Bakery bastardry

I apologise to all South Africans in advance: this asshat of a boss has made me cringe whenever I hear a SA accent. I'm trying to work through it, but it's pretty Pavlovian in effect.

Anyway. This boss hired me when I was at school, to do end-of-day sweeping up and cleaning in a very down-at-heel bakery premises. That was fine, except he started extending the hours, and the duties, to the point where I was doing cash reconciliation at the end of the day, AS WELL as cleaning, AS WELL as serving. Which was fine, except he wouldn't provide anywhere to lock the money away safely, so that he could come in and complain that he thought someone was stealing. (Which we never were - it was all on camera and on record, for christ's sake.) My paranoia - aided by his insistent grumbling that freemasons were robbing him, or some such shit, and combined with a back door with a ricketty lock and a frame that'd weep brick dust when I locked up at night - conspired to give me OCD; something I've not really been able to shake off, though I've not worked for the bastard for almost 15 years.

He used to then keep staff entertained by attempting to grope the female workers, and by bitching to the men about how he had things better in South Africa, where he'd apparently run Xerox SA and a gold mine. Lots of unsavoury references to black South Africans would invariably follow. Joy.

Anyway, he was horrible. He felt no qualms about putting chicken pies (hello, salmonella!) back in the fridge after they'd been in the pie warmer - and repeating the process for three days after - if the stock didn't sell. When I started just throwing the pies away (due to fear of killing any of the old-age home residents that frequented our overpriced dirtheap of a bakery) he fronted me and my "partner in crime" - another assistant - and put it to us that we had a scam going whereby we were *purposely* burning pies, so that they'd spoil and we'd have to throw them away. Except, of course, we weren't throwing them away - we were *selling* them to locals at a discount rate.

Yeah, there's nothin' like a burnt pie, if you're a hungry geriatric. Jesus.

The baker was a Pink Floyd-loving stoner who seemingly never slept. You'd hear "Wish You Were Here" picked on a three-string guitar (he never got around to replacing the broken ones) every second day, and though the boss came close to assaulting the guy over it, I think he knew that he'd never find anyone else who was willing to live on-premises, and wear a rent deduction that otherwise would've seen him living next door to Sydney Opera House.

The final straw? The guy finally fronted me about stealing. (I hadn't, he was just looking for a fight.) I got pretty upset, as I don't take shit like that lightly, so I started being fairly forceful in my defense. His reaction? "I don't allow my wife to talk to me like that."

I had to bite my tongue to stop from asking him if that was before or after he gave her a backhander to keep her in line.

So I probably wasn't going to be long for that world after that, right? Right. I went in to pick up some pay one day, and he had a nice speech about how business was slow (it wasn't) and how he was doing it tough (he wasn't) so there wouldn't be any more work for me. I was ropable, but just picked up the cash and left, as my friend asked, repeatedly and laughingly, if I'd just been fired.

Yeah, I had. And in retrospect, it was the best thing that ever happened during my time there.