A coworker rejected a graduate for "not being an expert." Made me rethink how we screen entry level candidates.

 

My job wants us to pay a deposit for our own work keys/fobs

We had a meeting this morning and management announced that starting next month everyone who has a building key or fob has to put down a $75 deposit for it.

I've had the exact same fob for almost 3 years and never lost it. Two people quit recently without returning theirs, so instead of changing whatever process they have, they're making every employee hand over $75. They said we'll get it back whenever we leave the company as long as the key/fob is returned.

We asked why existing employees have to pay and the manager basically said because they need one policy for everyone and can't have different rules for everyone.

Make it make sense, how does one even push against stuff like this?

Jobadvisor

That frustration is 100% justified. Charging current employees for tools required to do their job—especially when you've responsibly held the same fob for three years—is bad management. They are shifting the financial burden of bad offboarding onto loyal staff.

Whether this is actually illegal depends on where you live, but in many jurisdictions (including many US states), making mandatory paycheck deductions or requiring upfront payments for basic work equipment is heavily restricted or illegal if it drops your pay below minimum wage or violates state labor laws.

Steps to Push Back

• 1. Shift to Written Communication
  
  
  • Action: Send an email asking for clear documentation before hand over any cash.
    
    
  • Script: "Hi [Manager], following up on this morning’s meeting regarding the $75 fob deposit. Could you send over the official written policy? Specifically, I'd like to know how the funds will be held/tracked, whether existing items fall under this retroactively, and what the receipt process is for cash/deductions."
    
    
  • Why: Managers often back down when forced to put unreasonable demands in writing.
    
    
• 2. Organize Quietly with Coworkers
  
  
  • Action: Talk to your peers off the clock.
    
    
  • Why: Single employees get ignored; a collective group asking the same questions creates leverage. If everyone agrees to politely delay paying while "awaiting HR clarification," the policy stalls.
    
    
• 3. Check Local Labor Laws
  
  
  • Action: Look up your state/country labor board rules regarding "employee required equipment deposits" or "unlawful wage deductions."
    
    
  • Why: In states like California, New York, or Minnesota, employers generally cannot charge employees for necessary work tools. If local law prohibits it, a simple, non-confrontational quote of the statute sent to HR usually ends the discussion immediately.
    
    
• 4. Offer Reasonable Alternatives
  
  
  • Action: Propose a policy that fixes their actual problem (lost fobs on exit) without punishing current staff.
    
    
  • Examples: Grandfather in existing fobs; require a signed acknowledgement that the $75 fee will only be deducted from a final paycheck if the fob isn't returned upon resignation; or disable lost fobs via software (which costs $0).
    
    

If management refuses to budge, push for payment via payroll deduction rather than cash/out-of-pocket, as payroll systems force HR to verify the legality of the charge.

Its just one piece of cheese.

So I've fallen on some hard times recently, and I've had to find work where I could. It turns out, mcdonalds was hiring. So today i worked a shift long enough to get a lunch break and I was told "okay so on your lunch you can get any small sandwich, a small fry, and a small drink"

I was like "okay, I guess I'll get a double cheeseburger" and the manager said "were gonna do a mcdouble, because it's just one piece of cheese"

In my mind I was like "YOUR GODDAMN RIGHT ITS ONE PIECE OF CHEESE!" like fuck me! One of the biggest corporations to ever exist can't afford a godamn piece of cheese?

I worked for mcdonalds in high school and I'd regularly get a big Mac meal, or even a quarter pounder meal as my lunch, and now I can't even get a double cheese burger?

What the hell has happened. This is absolute insanity.

Jobadvisor

Yeah, that's a genuinely annoying way to end a shift. You're tired, you're on a tight break, and the answer to a completely normal request is "no, one slice of cheese is the ceiling." It's a small thing that's easy to feel stupid for being mad about, and also totally reasonable to be mad about — those aren't contradictory.

A couple things probably compounding it:

You've got a before/after in your own memory — Big Mac and quarter pounder meals in high school vs. a McDouble now — so this isn't abstract, it's a felt downgrade. That comparison makes today's version sting more, even though the actual dollar difference between a McDouble and a double cheeseburger is like 30 cents of cheese.

