I am working for a small startup, and after looking for a job for over 5 months, I was just grateful that they wanted me, and I wanted them.
After searching for so long for a job, I would do anything to make them happy, you know…
Time passes, and I am now pretty much the strongest person at the company. No one, and I mean no one, can do what I can do, some due to permissions, and some due to skill. That for itself made it so that I'm now responsible for about 90% of what all of my team does, that was giving me a lot of pressure, and I mean A LOT.
I was getting phoned after work hours left and right, it seemed that there no time that I wasn't working, I'm also making globally, meaning I get paid the same amount no matter how many hours I have worked for.
Anyway, I discovered this sub around a week ago. And man… what an emotional rollercoaster, the posts that you guys are posting just spoke to me at another level, all those stuff that I've felt but couldn't express with words was here in every post. I still found it amazing how accurate those “memes” are.
I have started to look at things differently, and it became very clear that they are just exploiting me for being effective. I was only rewarded with more tasks for completing all of my tasks before everyone else.
For the juicy part…
I got phoned after work hours, my boss is saying that there is an “emergency”, that we have a demo for a potential client tomorrow, and that I need to setup a demo environment ASAP. I tell him that I am done working for today, that I can do it tomorrow. he says “No, you start to work at 09:00am, the demo is at 08:00am. I need you to do it now, ASAP!!!”, I told him “No” and hung up the phone, I get a message an immediate message from him asking saying something like “bro, wtf are you ok?”. Told him that I am fine, he asks me what happened, and that is the first time that I have this way. I send him the link for this subreddit after using some arguments from this sub, but I'm really bad with words (as you can tell from this post). 20 minutes later, he message me “k”.
tl;dr
I just said my first “no” to the boss that called me not during the work hours, the posts in this sub were my arguments. (nothing exciting, but I have no one to share with)