I got hired at Port of Subs because Bobby and I had this strange form of recognition between us before I ever applied. I was just a regular who came in after class, but we talked like coworkers who hadn’t been hired together yet. We both had identity-through-work, the sense that being good at a job could stand in for having a self. And in a college town where the store got flooded with applicants every quarter, he brought me in on culture fit. It actually meant something. At that age, being chosen for anything felt like proof I was doing something right.

Once I started, the dynamic shifted fast. Bobby presented himself as the dedicated, service obsessed lead, the person who knew every quirk of the store and all the procedural trivia that made him feel important. Underneath that, he ran small power games that never stopped. Like most shifts, we worked in pairs, so writing the schedule gave him full control of who got along, who clashed, and who absorbed the burden of whatever he didn’t feel like doing. He avoided actual labor by assigning himself higher level tasks, though those tasks changed depending on what he didn’t want to touch that day.

One time he gave me the “Pepperoni test.” He just said everyone does it, you just have to slice ten pieces to an exact weight. He handed me the stack. I didn’t know it wasn’t real. I did what he asked and hit the number on the first try. Visibly baffled, he recalibrated the scale and told me to do it again. I hit it again. He didn’t react, no acknowledgement or recognition. He just shut down whatever he thought he was doing and never mentioned it again.

Jake was another issue. He had been there forever and treated that as an achievement. Right before I started, he got blackout drunk and broke his hand, so he couldn’t do anything except the register. He still outranked me because the owner liked him. He hated me immediately. Decided I was too confident on my first shift and turned that into some great character deficit. He complained to Bobby constantly. He started throwing pieces of meat at me instead of handing them over, waiting for me to drop one. I caught every piece. But he kept doing it, irritated each time I didn’t give him the result he wanted. But if I ever dropped one, it would be his fault. He would gain nothing if he was successful.

When the new girl was hired, everyone disliked her immediately. Too slow, too awkward, too much work to deal with. So Bobby assigned her to me. I mistook it for trust. It wasn’t. It was punishment. I treated her respectfully anyway, explained things clearly, and she adjusted fast. We became a solid team. When he asked how she was doing, I told him exactly that. He never put us on a shift together again. At the time I didn’t understand it, but looking back it’s obvious. Helping someone everyone else had written off was a kind of power, and I wasn’t allowed to have any.

Eventually I quit. I had worked hard in a place that rewarded nothing, and there was nothing left to push against. The dynamics weren’t special. The work wasn’t meaningful. And even when I excelled under impossible conditions, none of it mattered.

Sometimes you just lose, and that’s all there is to it.