AAVR Magazine

For a short time in my life, I worked at Subway. Not the store itself building sandwiches for people, but at the head office located in Milford, CT. And to be technical, the company is actually called Doctor’s Associates Inc., and is incorporated in Florida. But I didn’t write this article to give you a history of this storied American enterprise, I would like to share what drew me to the company and in only five short months caused me to leave.

I was working at the University as an AV tech, putting in a lot of hours. As a salaried employee, there is no extra pay for working more hours or Saturdays, and I was starting to feel burned out. The University is also the only place I had worked, and I went to school there, so I had been in the same physical place for a good amount of time. I decided it was time for a change, and I started looking for a new job (sometimes when I was working at night from my office). I had one interview with a hospital, but then they changed their structure and decided not to hire anyone. Then one day I found it, what I thought would be my dream job. Video Communications Coordinator at Subway World Headquarters. It sounds great, doesn’t it? Sounds like a lot of responsibility, and at a worldwide company with more outlets than McDonalds.

When I went there for my first interview, the smell of Subway sandwiches overwhelmed me as I sat in the lobby. The smell was coming from the first floor where the cafeteria is, and everyday, employees get to have free lunch. Wow, this sounds great. When I went for a tour of the place, I should have noticed that everyone worked in a tiny little cubicle with outdated computers, but I didn’t care. The room I was going to work in would have more room and a brand new Apple Mac G5. Or maybe I should of noticed that no one was really smiling, but again, these aren’t the things I was looking for, I just wanted a new job.

Needless to say, I got the job, and I had my last day of work at the University on St. Patrick’s Day that year. I went out to happy hour with the whole crew from the now old job and had a good send off.

The very next Monday I started my new job. After getting the full tour, there wasn’t much for me to do just yet. I spent a couple of hours staring at a computer screen. My cubicle was set up with a PC running XP and Office 2000. Needless to say, a little outdated. Some people were still running Windows 2000. But why do I even have a cubicle? I’m the video guy, I should be working in the video room all the time. That would make the most sense. So I did, well at least I sat there. I was given a project to start on, but when I soon discovered when I was importing video or had down time there wasn’t much for me to do because of the first major flaw of the company—NO INTERNET ACCESS!!! Well, there was some Internet access. Outside of each cubicle area there was a Internet station that you could go on to check things on the web if you needed to. Or if you had special permission to view the web, you be able to go out and explore… carefully. As a new employee the only thing you have access to is e-mail, subway.com and the Subway intranet. I  was working on an Apple workstation, and couldn’t even access the Apple updates page for my computer. But I figured as long as I had enough work to do, it wouldn’t even matter.

Within the first couple of weeks I got to work with the famous Jared. That’s right—the Subway guy. We were filming an event that he was doing at a local school. It was an easy shoot, had to be at work early and we got out of the office for a little bit, not too hard of a day. Jared is an okay, down to earth kind of guy. Other than his story that everyone knows about, he is just a normal (rich) guy. And no, I am not going to reveal any inside things about Jared because I have no beef with him. Like I said, he’s a cool, down to earth, funny guy.

For a lot of people, a free lunch is a free lunch and it’s awesome. And when you think about subway free lunch, it’s even better. Let me stop you right there. It is not awesome, in fact I have not eaten Subway since I left the company. The lunch line is set up buffet style, where you pick up you 6 inch bread of choice and pile on what ever you want off the Subway menu with the hot items rotating daily. After a while, there are so many things you can do, and they all start tasting the same. And that is when you wish you had either brought lunch or that you had more than a 30 minute lunch break so you could go out and get something else, from say the Wendy’s down the road. And when I say a 30 minute break, it is timed because you have to punch in and out for lunch, and you have to go at a certain time. It is all very rigid and structured and not at all what you would expect from a leading company.

And speaking of punching in and out, it’s not just for lunch. You have to punch in and out of the office and on your break. I don’t mind so much about this when you are hourly, but it’s the silly things that surround it. If you punch in early, it’s doesn’t matter, your time still starts at the same time every day, but if you are a couple of minutes late then you will lose money. And at the end of the day, don’t you dare punch out before the time clock hits 5:00. It was a farce really, because at the end of everyday, people would surround the time clock waiting for it to reach the magical hour, and no one dared punch out early. But it’s not like they were doing work anyways, so what is the point? I would routinely punch out 30 seconds early, just to be defiant. In an office where people stop working 15 minutes before the end of the day anyways, they really shouldn’t make people punch in and out.

