This is absolutely just a rant, so if it's not your thing feel free to skip it. On mobile, etc.
For the sake of simplicity and to cover my ass, let's say I got hired to make pizzas. It pays well, even better than when I managed 100+ people to make pizzas! Good benefits, equity, 401k, all that good stuff. I was happy, because I wanted to step away from management and just make pizzas.
There weren't really always a lot of customers to meet our goals of making a certain amount of pizzas per day. However, that left me time to perfect my pizza making, and in fact make more complicated pizzas that took more time. I was put on the extra complicated pizzas team, which made less pizza but of course, it was more complex.
But it was still slow. They asked me if I could wash the delivery car, I said I'll do you one better. I can wash it and fix it! I can even plot our courses better so we can be more efficient in our deliveries! Soon managers and the director was pulling me away more and more from pizza making, and more to do other things. I even, at their request, analyzed all the pizza data to help them come up with an informed decision about changing our business hours. No one knew the ins and outs of what went into running that side of the pizza business or understood how to analyze pizza data but me, so I was tasked with that project. We did indeed adjust our pizza hours as a result.
Just recently, a position opened up. It was a “do everything we've been asking OP to do” and I thought it was an easy in.
The Director of Pizza said I was not eligible for this role. The reasoning? My pizza making count was too low. The time period was during when she herself asked me to look at all the training materials, fix them all up, and then train the new outsourced pizza maker. “OP, spend as much time away from making pizza as you need to get training up to date, all week, and train the new pizza maker.” The big rub, is she didn't have the gall to tell me herself. She pawned it off on my manager (who didn't agree with her) and HR while she took the day off.
My next steps? I'm going back to making pizzas, and only pizzas. Any special projects, I will push back and say I need to focus on my current pizza making duties. If they insist, I will get the request in writing and meticulously track the time I spend outside of making pizzas to work on this project. I'll be doing that anyways, tracking how many pizza requests come in, how many were capable of being made by each person every hour interval, etc.
The moral of this story? Sometimes you get burned at a job you really like. Don't do extra work for free. Just make your pizzas.
To answer any potentially asked question: I can't just quit. This is capitalism at it's finest, I need the money. More over, I NEED the benefits. My wife's chemo is $22k USD per visit. I can't go anywhere for the time being. I don't mind rocking the boat, but I don't need it to sink just yet!
Thanks for reading, I genuinely feel better after getting it all out.