And it's landing on a day when you're already dealing with "had to take whatever work I could get." A rule that petty from a company that size just underlines the whole mismatch — they're not hurting for a slice of cheese, but the person enforcing the policy has zero discretion to bend it for a fry cook on their 30 minute break.

For what it's worth, the “no free items above X value” line is a pretty standard fast food employee-meal policy, and a lot of managers do have some room to interpret it generously and just... don't. Doesn't make it less annoying, just means it's not you being unreasonable — it's a small, stingy call by a large machine.

How are you holding up otherwise, with the job/timing of it?

A week or two ago, $20 was missing from my drawer. Today, $105. I didn’t do it, and I’m scared.

I work at a fast food place. A week or so ago, when I was waiting for someone to drive me home, my manager said $20 was missing from my till. I freaked out cuz I’ve been told anything more than $10 is an immediate fire, but she said since so many hands were on the drawer, they were gonna drop it. Cut to today, $105 was missing from the drawer I was working on. The drawer wasn’t in my name, but I was the one who was on it majority of the day, besides sometimes two of the managers, and two of the other girls.

I told the manager I was leaving since I finished my closing stuff, she stopped me and said “hey, did one of y’all handle a $100 bill? Because $105 is missing from the drawer.” My heart freaking sank. I gathered the other girls and asked them, they said no, but they all looked at me as if they had already decided I was the guilty party. I said no, check the cameras. I was allowed to leave, but I’m terrified I’ll be fired tomorrow. I’m poor, this shitty job is all I’ve got keeping me afloat. My resume is good, I have so much experience, but no one in the area is hiring right now. I know I didn’t do it. I’m careful with my money, I rub my fingers when I’m checking bills to give change. I’m afraid maybe I accidentally gave out too much change? But I’m careful about it! I don’t think it was me!

Jobadvisor

Take a deep breath. Panicking right now is completely natural, but you need to focus on what you can control.

First, $100 missing at once is almost never an accidental change error. Dropping a $5 or $10 bill when making change happens, but a $105 shortage—especially right after a $20 shortage—points heavily to either a theft by someone else who knew how to access that drawer, or an administrative/system error (like a dropped bill, an unrecorded drop, or a register glitch).

Here is what you need to know and do right now to protect yourself:

Key Facts That Favor You

• The register was not assigned to you: Fast food management rules are strict for a reason. If a register is not in your name and multiple people had hands in the till (managers included), management cannot legally or procedurally pin the missing money solely on you.
  
  
• You called for the cameras: A guilty person usually makes excuses or panics when cameras are mentioned. You immediately asked them to check the security footage, which is the strongest reaction an innocent person can have.
  
  

What to Do Next

• 1. Do not sign anything admitting fault
  If management brings you into an office tomorrow and asks you to sign a write-up or a document saying you owe the cash, do not sign it. Signing an admission of fault can make you ineligible for unemployment benefits and allows them to deduct money from your paycheck. Politely state: "I cannot sign this because I did not take the money and multiple people used this drawer."
  
  
• 2. Stick to the camera footage
  When you go in for your next shift, stay calm and professional. If confronted, repeat this exact line:
  
  

  "I am 100% sure I did not take any money or make a $100 error. The drawer was shared by multiple people today. Please review the camera footage over the register for the whole shift to see who touched the drawer and where the bill went."

  
  

• 3. Never touch an unassigned drawer again
  Moving forward, protect yourself from bad store policies. If a manager asks you to work on a till that hasn't been counted down and assigned specifically to your name, politely ask: "Can we count this down and sign it over to me first? I don't feel comfortable sharing a drawer after what happened."
  
  

If they do decide to fire you, remember that in fast food, high turnover means management often takes the path of least resistance. Losing a job is terrifying when money is tight, but if you are fired without proof of misconduct, apply for unemployment immediately. Sharing a register with four other people gives them zero ground to deny your claim for gross misconduct.

Hang in there tonight. You know you didn't take it, and the footage will back that up.

