7 Things That Suck About Working For A Small Business

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Peter Gibbons was absolutely right. Corporate America sucks. For the first couple years after college I worked for a huge company. The logo on my business card is still from a very large company, but I work for a franchise of the company and we are technically considered a “small business.” My office has four employees including me. There are good and bad things about big and small businesses. But since this site isn’t called “Post Grad Awesomeness,” I’ll highlight a few of the pitfalls of working for a small business.

1. Healthcare costs a ton of money.

I’m a (relatively) young, single, healthy male and I pay more than I’d care to admit for health insurance. When I worked for big business my health care was maybe $30-50 per month which came out of my check before I even saw it. Now, if I were to get sick, I’d have to fork out a couple grand just for walking into the hospital. At first, I thought I’d just skip health care until I got married or had a kid, but then I realized I’d have to shell out nearly a grand at tax time if I didn’t purchase health care. Thanks, Obama.

2. Everyone in the office knows when you take a dump.

I’ve always been a huge fan of taking a dump at work. I used to eat spicy food for dinner just to make sure I’d have to dump at work. My ideal work day used to consist of multiple dumps to read on my phone, check my fantasy team, and creepily swipe 20 year olds on Tinder, because their bodies are tighter than my hamstrings after a two-mile jog. But now it’s just weird when I return to my desk after 20 minutes in the john. Nobody says anything about it, but I know what they’re all thinking.

3. Work sucks infinitely more when somebody calls in sick.

When I was a standard cube jockey, it was no big deal if people were out sick. Hell, I’d argue it was better because that meant less people around to bore you with mindless chit-chat about their kids and the weather. Now when somebody’s sick it seems every phone call is for them and the person on the other end is mad that you don’t know every detail of their client files. It also cuts into the time you actually use to do your job, which if you’re like me is slim, especially if it’s a Monday, because I’m an “ease into the week” sort of guy.

4. You have to eat lunch by yourself every day.

I’ve got no problem eating my Chipotle burrito alone, but sometimes you want to hit the sports bar with your one cool coworker and rip a few shots on a Friday. If you do that alone, you’d look more pathetic than you would feel. Ever drink alone at an Applebee’s? That’s a special sort of depression. I’ll save that for when my third wife leaves me and my son asks for money so he can move to Norway to become a house DJ.

5. Office hookup options are severely limited.

When I worked in large offices, the company ink was already limited. A five became a seven because she wore really tight pencil skirts that hugged her ass and accentuated its sway when she walked by. Now, I have two coworkers with vaginas. Both vaginas graduated high school before I was born. The odds of working with a single, attractive member of the opposite sex in a small business is lower than the federal government awarding the taxpayers a refund of all government salaries paid during the shutdown.

6. It’s way easier to monitor your internet browsing history.

In a large office, the IT department monitors your browsing and unless your boss has it out for you, he or she probably doesn’t bitch at you for reading espn.com when you get into work. In a small business, your boss is the IT department and they don’t need to monitor your monthly records, they can just look up from their computer and catch you wasting time. Sometimes, I go sit in the bathroom, even if I don’t have to go #1 or #2, just so I can check my snapchats and swipe a few more collegiate hotties right on Tinder.

7. There is no cleaning crew.

Why did I go to college? So I don’t have to clean up shit for a living. I don’t have to actually clean up feces, assuming I don’t have a really unfortunate accident, but it irritates me that I have to take out the trash, wash dishes, and vacuum at work. As a single guy, the only time I’m motivated to clean my own apartment is if I know I’m having a woman over, with whom I want to make sex. If I pick her up at a bar and bring her back to my messy place, I’m banking on the fact she’ll be drunk enough not to notice the dishes in my sink and the fact I haven’t vacuumed in a couple months. The last thing I want to do on a Monday is clean my office with all the dirty dishes from the week before in the break room, that have spent the weekend festering in our moldy sink.

I’m sure all of you wasting away in call centers and corporate office parks are saying “What about us?” I’ve been on both sides of this coin, so there’s more to come about the gripes of working in enormous, fluorescent dungeons. Stay strong, cube warriors.

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