I'm with ya sharkbait.
I worked at ***** for a while back in the day. I had my hopes up to become the aquatic specialist, certainly had the credentials. But no, they put some smooth-talking hack in the position. He wanted to do reef stuff with the inverts, anemones, some polyps and mushrooms, angels and tangs.....funny thing is they let him. With their stock set-up (one compact fluorescent over a 33 gal).
Anyways, I noticed the problems mostly were due to management. Corporate hypocricy has always disgusted me, and I nearly vomited every encounter with management because of it. When you get hired at ***** they teach you about this "chime" or signal to go check out your area and animals on an hourly basis. You've heard it before; sometimes it's a bird squaking and a voice that says something like "at *****, animals always come first", sometimes its a cat. But when you hear it, every hour, you're supposed to do your thing, reptiles get misted, birds get food and water, small animals get food and water, fish get looked at and casualties removed. Then management wants you to order massive quantites of creatures to fill every habitat. Doesn't matter the critters will be overcrowded, they'll sell or die. One of the managers' automated responses was "put it in the freezer". At *****, they had a room called a "wellness area" where sick, injured, or abondoned animals would get put. It doesn't matter this room was disorganized, cramped, and was also the cleaning closet. Any animal still alive was supposed to get treatment or any kind of help we could find, even taking them to vet if they were that bad, this was written in the employee handbook. This rarely happened, and our freezer of death, the big kind that lay down, filled with bodies of animals usually on a monthly basis. I remember one time, we had a customer bring in a Blue Hippo that was getting abused in his tank, fins were tore up, the fish was gasping and very dark....anyways we're supposed to take it, set-up a habitat and nurse it back to health - atleast try to, but my redneck hillbilly hick manager simply said "put it in the freezer" of course I ignore him and follow the handbook in hopes of healing the fish and adopting it for my tank.
I don't know where this is going. I worked at *****, it sucked, I hated it, and always will hate corporations and management. ***** isn't all that bad in itself, but when you throw in a corporation and it's desires, along with management to pursue those desires, nothing but money matters.