Gamer Girls

After the casino experience, I decided to try my hand with the mentally ill. The job advertisement seemed to suggest that having a degree is preferred. So great. Maybe I can get some use out of this thing.

It paid $15/hour. So nearly twice what I was making at the casino.

The downside was absolutely everything else.

This was a fucking nightmare. Most of the people there were children but there were also adults. Most of the adults were mentally retarded, often REALLY mentally retarded.

Well, let’s just start with orientation. There were like 15 of us there. This place was CONSTANTLY hiring large groups of people like this because people were constantly quitting en masse.

I was the only white person. No, that’s not true. There were two other white people, a man and a woman, and I think that they knew each other, but they only lasted a couple of days. The orientation was like two weeks.

Everybody else was black. And 90% of them were from Africa. African immigrants. Everybody there, myself included, was really, really, REALLY desperate for work.

The trainers were all white, oddly. There were three trainers. All white Americans.

The training was like self-defence and how to restrain people and shit like this. I could get into the creepy history of this place and all of the problems that they’ve had but I’ll just focus on my own experiences there instead.

One of the things that we had to do was do a backwards roll. This was part of the training. And if you couldn’t do this roll, you couldn’t do the job.

So there’s this one woman there, an African woman, with the biggest ass I’ve ever seen in my life. She was a slim woman but she had a giant fucking ass. She could have made a fortune in porn just from the pictures. But instead, she was in this fucking nightmare factory.

She couldn’t do the roll. Just physically. Her ass was too big. She’d get stuck with her ass in the air. She couldn’t get the momentum going. It was impossible.

So the trainer just watched as she struggled with her ass in the air and then he pushed her over. They let her slide but technically, according to their own rules, she should have been fired. For having a giant ass.

We had to watch a video of what goes on in this place. And the video was from like…I don’t know….the 1970s? 1980s? It didn’t look current (2000s). And fucking…oh my god. How much detail do I want to put here? People banging their heads. People ripping out the interiors of their mouths. Eyeballs being gouged out. Weird toilet shit.

So after the video, we’re all in the hallway, and I fucking pass out. When I come to, some paramedic or something is talking to me. But I said that I was okay and I continued with the orientation.

I would get doughnuts with some guys there during lunch. It was an African guy and some black American guy. And we’d talk about the horrors of this job. It would be compared to training animals. And it’s true. It was like that. A lot of these people were so badly off mentally that they had animal or less intelligence.

This American guy had a degree, as I did. I don’t know if the African guy did.

And the owners of this doughnut place were immigrants from Poland or something. And we were there for Christmas. I don’t remember if it was Christmas Day or Christmas Eve. And I remember them being friendly and wishing us a merry Christmas. We were the only ones in the store. Nobody else is getting doughnuts on Christmas. And it was all extremely depressing. These immigrants working on Christmas, trying to eek out a living selling doughnuts, and the fact that we have to go back to this horror show soon.

A lot of the people at the orientation said, “I’m just going to do the orientation and then quit.” Because we got paid for this two week orientation. The same $15/hour as we’d get on the regular job. But the regular job was…indescribably horrible. So people didn’t want to do it.

One of the trainers was a giant asshole. He was fine the first couple of days, but after a few people quit, he just became a huge dick. He knew that if you were still there after two days, you really, really needed the job so he could do and say whatever he wants.

But I put up with all of the bullshit and finished the orientation. Now I had to do this job.

I’m on a bus with these mental patients. We’re each assigned our own person because everybody needs constant monitoring to prevent them from killing themselves and others. And my kid keeps eating his diaper. This is his thing. He’s constantly eating inedible things. When there’s nothing around that he can put in his mouth, he would scrounge on the carpet for lint to put in his mouth.

Now he’s eating his diaper. On the bus. This is my first day of the job. This black American guy who I would get doughnuts with points out that he’s eating his diaper. But what can I do? The guy has to be physically restrained all fucking day. His brain is mush. He can’t speak. He doesn’t understand anything you’re saying to him. You can’t reason with him.

