apparently, Tim had called everyone he knew and told them to come by. We make it through day one barely and I tell them that we need to readjust before we get smothered tomorrow. They ignore me and we continue. Day two, Tim is practically on top of the 2 guys helping and micromanaging them to the point that they quit right before dinner. That night was terrible and we had multiple tickets over an hour and tables walking out. It doesn’t help that the blame is being put on me and Joe for how it went even though it’s a giant menu and only 2 of us. Most places with such a large menu and being that busy have 6 to 7 cooks to handle the workload.

I had told Joe and Tim very firmly that we should close for lunch on day three and prepare for dinner or we were going to get destroyed again. I was again ignored. So I get called in early day three, having just woken up and having to rush in right away I hadn’t eaten anything(relevant in a bit). We were non-stop busy for 8 hours, I was running around so much and prepping so much food to order that I literally couldn’t stay on my feet anymore and collapsed. I didn’t pass out but came close. My blood sugar had gotten too low due to overtaxing my body(I’m not diabetic but i guess this can happen when your body runs out of fuel. Idk thats what a nurse friend told me) This is when Joe and Tim finally realized that maybe we needed more cooks and a better plan before we reopened(what I had been saying for 3 days).

We closed down, hired more cooks and retrained for a few weeks. This whole time Tim kept telling us that if we couldn’t handle the job, we were easily replaceable. Also all these cooks we were hiring, Tim would say they are some “real badasses” and that they would do my job better than me. They were useless. Not to say they were bad cooks, but they had only worked in one place for years and didn’t know anything other than what that previous place cooked, which was nothing like the food we had. I constantly taught them how to do things and easier/faster ways to get food out, but to Tim I wasn’t doing anything important because he couldn’t imagine me teaching them anything due to their “badassery”.

At this point I was starting to get a little annoyed at Tim but I figured it would work out… until I got my first check. It was $10/hr. I was very confused since I was suppose to get $15, but was told that everyone was on a “trial pay” until they proved themselves, but that I had also proved myself and would get $15 next time. Over the next couple weeks I spent a lot of time at the restaurant, almost always being the last one out at night, trying to improve our issues and efficiency. Even to the point that my school work suffered and I got notices from my instructors that I was at risk of failing. I spent all my time making sure everything was done properly and fixing issues so that Joe wouldn’t have to deal with it as he was there from 7am to 8pm most days.

Then my next check came around. At this point I was broke and had been overdrawn on my account for days. So I needed that money right now so I wouldn’t get another overdraft fee. I was pretty surprised when I saw it at $10/hr still. Tim told me it was a mistake and if I could wait for my check for tomorrow that he would fix it. I couldn’t so I said he can fix it for my next check and it would be fine for now.

Another few weeks go by and I keep getting more and more annoyed with Tim. Almost everyday I’m being told “you’re the boss back here. If you can’t handle it, I’ll find someone who can” for the smallest issues that came up before I got in that day.

About this time we got a new cook that was so incredibly lazy that I’m honestly not sure how he keeps his job. Everytime there wasn’t an order, he was sitting down on his phone, or just wasn’t doing anything. I told him multiple times to prep, but he told me Tim said it was fine for him to be on his phone when there wasn’t an order. Extremely abrasive to work with and complained about everything anyone did to Tim. The one day I worked with him on the grill he complained to Tim that he did all the work and that I kept running off. Except that, while I had to do orders, I also had to assign prep to the prep cooks and teach the other new cook how to do the fryer station. I did most of the work on all the tickets at the grill too, due to him not realizing orders came in when he was on his phone or decided he wanted a smoke break without asking me to cover. Then at the end of the night, he did a little bit of cleaning and said “I finished my closing, my uber is here so I have to leave”. I told him that he wasn’t done because everything was still out, but Tim overruled me and told him he can leave. Shockingly, I didn’t get out until late due to the extra cleaning I now had to do and Tim kept telling me “why does it take you so long to clean” “I wanna leave already, hurry up”.

I’m just gonna fast forward to my last day now as this is already longer than I thought it would be.

When I got in, there was barely any prep done for my station, so I did as much as I could and hoped it would be slow. That whole dinner service I kept having to prep breaded items to order and pick up slack from a guy who had stomach issues in the middle of service and was running to the restroom every 15 minutes(I don’t blame him, we’ve all been there). Joe sent the lazy cook back to help me (because he kept messing up on the grill), and he decided that because I had to keep running off to prep stuff that he would be in charge of the kitchen. He kept calling the wrong items, calling things twice or three times, sending food that wasn’t ready, and then burnt an order in the broiler when he decided that he needed a smoke break while there were still orders and didn’t tell anyone.

At this point of the night I was fuming with anger. While Joe was about to leave that night I told him that I was probably quitting if my check wasn’t right or if the cook complained to Tim again because I was doing my job. Joe told me “I don’t blame you. Just remember you owe us nothing and if anything, we owe you.” Cue the timing because that’s exactly when Tim comes out and starts yelling at me because the lazy cook complained to him about me. Saying stuff like I’m not a leader because I should have prepped to lead by example and that I was taking my time with orders. I had to calm myself down before I told Tim “everything that came out of my station tonight, I had to prep in the 2 hours I had before dinner started or prep to order due to lunch shift not prepping. How can you expect me to prepare 35 items in 2 hours. I told Lazy cook to help, but he said he didn’t do that because he was a line cook, not a prep cook” this is when Tim called out Lazy cook and he started saying all about how he saved dinner and I was a terrible leader for not prepping, and said it with a lot of theatrics. I told him that everything he cooked tonight, I prepped and even Joe asked Lazy cook “how many times did OP ask you to help prep and how many items did he messed up that OP had to fix” Lazy cook shut up after that and sulked back inside.

Again Tim said something like “you have to be a leader and if you can’t, I’ll replace you. I’ve got all these badass cooks lined up ready to work here(he doesn’t) and we can get one to do your job”. Then as we were going back inside, Tim told me that “maybe Lazy cook doesn’t like you because he wants your job”.

This is when everything clicked into place in my head. He had been complaining to Tim, and not Joe, about me for things I never did, because he wanted my job and was trying to get me fired. If he complained to Joe, he would tell him that he’s full of shit and send him home for trying to bad mouth me for fixing other people’s mistakes.

While I was cleaning, I thought really hard about how I wanted a job that didn’t stress me too much and how my schoolwork has been lacking. I told myself I would sleep on making a decision and come back the next day with what I was going to do about staying or not.

As I was leaving I asked Tim for my check and again I was shocked. My check was still $10/hr. I asked him if it was a mistake and if he could fix it for me tomorrow. Tim said “well, that’s not how it works. Me and Joe have to have a meeting before we give anyone a raise”. I said "I w…

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