Hi, all. This happened a couple months ago, but I feel like sharing.
For years, I attended and then volunteered at a local art camp. Once COVID numbers settled down, the camp’s owner offered me a paid summer job. I said yes.
Some background on how this camp works: the campers range in age from 6 to 11, though most are on the younger side. The camp’s owner (and by extension, my boss) is a trained artist who does step-by-step drawings with the kids. My job was to lead half of the kids in a craft project while my boss taught the other half.
Now, I’d known my boss for many years, both as a camper and volunteer. Her personality was such that she could get very particular and snippy about things, though yelling and outright abuse never occurred. I’d brushed this off as a camper and volunteer, but being a paid assistant worsened things.
When I arrived in the mornings, my boss would give me an overview on that day’s crafts. She gave me an opportunity to ask questions, would provide some tips, and leave the rest to me. That part was fine. However, after helping her group with their drawings, my boss would come over to check on us. She’d inevitably find something I wasn’t doing correctly, something that had not come up AT ALL in the morning. Now, for some background on me, I’m not a trained artist by any stretch. I just like working with kids and doing some art along the way. Being corrected wouldn’t be a problem, except my boss would act like it was obvious. She knew me for over ten years, this kind of thing was not obvious to me.
There’s also one particular instance from that first week that sticks out to me. We had a girl that, for whatever reason, didn’t want to work one day. She would just cross her arms and start crying. Now, how did my boss handle that? She would tell this girl, in front of everyone else, to suck it up and do her work. She didn’t yell, but I watched her do this and thought, “How is that going to calm down a kid?”
Second week of camp, I was scheduled to only come in the first day. My birthday was that week and we were going out of town. My boss gave me my scheduled day off, which I will admit was very kind on her part. But when I got that time off, a huge weight felt like it was lifted from my shoulders. As my birthday vacation came to an end, I began getting stressed about returning to work. My parents listened to my concerns, but since no outright abuse was happening, we decided it would be best for me to stick the next week out. Besides, the pay was not bad.
The first day of week 3, I woke up with a very bad leg cramp. Texted my boss about this, we talked, and I agreed to come in since I could still walk. That was all fine. Then we got to the end of the day and our texts from that morning. My boss told me, to my face, that when she got those texts, her first thought was, “Why is Hannah bothering me?” Now granted, she was genuinely concerned about my cramp. But I just heard that and got very mad internally.
I went home and basically told my parents, “I don’t care how good the pay is, I can’t put up with this anymore.” I then sent my boss an email, stating I felt there was a personality mismatch and the whole thing wasn’t working out. Since I was leaving her to tackle camp alone, I also offered to forfeit my pay.
My boss was surprised by my resignation. She admitted she could be a perfectionist at times (a trait that contradicted that camp’s “No mistakes in art” motto, I should add), but then accused me of being impatient with the kids as well. I can tell you that at no point did I get in a child’s face and tell them to grow up.
I will say, I did get generously paid for my one day of work, and I do feel bad for leaving my boss in the lurch. But I was coming home and crying from the amount of stress I felt. In my opinion, things went beyond difficult but manageable. It was taking a toll on my mental health.