Fired for haircut...

marcracicot submitted 559 days ago

When I was 17, I got a job as a night security guard in a store selling small but expensive goods in Toronto. It was a 9pm to 9am job on Friday and Saturday nights. Could sit down and I had to walk around the store all the time.
I was in high school and it gave me good money.
I was to show up at 8:45pm, following a dress code: jeans, black turtleneck sweater.
Every morning, my boss would come in at 9am and ask me to take off my shoes, socks and turtleneck (I still had a tshirt on) and empty my pockets. He would then proceed to check everything to make sure i didn't still anything. He would also check my bags which I brought in (I came from school, soccer practise or in Winter was going to hockey in the morning).
When I got hired I had shoulder length hair. After a month, he asked me to get a haircut ("I didn't fit the profile"). I thought it was BS but I did it because I needed the money. I got a mushroom-style haircut (hey - it was a trend then!): shaved on the sides and back, a bit longer on the top.
He wasn't happy. One morning he came up and in front of the two day staff gave me ****. He told me I should shave my hair completely.
I asked my dad who told me that as long as I didn't work in the food industry or didn't appear unclean, the owner couldn't do anything.
But he did, two weeks later, I got fired. I was told I didn't fit the profile of the company, that I was a difficult teenage boy, and that he couldn't trust me. I asked him if the real issue was the haircut. He said yes.
I had grown weary of the whole routine (inspection in the morning) and didn't want my friends to think i was going to a military camp... So I happily packed up.
He never paid me my last week. When I called him about it, he said I was lucky he didn't call the cops because I took things from the store. When I said that was not possible because he checked regularly and that I wouldn't do that, he hang up. I got scared and didn't want problems so I let it go.
I became a waiter in the evenings and he later went out of business...