The small business owners she got so much shit from couldn't possibly have treated her badly because she's a lazy, useless beast who requires constant goading and monitoring if she's to perform even close to the bare minimum expected of her. Nah.
That said, you do need a thick skin to work in restaurants, especially in the lowest-rung positions, because so many employees have fucked up in your position before you came along--showing up drunk/high, not showing up at all, stealing shit, too retarded/brain-fried/personality disordered to do the job to minimal competency, hitting on FOH staff, picking fights, you name it. Kitchen work is one way for convicted felons and chronic fuckups to work their way back up into regular jobs because the barrier to entry for the least-skilled positions is so fucking low--if you can pass the test to get your food-handler's permit (depending on the state), and fog a mirror held immediately in front of your face, there is a kitchen that will hire you. But they expect you to be a shithead, so until you've stuck around long enough and reliably done a good job that proves otherwise, a lot of restaurants will treat you like a shithead.
So if she had such terrible experiences, it tells me that she's only worked at the lowest-tier establishments--the kind that would hire someone like her--and in the lowest-tier jobs. And it tells me that she's never proven herself to be anything but the exact kind of employee all those "(cruel) authoritarian measures" were created to deal with.
And of course a restaurant is going to put into place rules that are for the good of the business, because that's what they need to do if the business is to survive. Keep allowing shit that's bad for the business, and soon you have no business left. If Kiva was even remotely capable of starting and running a business, she'd understand that, but she's not, so to her childish mind it all seems horribly unfair.
