u/bananarepama

Worked at one of the most overly-hyped restaurants in my area for a year. I had no prior experience and so every manager felt like they needed to keep an eye on me. They had all been working together for 15 years and all assumed they were "basically telepathic" as they liked to say, but they frequently contradicted each other and one of them, my main boss, contradicted herself multiple times a day. Somehow I was always the idiot, even when I could prove that they had contradicted themselves. A couple of the other servers, who had worked all over, told me that while they loved this place it's the last place they would ever have wanted to train up at because it was just too chaotic. They could handle it because they'd been serving for many years, but if they had started at this place they didn't think they would've been able to handle it.

I didn't leave because I didn't think I'd have an easier time anywhere else. Plus these guys were in a small community and they knew everyone, it wouldn't be hard for them to blacklist me.

This is a restaurant that basically prided itself on getting by on the skin of its teeth every day, and it was not uncommon for the kitchen to be 40 minutes in the weeds when we were only a quarter full. I would come in an hour early every day just to get all my prep done because the boss had a thing for letting customers into the restaurant after we had only had 15 minutes to prep and I wanted to make sure I could roll with anything without getting too stressed. These guys were very good at schmoozing with people and they had a lot of friends in the city who would come up and give them their business no matter what though, so they did fine. (They were in the middle of gentrifying the shit out of the area, which is part of why they kept coming back.)

After like 13 or 14 months there I'm head bartender this one shift, and twenty minutes in a keg kicks. No big deal, happens all the time, except my back is not doing great that day and the beer cooler is so small that if you want to change one keg you need to haul 3-6 kegs out of and back into the cooler to do what you need to do. I tell the general manager who's the only remotely consistent one there, he says "no problem I'll do it definitely don't do that shit with your back out" and then disappears, gets pulled away by some other crisis. I keep trying to track him down but he's nowhere to be found. I start getting word that people on the fine dining side of the restaurant are refusing to order anything until the new beer is available, even though they don't know what it is.

One of the proprietors comes and finds me and demands to know why there's a holdup and I tell her the situation and she gives me this withering stare and she says "Oh, you...can't change a keg because your back hurts...?" and tells me to stop bullshitting her and do my job.

For the record, I did not make a habit of trying to get out of tasks because I was in pain. I did most of the heavy lifting for my head bartender and, like I said, came in an hour early every day to prep and organize the wine cellar and clean.

I know that nothing will change and the general manager isn't coming back to save me so I do it. And the next morning I can't so much as move my head without feeling like there's a cattle prod at the base of my spine. That was the worst I'd ever had, and I haven't been the same since. I was on bed rest for 6 months and needed a walker to get around that entire time. I saw one spine specialist and he immediately said I needed surgery so I dipped and didn't go back, because I was out of work and didn't have health insurance.

I'm thinking about all this now because I haven't been able to work an in-person job since. And I'm currently in a flareup that has me back on the fucking walker again. Every time I lie down I wake up feeling worse, regardless of what sleeping positions/bolsters etc I try. Sitting is torture. Walking is exhausting. Standing is torture. Pain meds prolong the issue, because the muscle spasms just come back harder when they wear off.

I have times where I can function, and one of those times I applied at a restaurant just for kicks. During the interview I'm asked how my old bar would handle certain situations and I answer honestly but diplomatically, and I am told very gingerly that I learned so many bad habits at my old place that I would only ever be hirable as a barback and I would have to re-learn everything from scratch. I had specifically applied to my old restaurant because I was told they were hot shit and if I had them on my resume it would open a lot of doors.

I fucking crippled myself for a group of people who were so inept at managing a restaurant but somehow are STILL INSANELY POPULAR even though most of the people I've talked to that have been there think it's extremely overpriced and overhyped. They're doing great. They ran me into the ground and for some reason started a rumor that I was having an affair with the grill cook, who was married with children (I fucking wasn't) and it was heavily implied that when his marriage failed I had something to do with it. Who acted like I was a fucking malingerer when I tried to draw a boundary once after over a year of my showing up and honestly trying my fucking best in that chaos pit. Can't prove that dour bitch told me to go change the kegs, so I can't sue her for any of the millions she's sitting on. Over a decade later, they're doing great and I'm just...perched on one ass cheek on a chair next to my walker, knowing that as soon as I try to stand up it'll feel like someone's electrocuting my tailbone.

It wasn't all terrible and they had days where they were a little bit more fair, but for God's sake it wasn't worth it. This industry ain't shit, and I ruined my fucking life to prove it.

edited to add a funny anecdote that gives you more of an idea of this place:

The barback was this little early-20s waif, and they kept dangling a promotion to server in front of her face with zero intention of ever actually moving her up, because she was too good at being a barback and anyone new we demo'd would suck. She was a good worker, and also not a fucking malingerer at all. One night we're doing our paperwork, she gets asked to go down to the cooler to see how much of something we have left. Around this time the cooler had just been stocked and there were full kegs stacked on top of each other. She comes back up and says "One of the stacked kegs fell on my foot! Holy shit! I don't even know how that happened, I didn't even touch it!" And the head bartender and general manager literally don't even look up from their paperwork. One of em says, "wow." in a very bored voice. The other says "Well thank god you were wearing your boots today, not your regular shoes, right?" Zero fucks given. This was one of those places where if you advocated for yourself in the slightest you would be called petty, and this was no exception, so the barback just shut her mouth and rolled with it.

