As college students, we all know one student who sucked up to the teacher. I’m pretty sure that you have even seen a coworker do the same thing with the manager or the owner of the establishment. It’s not fun working or studying with them because they know how to play the system.
This article is about how your luck can and will run out if you’re not careful. If you see someone “brown-nosing” (someone trying to please for personal gain), let them. You should just do your own thing. Be it coming into class and learning or going to work and doing your job. That person is trying to do stuff just for themselves, and those actions will come back to bite them.
In my workplace, there is a manager who has been a part of the business since it opened a few years ago. She was the favorite, or at least it felt that way. When I joined this “family” in June of 2025, I felt out of place. It was hard to be successful because my training didn’t feel detailed enough. According to my coworkers, I was not trained properly and was set up for failure. I am finally learning the ropes and showcasing my skills, but there is a bigger reason for this, and it’s not just that I’m getting better at the job.
The “favorite” started taking advantage of the owner of the establishment. The manager has a few legitimate reasons for missing work, but it’s gotten excessive. She is constantly calling out or just flat out not showing up. She has made some mistakes, and it seems she has blamed me because the owner went from treating me like I’m disposable to being an integral part of the team. The owner gets visibly upset when the manager is mentioned because she has shown him that she doesn’t care about the establishment.
There was a point while working here that I felt like they hated me, but now I realize that the manager would whisper into the owner’s ear to make him believe incorrect things about me. The first time I noticed something fishy was when the manager and I were working together, and a situation happened. The week after, the owner called me into his office, saying that the situation couldn’t happen again. I was stunned because I didn’t know it wasn’t allowed, and the manager did not tell me at the time that what I did was wrong. Odd, don’t you think?
I had talked to a colleague about some things I’ve encountered, and she told me she felt a similar way. I thought to myself, how is this not just happening to me, but also to someone else? I think the manager felt threatened by me because I can perform well as long as I know what I’m doing.
The manager has missed over half of her scheduled shifts over the past 2 months. I can understand being a young adult and having a lot of responsibilities, but at this point, my colleagues and our other colleagues, who have known her longer than I, think something out of the ordinary is happening. All our colleagues have lost sympathy for the manager because it feels like she isn’t trying to help her situation, nor is she showing up for work when she mentions how much she needs to make money.
In my 8 months at this job, I constantly watched fishy activities. For example, we use Google Sheets, and the manager created a sheet for cleaning. It was convenient to be able to check off things you cleaned, and then the opener would be able to see what was cleaned and what needs to be done. The manager had hit a point where she stopped filling it out, and when a coworker asked her about why some people use it, and others don’t. The manager decided to get rid of the cleaning sheet, and that everyone should just know what needs to be done. All of us who clean like having a list because if we don’t, we can’t remember the small things that need to be done.
When the manager does come to work, which is a rare occasion, she thinks she has the right to order everyone around and change things that she doesn’t think “make sense.” She also carries a negative energy that everyone can sense; even the coworkers who have known her for a while find something off when she comes in. She also complains about all the work she has to complete. She has a lot of emails to respond to, and since she suffers from migraines, staring at a computer screen is not fun. While she was out, many tasks were neglected, so a coworker had to do damage control while I assisted. It was not good looking for us, having the ball being dropped, and the owner would get progressively upset at the situation.
The manager ended up only having 9-5 Mon-Fri availability when average work hours are 9:45-7:15. For this schedule to work, someone has to either work in the afternoons or work in pairs at the start of the shift. Which worked out for a while, but the manager had started not being able to come in for shifts at all, and everyone had to scramble to fill hours. Not to mention that this schedule only worked if everyone was healthy, but people fall ill and can’t come in, which makes the owner have to run the ship when he is supposed to be working on the logistics of it all.
With all being said, we still haven’t found a solution, and the manager is still neglecting her work. It’s a very sad situation to see the highly favored fall so low. So, here are the key takeaways for LSSC students.
College is a steppingstone where you get to learn the lessons of life. LSSC is here to give you a slice of what the real world will be like. If things are made for you, take them but don’t abuse them. We all know, there are rules for a reason and opportunities taken away for a reason. I urge you to stand up for yourself. I found that I kept quiet and talked to people that couldn’t make a difference. So, a change has yet to happen. I hope you learn that mistreatment comes back around. If you treat someone negatively, it will come back to you tenfold. So always be a good student, a good person, and always be courageous.
