We need to talk about your sandwich.
I work in an after-schools club that goes full time daycare over the summer. I work with a bunch of tit-heads that think they can dump 14 kids aged 5-12 into a swimming pool and bugger off for tea and fags leaving them in the care of the lifeguards, because none of them has the nerve to don a swimming costume and actually look after the kids, or even thinks to round up the kids and bring them outside when the fire alarm goes off, things like that, so I'm very much trusted and sent on all field trips and they'd be screwed without me.

We have a minibus driver who took his much deserved 3 weeks off last summer, so my boss asked me (as the only other person with a licence) to drive the minibus for those weeks. She couldn't do it because she'd be "too nervous". I pointed out that I didn't have a PSV licence and had never driven anything that size before but I basically wasn't given a choice. Drive the bus or else. So I did. For three weeks I took the kids and a couple of my co workers (who actually are lovely people, just crap at being the grown ups)to the Giants Causeway, Stormont castle, Folk Parks in Omagh etc. I'm 5'1, by the way, and it was a workout for me to reach the pedals and handbrake.


Summer scheme ends and everything goes back to normal. Round about October, I was late several times in one week and the boss calls me in with "We need to talk". I go into her office and immediately start into "I'm sorry, I know I've been late, it won't happen again" etc. No, that's not the problem. I'm being warned for gross misconduct, she says. Gross misconduct?! I'm very taken aback. I pride myself on doing my job very, very well. I also work with other peoples precious babies and was very hurt and upset. What the hell have I done?

Turns out I'd taken the minibus out on my lunchbreak to fill the tank and been seen buying lunch for myself in the service station when I paid for the diesel.

Of course, I immediately tendered my resignation as I'm obviously some evil, dangerous, lunch-purchasing cnut who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near kids lest they witness me consume a sandwich or a mars bar or something equally innocence-shattering. I was told that wouldn't be necessary, but that the warning would go on my record. I suspect my sarcasm went unnoticed.

She ignored my questions about "Didn't you once send the bus to the airport to pick your entire family? And get a lot of stuff taken from your house to the dump? And have it decorated and driven down the road for a parade?". Those are perfectly acceptable things to do with a school minibus, it seems. But buying a sandwich (all service stations should have a Subway... mmm) while paying for fuel is bang out of order.

It was three months after the event too! She'd sat on the knowledge of my heinous behaviour for all that time because she kept forgetting to mention it to me. The woman is utterly, utterly insane. And foriegn. I'd look for another job but the boss is emigrating home at the end of this summer so I won't have to put up with her insanity anymore and intend to start bullying my new boss into running things my way before she can settle in.

I expunged my own record 2 days later too. Now *that's* gross misconduct.
(posthumous mince is tiptoeing through the tulips, Fri 20 Apr 2007, 14:16, Reply)