#working in a vet clinic makes you realize literally everyones dogs are fat

[lesbiten]

added to the list of cool dog breeds i got to see at work is an irish terrier. he was a menace but all terriers are so im not too mad

[prorevenge]

You mess with my cat, I'll bury you.

Sit back, this ended up kinda long.

TL;DR: Shitty coworkers let my cat live in filth for a week while I'm out of town, I get one demoted and crush the others life into dust.

I like to think I'm a patient man. I'm hard to anger, my coworkers say they haven't seen me angry in the 2 years they've known me. I have firm boundaries and as long as you don't cross any of them I can let anything go.

One of my boundaries is don't fuck with my cat.

This story is about 2 of my coworkers and me, and happened the winter of 2013.

So I worked at a veterinary hospital as a vet tech/kennel attendant, and coworker 1 is a kennel attendant(KA) coworker 2 is the kennel lead(KL). KA is the one who comes in to take care of the animals, KL is in charge of overseeing everything boarding and kennel related. They both crossed that very simple boundary.

I went away over Christmas since I lived in another state from my family, and while I was out I left my cat to board at work(one of the perks is free boarding). I trusted my coworkers would take care of him even if it was a top 2 busiest weekend of the year.

So, I set up his cage the night before I leave. He's a shy boy so i set up a tent with very distinct blankets(one is bright green, the other has rocket ships). I kiss him bye, and am on my way. I enjoy Christmas with family, candy and fudge, and other things unrelated to the story, and come back 6 days after leaving.

It's late when i get back, so the hospital is already closed and everyone has gone home. We all have a key so I swing by because I miss my cat and want to take him home.

What I am greeted by when I get to him is those same blankets, the white rocket ships now slightly tan/yellow damp with urine, old desiccated pieces of shit and smears on the wall, and a very stressed cat that smelled like pee. We're talking 6 days worth of filth. All they did was put in more food and change the litter box as far as I could tell.

I saw red.

KA, the attendant, was scheduled to take care of the animals that holiday. KL, the lead, had been there 3 different days I was gone, including the last 2. Figuring out how to destroy these people became the only thing i thought about.

I'm scheduled to work the day after I get back, and KA is there. I don't look at her all day, as it's the only way I could contol my emotions. My blood is still boiling thinking about my boy who I'd had to bathe the night before(much to his chagrin). The sight of her makes that primal part of my brain reserved for beating the shit out of things starts to burn and makes my muscles tense.

(Now some important backstory here is that KA is kind of terrible at her job. We were kind of friends since she was the only one who wasn't shitty to me when I first started. Whenever I'd find something she messed up, I'd gripe to myself but I'd fix it. She did some write-upable shit on a regular basis. I never did anything because KL was already aware and working on her so I figured 'eh, none my bidness.')

I decided against violence and figured I'd let my manager handle it. At first, I just told him about the condition of my cat and kept the rest to myself. He agreed it was unacceptable and said he'd talk to her. She denied everything, said she'd changed my cats bedding every night, that he didn't get all of it in the litter box(unfortunately true, 12lb cat[not fat] aiming at a box made literally for kittens). Basically said I lied to my manager, to my managers face without batting an eye. I gave her the chance to own up to it because that would've come with punishment enough.

My manager told me what she said, and her blatant bullshittery poked the dragon that was already awake and pissed. I told him she's fucking lying, I work in the kennel too and not to mention I know my cats shit well. He believes me, and I not so subtly point out that if she pulls this shit on an employee pet, what has she been doing with the lot of random boarders? Manager thought it was a good point, and asks me to keep an eye out for mistakes and let him know what I find.

The next day, I was in the kennel alone without her, and I began to document every single thing she did incorrectly. Remember me saying how crap she was at her job? She left me a treasure trove of shit to dig up.

To name a few of these nuggets, every single animals cage was filthy, like multi-day filthy like my cats was, two dogs had had their medications switched for the whole week, there were copious amounts of shit left in the yard(big no-no, spreads parasites and disease), and not even her documentation and charges were entered correctly. It was a trainwreck that took me the whole morning to get back to an acceptable condition.

