I still have my Ethics Manual from working at Enron. It's always good for a laugh.

Man, what a great memento.

The only 'treasure' I keep is all my old employee badges. I think I still have the one from my first job, working in food service at an amusement park on Panama City Beach, depicting a man covered in sweat and sporting the thousand yard stare of the damned.

The only thing I can think of is one of those "flair pins" from when I was a bus-boy at Outback. I hated the manager, and if I had known then what I know now, I would have sued him for some of the things he put me through. Once in a while, on the first or fifteenth, a large group of army guys would come in, and take up half the restaurant. While this brings in a good bit of income (these being military paydays, thus leading to copious amounts of alcohol, along with multiple meals for some people, and desserts), this is hell on a busser. The problem being, on a normal night, the tables are seated by the order in which they arrived. And even if they're all seated at the same time, they're fairly staggered in the time they leave, giving you more than enough time to bus that table before the next party gets up.

Well, when you have half the restaurant leave at one time, it becomes a "bus 15 tables at once" deal, which caused me to pull my back out on more than one occasion. The manager would stand just inside the kitchen, so he could yell at me for walking so slowly, even though I was hurting myself trying to carry 100-150+ pounds of crap at a time. I still have back problems from that.

I waited until a night where I was working with 2 of my friends (only three bussers work at one time), and we all quit together, right before our shift started. I hope he enjoyed trying to find three more people to work that night, within 30 minutes of opening.

That's the only job I didn't give notice for when I left.

One of my managers from a restaurant I worked in invited a few of us over to his new house for some beers and such one night. It was a new house, and quite shoddily built. The front door didn't have a real knob, just a faux knob to pull and a dead bolt. On the way out, the outside half of it came off in my hand. Best souvenir ever

Been there, that's for sure. Happiness and employee banter were not allowed in cubicle environments. Especially call centers. If one department wasn't as busy as another, and they had moments to chat amongst themselves, others would complain and sabotage until they managed to persuade your supervisor to crack the whip. I was in such a "privileged" dept and one day due to another dept's discontent we were told that we were not allowed to turn away from our cubicles. You had to constantly stare directly ahead and not speak to anyone else until you were outside the work area. I'm not even joking.. I experienced a summer of that.

I kept my call centre security badge.

I worked for the Company From Hell for about three years, until they fired me. My job was not always terrible, but watching the company dysfunction around me was horrifying. I was too complacent to leave until I was caught up in a RIF. I promptly got a new job for about half again the salary; they say my hands stopped shaking a few weeks later. Here are just a few examples.

The company had been founded in the 20's, and was a non-profit funded by an industry consortium, so they had never had a reason to change their management structure or techniques. I mean that literally. I remember that in three years, the executives hired by the President normally exited the company within a few months. After they were asked to evaluate proposals, if they disagreed with the President once, they were fired. I even remember coming upon him arguing with a coder about a technique he was using while coding! Managers were routinely abusive as a means of criticism. The company had bizarre practices - for example, after they bid on three separate government contracts, they hired over 300 new employees - about 25% headcount increase - and started coding. When they did not win two of the contracts, they simply started firing workers en masse. They called 50 or so people into a briefing room and announced to them that if they were there, they no longer had jobs, and should expect to talk with an HR person later that day and be off the premises by evening. Some of these people had relocated for the job! Some of them had nothing to do with the lost contracts, but they were simply selected for excision for personal reasons of their managers.

It actually became a joke that people would wish horrible fates on the President, and the company. For some reason, my group settled on brain cancer. After I left, I heard that he had begun raving in a meeting and collapsed. Turned out he had brain cancer, inoperable, and he died horribly.

I felt kind of bad afterwards. But only a little.

American broadband ISP technical support. I won't name names, but it's one of the big ones.

I know who you are talking about. I did a three week stint there for training. I quit the first day I was supposed to go on the phones. I remember asking my training supervisor why we are expected to input the same information into no less than 3 different database programs. I asked that if they were all about efficiency, why not just pay for a program that you simply input the information once, and it does the rest. The supervisor looked at me and said: "If you say that here you will get two different responses. One response will be 'Good idea. Nice to see you are thinking outside the box and want to improve on things', the second will be 'Why do you think you are so good? Stop trying to rock the boat and get back to work'".

I have my Nuclear Medicine coffee mug, you know, with a nuc-ular symbol on it. I was so underpaid, abused, and used it was pathetic. I supposedly worked as one of the front desk clerks. At some point they changed from having work stations hooked up to the hospital mainframe to having PCs, with a beta software system, and no time spent on training and implementation. These computers just scheduled patients, tracked reports, and kept medical records. Just everything except putting patients on the tables, pretty much. I trained half the staff, and wrote a bunch of macros so that simple, repetitive tasks would take 1 step instead of 15. I think I was making slightly more money than if I worked at McDonalds (but the benefits were very good. hourly rate...pah.)

The only good news was that when I told one of the doctors that I respected alot that I was tired of being used as tech support (and paid McDonald's cashier wages), and and tired of being abused by the techs, other doctors, and one of the clerks, and would be leaving ASAP, he said, "well, why don't you just come work for me in my lab." That was fun for a couple years. Very good guy.

A Thermoluminescent Detector and a radiation sign from a Nuclear reactor compartment. A couple of older Dell computers from a company that was on the brink of collape and some weeks we weren't sure we were getting paid.

I would have felt bad that I didn't put money on it.