It all happened in August 2011. I was still in college and was searching for a summer job in IT.
I responded to a job listing and was invited to an interview with a small company located at the other side of the city. I suited up and took the bus there.
The company was indeed small - their office was the size of an apartment. That couldn't be said about the owner though(named D. in this story), who happened to be at the door when I arrived - I would later learn that he used to be a bodybuilder (important detail).
Our exchange went as follows:
- Is this Company X?
- Yeah. You for the interview?
- Yes.
- Zajebiście (translates to "awesome", but is also an expletive).
The interview went well, because there were really no technical questions. Actually, it went so well that he told me I could start right away, so I did.
Thus began my work experience in that place. Every morning when I arrived D. would call me to his office and talk to me for at least an hour. Our little chit-chat was usually broken up by his CEO/girlfriend/cleaning lady, who would rush me back to work and scold D. for wasting my time. I would then return and ask my supervisor - M. what's the plan for that day. M. spent an average 11h every day in the office and was de facto running the place. I wanted to make a good impression, so I started spending 10h there.
My duties included writing web scrapers and so-called "ant sites" (loose translation) - small pages with links to the site our customer was paying us to have higher in Google's search results.
During those morning meetings D. would pitch me his ideas or show something that he thought was cool. Examples:
- An episode of Metal Motivation with the music from Chariots of Fire and some other song played simultaneously to a CGI clip of a meteor hitting Earth. D. trailed off before explaining the reason for showing me this.
- A "3D" gif of the hourglass nebula - he said that this is going to be a hit and that he talked about this with Brian May (the musician/astrophysicist).
- "know your date of death" - a premium SMS campaign in the form of a quiz that he coordinated. I remembered that one from a year before - disregarded it as spa.. Turns out that he sold the aggregated results from those quizzes to insurance companies, who could then plan their pricing strategy based on that. The questions were pretty personal, but that was before GDPR, so yeah.
- This one got him really exited: he sat me down on a leather-clad chair, gave me a pair of stereoscopic paper glasses and showed... 3D porn.
At that moment I started asking myself what kind of mental institution I landed in, but the CEO/girlfriend/cleaning lady interrupted us, ordered me to go back to work and asked D. "does this sculpture need to be here?" - she meant the tower PC chassis next to the door that looked as if someone gave it a few healthy whacks with a baseball bat.
I would later learn that D. slept an average of 4h a day and at times was aggressive.
But the weirdest was yet to come: you see while D. spent most of the day in his office, in the afternoons he liked to have a stroll around the place and stand look over peoples' shoulders.
One such time I was minding my own business when I registered his presence, bit something was off. I turned in my chair towards D. and noted that he is not wearing pants - just a shirt and briefs. More importantly my face at an unfortunate height.
He noticed my confusion and explained that since he used to be a bodybuilder, his legs are fairly thick, so he's uncomfortable in pants. I chose to accept this new reality.
Later on it proved to be more of a thing than I originally thought. We tried to hire a secretary. I've seen four of them and the the one who lasted the longest (a week) reportedly had this conversation during the interview:
- By the way, are you fine with me walking around the office without pants?
- Oh, it's no problem - I have four brothers so I'm used to this.
The CEO/girlfriend/cleaning lady did not enjoy this development and made sure that girl quit ASAP.
Our relationship started to sour when, after returning from a few days off which I took, I learned that I would be paid minimum wage. I wanted to reach D. about this but he was busy smoking weed and drinking vodka with his clients/friends/businesses partners. I quit on the spot and that was the end of it.
I responded to a job listing and was invited to an interview with a small company located at the other side of the city. I suited up and took the bus there.
The company was indeed small - their office was the size of an apartment. That couldn't be said about the owner though(named D. in this story), who happened to be at the door when I arrived - I would later learn that he used to be a bodybuilder (important detail).
Our exchange went as follows:
- Is this Company X?
- Yeah. You for the interview?
- Yes.
- Zajebiście (translates to "awesome", but is also an expletive).
The interview went well, because there were really no technical questions. Actually, it went so well that he told me I could start right away, so I did.
Thus began my work experience in that place. Every morning when I arrived D. would call me to his office and talk to me for at least an hour. Our little chit-chat was usually broken up by his CEO/girlfriend/cleaning lady, who would rush me back to work and scold D. for wasting my time. I would then return and ask my supervisor - M. what's the plan for that day. M. spent an average 11h every day in the office and was de facto running the place. I wanted to make a good impression, so I started spending 10h there.
My duties included writing web scrapers and so-called "ant sites" (loose translation) - small pages with links to the site our customer was paying us to have higher in Google's search results.
During those morning meetings D. would pitch me his ideas or show something that he thought was cool. Examples:
- An episode of Metal Motivation with the music from Chariots of Fire and some other song played simultaneously to a CGI clip of a meteor hitting Earth. D. trailed off before explaining the reason for showing me this.
- A "3D" gif of the hourglass nebula - he said that this is going to be a hit and that he talked about this with Brian May (the musician/astrophysicist).
- "know your date of death" - a premium SMS campaign in the form of a quiz that he coordinated. I remembered that one from a year before - disregarded it as spa.. Turns out that he sold the aggregated results from those quizzes to insurance companies, who could then plan their pricing strategy based on that. The questions were pretty personal, but that was before GDPR, so yeah.
- This one got him really exited: he sat me down on a leather-clad chair, gave me a pair of stereoscopic paper glasses and showed... 3D porn.
At that moment I started asking myself what kind of mental institution I landed in, but the CEO/girlfriend/cleaning lady interrupted us, ordered me to go back to work and asked D. "does this sculpture need to be here?" - she meant the tower PC chassis next to the door that looked as if someone gave it a few healthy whacks with a baseball bat.
I would later learn that D. slept an average of 4h a day and at times was aggressive.
But the weirdest was yet to come: you see while D. spent most of the day in his office, in the afternoons he liked to have a stroll around the place and stand look over peoples' shoulders.
One such time I was minding my own business when I registered his presence, bit something was off. I turned in my chair towards D. and noted that he is not wearing pants - just a shirt and briefs. More importantly my face at an unfortunate height.
He noticed my confusion and explained that since he used to be a bodybuilder, his legs are fairly thick, so he's uncomfortable in pants. I chose to accept this new reality.
Later on it proved to be more of a thing than I originally thought. We tried to hire a secretary. I've seen four of them and the the one who lasted the longest (a week) reportedly had this conversation during the interview:
- By the way, are you fine with me walking around the office without pants?
- Oh, it's no problem - I have four brothers so I'm used to this.
The CEO/girlfriend/cleaning lady did not enjoy this development and made sure that girl quit ASAP.
Our relationship started to sour when, after returning from a few days off which I took, I learned that I would be paid minimum wage. I wanted to reach D. about this but he was busy smoking weed and drinking vodka with his clients/friends/businesses partners. I quit on the spot and that was the end of it.