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Rajaah said:

Side anecdote, Story Time With Raj, feel free to skip:

When I was a kid (like 18) I worked for a gas station. 3 days a week, nothing serious, was just putting in some work to help my mom out instead of starting college. A few people at the gas station had a clique and didn't like me, so they did everything they could to bad-mouth me to the owners when I wasn't around. Since I hadn't actually DONE anything, the owners couldn't fire me, and probably didn't want to. So instead the clique put me under heavy scrutiny. Like Stalin's police chief, "show me the man and I'll show you the crime". And they STILL couldn't find anything to stick me with. They complained about me so much that the owners reduced my schedule from 3 days a week to 2 days to 1 day a week. At that point I knew something was wrong, but nobody would tell me anything. The other employees acted like everything was fine, the owners just kinda didn't want to talk to me. One guy there was kind of sympathetic to me and told me that the bad-mouthing was "nonstop" when I wasn't around and he didn't know why.

So on the week that it was reduced to 1 day, the employees that didn't like me took a bunch of stuff from the store (like $70 worth of merchandise) and put all of it on my employee credit. The owners had it set up so employees could ring up food or whatever on their employee badge # and get all of it at a small discount (like 10%). It'd come out of that week's check. So they put in my ID # and bought all this stuff as me. It ended up being more than my check for that week (remember, was down to one day a week, and minimum wage at the time was like $8). So on that week's check (the following Friday) I was going to get nothing.

This was a Thursday so I hadn't even gotten the previous week's check (the next day) which was for a whole two days or $140ish.

I went into the office and complained about the theft and how I didn't actually make any purchases, something that would be easy to prove with the transaction timestamps and looking at the station cameras. The bosses didn't even want to look into it, and told me I'd caused enough headaches for them, now I was blaming people for stuff. Then they fired me right there, and told me to sign an NDA type document promising I wouldn't bring legal action against them and agreed with my termination. I refused to sign it because it was all bullshit, and they told me they'd with-hold tomorrow's $140 check if I didn't sign it.

My mom needed that money at the time since we were the poorest we've ever been, so I reluctantly signed the paper. Stopped in and got the $140 check the next day and had a few of the employees laugh at me in this super mean-spirited way. I never got the check for the final week, it got gobbled up by their stolen goods.

This whole thing made me angrier than probably anything else in my young adult life. Like I wanted to go back and put bricks through the windows if I could get away with it. But I didn't, I took the ass-beating like a little pansy boy and sulked away.

Basically I compromised my principles for $140.

This story came back to me while reading the Mick Gordon thing. Now I'm wondering if I had a substantial lawsuit on my hands with that place (for wrongful termination, unfairly garnished wages, harassment, threatening to withold pay) and totally messed up by signing a no-sue form.

@Cad and anyone else, feel free to weigh in with how dumb I was to let them bend me over like that. Again, I was 18, and had never been treated that badly in a work environment before so I was more caught off guard than anything.

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