On another day, he took a shit in his diaper, reached behind himself, and smeared the shit all over his face.

We would get attacked every fucking day. Spit on. Punched. Kicked. Every day. There wasn’t a single day that I wasn’t attacked. It was like dealing with animals.

This job was like 90 minutes from my home. So not as far as the casino but still a long commute. But I did it because this is the only job I could find and I was trying to make the best of it.

I worked there for three months and there are a thousand insane, disgusting stories that I could tell. But I’ll just skip to my last day.

We were in one of the group homes for these kids. And I get there and I’m told by a co-worker, at the start of the shift, that I have to work with this kid who eats everything. So I make an offhand comment suggesting that I really don’t like working with this kid. So the guy says, “Oh, I’ll tell the manager then.” I tell him not do that, it’s okay. But he insists that it’s not a problem. He’ll tell the manager and the manger will surely move me to a different job. Fine.

The manager comes over. He’s an African guy. And he says that we all have patients who we don’t want to work with but this is the job. So I say it’s fine, I didn’t tell that guy to say anything to you, this was his idea, whatever.

This kid is constantly putting things in his mouth and I’m constantly having to stop him. His friend comes over and attacks me a few times. Then this friend ends up getting restrained by other people and they threaten to put him into an even worse group home if he doesn’t stop. To think that there’s a worse group home than this place.

Then the manager, who clearly doesn’t like me, starts telling me that I have to stand over here, now I have to stand over here, now I have to stand over here. There were like 20 people working in his house, by the way, for about 15 kids. It was necessary because it was chaos constantly.

But the manager was shit. He was an asshole. I never saw him before. There were loads of managers at this place. You never saw the same manager twice. People quit so frequently and were promoted so quickly. The turnover of staff was ridiculous. Every day, probably ten people quit.

So then the manager says that I have to stand outside of some other kid’s room and make sure that he’s not killing himself or anyone else. This was the usual job. This guy was below average intelligence but he was able to speak and reason and learn and whatever. He was just a stupid, violent kid.

He’s talking to himself and he starts using profanity. So a nearby co-worker says that he can’t use profanity. He gets punished for that. I’ll spare you the details of the punishment. But this co-worker tells me to go get this guy’s sheets.

Everybody in this place had their own sheets. The sheets listed all of the behaviours that they’re not allowed to do and what the punishment is if they exhibit one of these behaviours.

So I go get the sheet. Some other African immigrant was handing them out to people. And as I get mine, the manager comes over. “What are you doing here? I told you to watch that kid.”

This was my limit. I was told by that co-worker to get the sheet. That’s what I’m doing. Nobody has a problem with any of this. There’s a crowd of other staff doing the exact same thing. There’s nothing wrong with any of this. It’s the appropriate protocol. But this asshole manager has some problem with me. He wasn’t behaving like this to anyone else.

So fuck it. I said, “Okay, that’s it”, I got my coat, and I left. And as I’m leaving, he’s trying to explain, “No, all I did was tell you…you have to be at the…” Fuck you. You deal with these people.

A few days later, I went back to this place to return their stuff and they didn’t even want it. I just had some kind of exit interview where I explained what happened. The guy said that I should report him. You were actually required to report misbehaviour by your co-workers at least twice a week or something. I never bothered. And if you didn’t report people, you got in trouble somehow. I don’t remember exactly what it was. You got some kind of demerits and if you get too many demerits they fire you or don’t give you work for a couple of weeks or something. You also got demerits if people reported you, of course. Maybe there was some kind of investigation first and you had to be found guilty of whatever it was that was alleged. I don’t know. I didn’t give a fuck. You want to fire me, go ahead.

So anyway, I didn’t report this guy. Then this guy doing the exit interview said that I’d be getting demerits or whatever for leaving the job early on that day. But…I quit. So who gives a shit?

Anyway, worst job I’ve ever had. And there are some real contenders.