There was material here to get her enough writeups to lose her job if she had been perfect before, and she had already been disciplined a couple times for other shit she pulled. I gather it all together and bring it to my manager, who is horrified and says he's setting up a meeting with me, KA and KL, and him to discuss it all. He encourages me to hold my temper and call them on their bullshit at the meeting. Until then I hadn't even considered KL's complicity in this bullshit, but I immediately realized there were 2 people on my wrong side. KL was not as horrid at his job as KA, he was old as hell in a demanding physical labor position. I figured what he'd got coming will be enough so I could aim everything I'd got at KA.

What's the human equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel? Because this girl had already dug herself such a hole it was incredible she hadn't been fired already. She didn't do her job, she was stealing clients from the clinic by offering to petsit for cheaper instead of offering boarding(explicitly against our contract, fireable). She had been leaving 30 minutes early leaving the shit condition I'd had to deal with. And I knew all of this.

The day of the meeting rolls around, and KA and KL are blissfully unaware when manager calls us into the office together. We all sit down and manager begins to explain what the meeting is about. He was a fucking boss and we prearranged to give KA one more chance to own up to my face and leave out the rest at first. He had asked me how far I wanted to take it, I told him I had a lot of dirt. Let's let KA dig a deeper hole first so I can use it all.

She denied it all, swore up and down she had taken care of my poor cat properly. I graciously gave her the benefit of the doubt, saying ok I believe you did clean like you say, but then how did you miss this dried up piece of shit? She said my cat must've been dehydrated. I say "oh, well you documented he'd been drinking well all week, why would he be dehydrated?" She says it might have been just from the last day. She wouldn't just admit it... So I give my manager the look, and he tells her "ok so you took care of the cat, what about all of this?" And he pulls out my stack of evidence I'd collected.

KA's face paled. KL had been silent up to this point and starts trying to apologize on KA's behalf, saying it was a busy week and things slip through the cracks. I called their shit, saying I had been able to handle as many animals as she had had to a higher degree of cleanliness than the 2 of them could accomplish, so busy was not a valid excuse.

We went over every single sin KA and KL had committed for the past 3 days, individually and in depth with discussion about each one before moving on. As we worked through the stack, manager wrote up KA for every single offence that warranted it. By the end of it she had 6 writeups(3 to get fired). She was sobbing, saying she couldn't afford her kids daycare if she didn't have that job. My manager very pointedly told her he had never seen someone with such terrible job performance in 30yrs, and if she were worried about her kids she would have done her job better.

KL was written up and removed from his lead position, and KA was given the option to quit before she was fired.

The end.

... hah! No it isn't. This is ProRevenge, not GirlOnlyLostHerJob. Oh no, there's so much more.

Remember how she had been stealing clients from the clinic? She had built up quite a large client base, and had told me some weeks before she was about to quit her job and petsit fulltime since she hates her job sooo much. Plus when she returned her key after quitting, she made sure I knew the crying was fake and she was planning to put in 2 weeks in the next couple days.

At the clinic, we still saw all of those same clients she had skimmed all the time, and plenty of them asked what happened to KA. Manager told everyone we should tell the truth, since we had a petsitter we referred to and KA was not it.

For the next few months, we saw so many faces twisted into expressions of disgust, contempt, betrayal, worry when we told them why KA was no longer there and why they should reconsider letting her watch their pets. Literally dozens of people. Anyone who has tried to petsit or do yardwork for a living before knows how hard it is to build that client base. KA had a decent one, which we absolutely destroyed.

After a while, she texted me saying I was a piece of shit who was destroying her and her kids life and she couldn't afford daycare anymore. She went from 2 or 3 petsitting gigs a week(about 300 dollars a week) to maybe 1 a month. I told her to fuck herself and blocked her number, and haven't heard anything since. Bitch.

Don't fuck with my cat.

Updates:

Edit for those saying I'm a shit human for letting this go as long as it did: KA and KL cleaned sometimes, just not enough for my standards. KA had only been there a few months and it was her first big girl job (yes, kidS at 20yrs old), and there's a small learning curve. I figured it'd be ok for a week and was poor as shit at the time so options were thin. Until that week, i was there constantly cleaning to my standards so didn't know how bad these 2 would really let it get. Protocol said lead is informed of performance issues before manager, and as i mention he was aware and KA had already been written up a couple times. I was done when i realized just how far they'd let it go so i went over KLs head right to manager because they clearly weren't handling the issues at all. Even if my cat wasn't affected, I would've done the same, he was just unfortunately there because i had to go out of town. In hindsight i wish I'd said something sooner, but workplaces have rules and i was young and tender, and didn't know it was that bad until then. But yes I'm a terrible person who abuses animals, gets people SWATted, I'm pompous and arrogant and only care when things personally affect me and my cat. You're right, reddit!

