I find that a lot of people with the worst stories here work Retail and customer service. The amount of people with purely negative horror stories (ie, no restitution or good ending) from those in professional or otherwise office-based careers is much less.

Its something about retail management that sucks up all the wannabe dictators that just generally failed at life and feel the need to lord their pathetic level of authority on other people over insignificant shit. Yeah there is some real horror shows in the professional world, but as a raw number I think your likelihood of running into a complete asshat is way higher in these hourly customer service jobs.

200k a year engineers can faf around as much as they want as long as the work gets done with only the occasional check in from a delivery lead, but a waitress earning a fifth the money is tracked and surveyed like a prisoner in a gulag.