Back to the Internet, I finally got access. I had to have my boss ask his boss and give reasons as to why I needed this honor. Though the reasons were valid, some of the things I did with it were not. I used it for work, looking up photos and information. Posting videos I made on YouTube, and such. And when I didn’t have work to do, I spent most of my day on Digg.com.

After working there for only a couple of months, I began to notice certain trends within the company that were sending off red flags that I shouldn’t be here. First of all, there were more women than men working at Subway. Now, this is not meant to sound sexist or anything like that, but more of a fact. Subway does not pay well, period. And men that might go for some of the jobs know they can get paid more else where, and in fact go else where. Many of the women who worked there were moms who made the conscious choice to work somewhere that they could have a minimal commute. The high ups were there because they had been there forever, and in some cases are only there because they are personal friends with Fred Deluca (co-founder and owner of Doctor’s Associates).

I also noticed that things weren’t done in smart ways. They had a motto that is in Fred’s book (which I got when I started there, but never read). The motto is “ready, fire, aim.” Needless to say, not everything is planned out very well within the company.

Subway, as I mentioned before, is the largest Quick Serve Restaurant in the world. This means that they make a lot of money, and yes, Fred is very rich. However, they pay their employees low wages. The benefits package is outrageous. For just myself I was paying $200 a month for insurance (when I finally got it after the first three months of not being insured). And Fred doesn’t want to spend money on anything! You would think that the conference rooms might have nice projectors or large LCD screens. WRONG! They have old CRT TVs hanging from a pole with a DVD/VHS player attached to it. One of the TVs was over 20 years old. This is a multi-million dollar company, but anyone walking into one of their conference rooms for the first time would not get that impression. The first thing that they would probably notice is that the people are miserable. I mean, everyone is always looking forward to the end of the day. My supervisor (who was a cool dude) used to come down to the video room just so he could speak louder than a whisper and hang out with creative people. But no one looked happy, and on top of that, no one took initiative to get out of there. Well, I did, but not just yet.

The most fun I had at Subway was location shooting. We did a video on renovating old Subways, which involved myself and another video person traveling up to Amherst, MA to store co-owned by a HQ employee. We filmed some before, during and after video of the store and put a piece together about how to do it and how it can help your business. It was a neat project, and it got us out of the office. We also did a couple of health pieces with fitness guru to the stars J.J. Virgin (she trained the new Superman). These were also location shoots and allowed for half days.

The best location shoot was with Jared in NYC. Jared was coming out with a book and he was doing a media blitz on a Monday morning. My supervisor, a person from the advertising branch and myself went along to capture the day. For once, we spent some money. I had a new camera, and we had a private car for the whole day to drive us around and we had a hotel right near Times Square. We went from Good Morning America in midtown, to a radio show downtown, and the a Subway store at 30 Rock, and then to Central Park and ended the day at a Barnes & Noble for a book signing. It was a fun time, and I made some good videos. I also got to hang out with Jared the whole day, and we got to relax and have lunch together, but I already knew that my time at Subway was coming to an end.

I decided that Subway was not the place for me, or anyone like me. It’s restrictive, and behind. The compensation is not fair, and it’s not what you would expect from a company that size. You may love their food, and I can understand—but Fred was only good at making the food. He has lost his grasp on running the company, and has not been successful in any other business venture. There are many inside fights that I could talk about, but won’t because that’s not my business, and I don’t want any lawsuits coming my way. But let’s just say that their are different ‘families’ within Subway, and it won’t be long before a mob war happens within the company.

Sensing this, and the general bad vibes in the place, I went back to the University. The same job I had before wasn’t there, so I took a different one. Just before I gave my two weeks notice I was helping my now wife look for cars because hers was about to die. Since I now had Internet access, and didn’t really care anymore, I spent time at work looking for a car. Well, turns out that for those people that do have access to the Internet, it is tracked. Needless to say they had a lengthy report on me, and what I had been doing. So my supervisor (even though he didn’t want to) say down with me to talk about how I can’t be doing this or that, and the whole time, all I could think of was “I can’t wait to know my new job is official so I can get out of here.”

It wasn’t a week later that I handed in my two weeks notice. My video co-worker simply said that she knew I wasn’t going to stay. This place wasn’t for me, and she was right. And here is my message to people out there. If you see a job opening for Subway, don’t go. Please don’t go unless you like to be miserable everyday, and be confined to a 5′ x 5′ cubicle. Don’t go unless you want a lower than average salary for your job. I only worked there for five months, and I wish it had been zero.