Edit 2: I'll take this opportunity to give some advice on how to pick a good kennel facility. Always, i mean ALWAYS, ask to take a tour before leaving your animal. Dont schedule an appointment, ask to go back randomly. If they try to say no, say you dont feel comfortable leaving your pet without an idea of where they're staying. If they still wont, and even a manager denies a tour, take your business elsewhere as they probably have something to hide.

If you do get a tour, here are some things to look out for. Check water bowls for grime and dirt. Some pets are messy, but if a good number are dirty, it's a big red flag.

If the kennel smells strongly of some kind of air freshener, be wary and look around for messes. A good kennel attendant will smell pee and clean and replace things until they get rid of the smell; a bad one will spray some animal odor eliminator and cover it up.

Make sure everything looks organized, properly labeled, and has some kind of system to it. Cluttered storage and unclear labeling is where so many mistakes come from; make sure they take those little things seriously, or something big may slip through the cracks.

Finding a good clinic and good boarding facility can be difficult, but they do exist. And just like you wouldn't want you or your child going to a shitty doctor or daycare, I don't want anyone taking their pets to a shitty veterinary clinic!

(source) (story by Amesa)

[chibeast]

Second appointment at the smi clinic: I’m not going back.

First, I realized that the staff there have never once asked me for my ID or insurance card. Never. They were generally disorganized, but that really stuck out to me.

Second, they were exceedingly rude to the other people there. They talked down to the other patients, and spoke in a really patronizing way. One woman there was recounting to her friend that she could no longer bring her emotional support dog to the group classes or clinic, which she found out because they made it the topic of one of the group meetings. I don’t care if her dog was disruptive or not, you don’t humiliate someone in front of an entire support group!

Anyways, they had told me I was seeing a nurse - which I assumed was a psychiatric nurse, a stand-in/go-between for the psychiatrist at the clinic. The woman forced me to get on a scale, took my blood pressure, etc. She made a lot of comments about my weight. For example, she went through a list of illnesses I might have, to which I needed to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to having. She paused and repeated herself at every single ‘obesity related’ disease. 

“High cholesterol?”

“Nope!”

“*doubtful look* High cholesterol? High Lipids?”

[Repeat for Asthma, Hypertension, Heart Disease, etc]

She was also not very happy with my boyfriend being in the room to witness this examination. Now look, I know I’m overweight, and one of my goals with this plan is to find an affordable fitness center for both me and Michael to go to. Believe it or not, I enjoyed it when I was going to the gym regularly, I felt proud of myself, and that is a feeling I’d love to get back. What I don’t like, however, is being fat-shamed by a complete stranger without any warning. She said I’d need to have bloodwork, etc done.

This place is supposed to be a support network for people with serious mental health issues that hinder their daily life. I’m pretty sure that doesn’t involve bloodwork. Or weighing your patients. I can’t prove this, but I get the feeling that this clinic is ‘certified for smi’ in name only. I believe they do drug testing and government mandated rehab, but not actual therapy or aid for mentally ill people.

I’m not disparaging people with addition problems, but I do have a huge problem with tax money (my insurance) going to pay a clinic that clearly does not provide the services it claims to offer. If that clinic is for drug rehab, great! But I do not have substance abuse problems, and I don’t like being treated like a criminal or a child by people who literally have NO IDEA how to handle my mental illnesses.

I’m depressed about this whole thing because it means having to, on my own, find another clinic, vet the clinic to make sure it’s good, and then start all over. Meanwhile, I still need help applying to ssi and I know for a fact they don’t like when people switch doctors a lot - ‘doctor shopping’, I think they call it. Even though it’s entirely justified in my case, as I’m positive spending time at that clinic would do me NO good and only waste everyone’s time and money.

Like the whole point of this process was to get me into better, more intensive care. Get me a case worker who would work with me to help me with the small things like applications etc. So I could get back on my feet. Get me a therapist who would give me real goals and skills to deal with my symptoms. And it’s starting to feel like the whole thing is medicaid fraud disguised as ‘help’ because many of their patients are poor, homeless, defenseless people who can’t or don’t know to object and demand better treatment.