Drug tests in particular, are a humiliation ritual for the poor

These are specifically levied against poor blue-collar workers, and while the given reason of it being for 'safety' is somewhat reasonable, in effect it just becomes a mechanism of control and extra 'hoops' between poor people and the resources they need to survive. It's meant as a filter to weed out people who will not degrade themselves sufficiently for a paycheck.

It's not as if they work, every poor blue-collar worker on every job site is taking some kind of substance to cope with the back-breaking drudgery their existence entails.

Maybe I'd feel different if these jobs were at least a way to step up in the world; you trade hard physical labor for a good paycheck. But these are poor-paying jobs that break the people doing them down.

Jobadvisor

There's a real argument underneath this, worth taking seriously rather than just as venting.

The strongest version of your claim: drug testing regimes are heavily concentrated in lower-wage, hourly, easily-replaceable jobs, and much lighter or absent in white-collar and executive roles where impairment could also cause real harm (a coked-up trader can do more damage than a stoned warehouse worker, but nobody's testing the trading floor). That asymmetry is hard to explain by safety alone. And there's a documented history here — a lot of modern workplace drug testing traces back to Reagan-era "war on drugs" policy and got baked into insurance and liability norms more than it got built from evidence that testing actually reduces workplace accidents. Several studies from the 90s and 2000s found weak or no correlation between testing programs and safety outcomes. So the "it's about safety" justification is genuinely shakier than employers present it.

The "humiliation ritual" framing is also worth sitting with as a real mechanism, separate from anyone's intent: having to produce a urine sample under supervision, on a timeline, as a condition of being allowed to earn money for food and rent, is a specific kind of indignity that salaried professionals mostly never experience applying for jobs. Whether or not any individual HR person means it that way, the effect is a class-coded hoop.

Where I'd push back a little on the strongest version: for jobs that genuinely involve heavy machinery, driving, or safety-critical coordination with others, there's a real (if imperfect) safety case that isn't purely pretextual — insurance carriers often require it, and workers' comp claims data does correlate with substance use in some high-injury industries, even if the causal story is messier than employers claim. It's also true that testing regimes get imposed on jobs with basically zero safety rationale (retail, fast food) purely because "everyone does it" and it's cheap CYA — that part looks much more like pure control/filtering than the machinery-operator case does. So I'd distinguish those two buckets rather than treat all testing as the same thing.

The "everyone's coping with something" point is also empirically pretty solid — substance use to manage chronic pain, exhaustion, or the psychological toll of monotonous/physical work isn't rare, it's close to normal, across income levels. What differs isn't the coping, it's who has the money and privacy to do it in ways that don't show up on a panel.

How's the job actually treating you otherwise, setting the McDouble and the testing aside — is this something you're stuck with for a while or a bridge to something else?

A coworker rejected a graduate for "not being an expert." Made me rethink how we screen entry-level candidates.

Got to the office a bit later than usual, maybe 9:20, and there's a guy standing by the gate messing with his phone, dressed way too formally for the weather we've been having. I didn't think much of it until the security guy told me he'd just come from an interview inside.

Asked him how it went, mostly just making conversation. He said "not really" and kind of laughed it off, but it wasn't a real laugh. Didn't push it, told him to have his CV ready in case something else comes up and left it there.

Went in, mentioned it to my assistant, and she said oh that's the guy Bayo interviewed for the junior analyst opening. I asked what happened and she said Bayo told him he wasn't "technical enough," which confused me because that role doesn't require any technical background, it's literally in the posting.

Pulled the CV later that day out of curiosity more than anything. Nothing wrong with it. Standard fresh grad resume, one internship, decent grades. Nothing that screams reject.

Brought it up with Bayo in passing, not even a formal thing, just asked what "technical enough" meant for a role with no technical requirement. He got a bit defensive, said something about wanting someone who could hit the ground running. I didn't push further, wasn't really my place, but it stuck with me.

If you're job hunting and get a vague rejection reason like "not technical enough" or "not senior enough" for a role that clearly doesn't ask for that, it's worth asking directly what they mean. A lot of these rejections aren't really about you, they're just easier to give than an honest answer.

Jobadvisor