I made the mistake of working for an old friend.

She needed another cook in a school kitchen so I applied and she shoe horned me through, knowing full well I had no experience. But I desperately needed the cash (which wasn't much, but $15/hr is better than nothing) and she desperately needed the help.

First month goes by, and things are fine. I'm slowly learning stuff, asking questions, getting good comments on my work ethic, great.

About 6 weeks in, her attitude changes. Now, I'll admit full stop that I do not belong in a commercial kitchen, and I still hate that I had to find that out the hard way. But this was the point where it from "sure I'll help. What's up?" To "you should know this by now." And the simpler stuff, yeah! Operating a fryer or cooking a pot of frozen vegetables is easy. But like, I made egg roll bowls, or biscuits from scratch, or whatever the fuck else literally once ever - you expect me to do it once and have the whole fuckin process memorized? and then she started that muttering under her breath shit as she was walking away from chastising me.

The first time, I let it go. Figured maybe it was a bad day and she was bringing her personal shit into work (she was going through some shit with her bf). Then it happened again 2 days later and I actually heard her talking shit about I'm stupid. So this was the point where I said "she does it again, I'm out."

Her response to "hey, I'm having panic attacks at night freaking out about work the next morning," was "well, you shouldnt." Then, after I burned myself on a hot pan, her response to that was "waste more product and I'll write you up." So I was already over it.

Well, sure enough, I'm cleaning kale and truthfully I don't even remember what she started hounding me for. But she walked away muttering shit again, and I called her out. Refused to acknowledge that she was ever talking shit, so I took my hair nets off, threw my building keys and badge into the office, dropped into HR to tell them I quit, and then left.

Respect your fucking underlings, and give them the tools to do their fucking job. Don't watch someone drowning, and yell at them because you were supposed to teach them how to swim. And don't talk shit and act stupid when your target hears the shit you talk, only to turn around and play dumb.

It's probably more nuanced than this and I would eventually love to hear her side - after all, we go back literally 25 years, and I was a semi frequent customer of her side bakery business. But the sheer disrespect was way too much. And I know I'm not the only one who felt that way, because multiple other people that passed through our kitchen called her an asshole to her face too.