Man, fuck that place.

I've got some blueberry bushes in-ground that looked okay until they started to set fruit, and now the entire plant, including the little baby blueberries, are a uniform pale bile-yellow that's really freaking me out. There is some slight green veinage on the leaves, so I gather they're locked out of absorbing iron. The green veins aren't really dramatic though. I've given them berry tone and sulfur and a few other things over the years but they've never been happy and I've never gotten fruit off of them.

It occurs to me that I have extremely hard, alkaline water, and every time I water them I'm basically poisoning them. I had seen some people on YouTube recommend watering with vinegar water using 1T of vinegar per gallon of water...I tried that my first year out of desperation and the leaves turned red immediately when they had actually been pretty green before.

I also just got some citrus saplings for indoors that I really don't want to mess up, kumquat and improved meyer lemon. They've been happy so far (haven't up-potted them yet, trying to make sure I get the soil mix right) but they won't tolerate my water for much longer and I'd love to actually get some fruit off of them.

Is there anything I can do to save my blueberries at this point, and any way I can treat my water to keep from messing my acid-loving plants up?

Just checked out NCRA's free A-Z program based on advice I saw on an archived post. But when I looked into the program you need the machine as well.

I'm interested in scoping and I've seen a lot of reporters say that if a scopist doesn't know how to read raw steno they're not worth hiring. I'm a middle-aged l loser with a high school degree and I'm stuck in a bit of an abusive situation and have been for some time. I'm looking for skills that can help me gradually cobble together some work (not allowed to work unless it's from home, and with AI and everything all of the remote jobs I qualify for don't really exist anymore). I know that it would take a long time for scoping to come anywhere near supporting me, if it ever does, but I'm interested in it and I feel like it would be a viable option for supplemental income over time.

Tl;dr I don't have a ton of money and I want to learn how to read steno without necessarily having to learn to type it. Wouldn't be able to bring a machine in the house, and almost all of my time is spent in the house, so. Any tips?

Also, quick tangent, but with all the theories and all the individual briefs that y'all use...how do you ever read each other's notes successfully? Do you just kind of intuit your way through or does it get kind of nebulous in briefs-heavy writing?

I've had a few jobs in my life (wasn't allowed to get my first job till I was 25 though) and they've all been either extremely toxic dead-end situations or they were lovely and I got on well with people but it paid jack shit.

I don't have any "superpowers" that come with neurodivergence. I don't have a special interest I could leverage to carve out a niche for myself somewhere. I'm not particularly intelligent, I need to be taught how to do things (I can't intuit my way through computer programming like my brother did, for example), I struggle with agoraphobia, I have a lot of mobility complications and I have very few and very flickering soft skills. In short, I can't even be all that outraged that federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr in my specific case, because the reality is that's about all I'm worth.

There are a couple things I have potential in -- I'm artsy, but at the moment in a pretty mediocre way. Even if I did get into the swing of it I don't know how to do social media in an engaging way so I'd have no way to promote it.

I am pretty decent at doing mind-numbing tasks that most people despise doing, like say sorting and counting change, stuff like that. I once agreed to sort a bin of beads by color for someone. Took like five hours to do it all but I popped on a podcast and agreed to let myself take a walk if I got too claustrophobic. Basic AI-level shit at this point, haha.

If I know exactly what to look for I *can* be good at being detail-oriented, though I won't lie sometimes the brain fog gets me. If I again know exactly how things work I can be good at anticipating needs. Problem solving not great though I've had some lucky moments. Tech skills abysmal. Would love to learn more about all of this but I'm genuinely at a loss as to where to begin. (Don't want to learn how to do AI stuff though, fuck that.)

I need to work, and unfortunately at the moment I need it to be something I can do from home. That means I need to find a way to learn skills -- but what skills? I have no idea, and I know I'm not the only one because with AI replacement everyone is either already obsolete or afraid they're on the brink of becoming obsolete. If I don't find something to do that isn't cooking and helping run a household and actually earns me money, I feel like I'll never respect myself again. I hate being at the mercy of others, I hate not having my own options, I hate thinking I'll never be able to make it on my own so I have to deal with whatever abuse I get here until there's no one else left, and then I'm screwed anyway because I've spent my life in bizarre symbiosis with very specific others who are not mentally well and have taught me a lot of bad habits when it comes to dealing with people.

For those of you who actually how to hack it in life...who don't have specialized degrees, who are just normal people functioning in life...what kind of advice would you give someone like me, who has a huge itch to Do Work but has no clue where to even begin finding a direction? If I were a high schooler asking for this advice as opposed to a 30-something loser, what would you tell me? I'm so pent up and I'm so sick of spinning my wheels.