When I accepted the job the owners seemed to understand my experience and vision and explicitly said they were willing to work with me to help me achieve it. I was instantly met with limited time to meet, and lots of last minute changes to the schedule and budget. There weren't clear guidelines, and when I asked for clarification after the first mix up they fixed the problem for me, without any feedback on how to avoid similar problems in the future.
One of their last minute changes was hiring a co-lead my first week into the job. This person was near equally qualified to me, in an extremely similar backgrounds that is diverse from the rest of our team. Based on our experience, titles, and rate of pay I expected that we were collaborators, despite putting a lot of leg work before the school year. When the next term of planning came up, I got a feedback meeting where they said I bit off more than I could chew, and that if my coworker needed to perform more of the work that they would pay her more for it. So I again planned another terms worth of work. Throughout the process she would accuse me of having problems with her, that I was doing things behind her back, and discouraging me from getting our bosses involved to resolve any issues. She would go as far as to call me on my days off and beg me to help her fix her work she's not happy with and then throw it all out when I give her the help after staying up all night to get it done. She has started getting a lot more opportunities at work, and they've been taking random responsibilities away from me, the more work she takes on that I'm not involved in the more she delegates our project to me.
The gossip has gotten so out of hand that I'm regularly ostracized at work, and left out of conversation and decision making meetings. For this final project there are 8 different partners that I have to get each plan approved from in order to get stuff working well. I've had to put in a lot of unpaid hours to work and rework plans to accommodate each person. At one point a month from the deadline I found out through one of my volunteers that a board member reached out to multiple volunteers saying that we weren't going through with a plan my coworker encouraged me to take on. So with a month left I scrapped it, and focused on working with another collabotor that I would like to learn from. This last week one of the partners got back to me about a project we're planning with concerns. It is two weeks before the project starts and this next week's spring break, so everyone is busy. I extremely anxiously approached my bosses and asked that we all get together for help really fast before break started. Instead my boss met me at the property and chastised me for things I had no idea about, and threw me under the bus in front of our partners family.
This is the part where I tell you I'm getting paid $22/hr for 10 hours of work a week for this project and that this is obviously taking up much more of my time. Part of the reason I can only work part time is that I have to help take care of my grandma who is extremely disabled. Before I went to that meeting, on my day off, my grandma had begged me to let her move into my house and quit my job to take care of her full-time. There are plenty of reasons I can't and don't want to do that that I won't get into so I'll leave it at I showed up to the meeting 7 minutes late being dropped off because I was already crying after she called me an evil little bitch while searching for nurses. The meeting started with my boss yelling at me and telling me that I was the supervisor and I should have had more control, and that I shouldn't complain that I don't have the time to create the product to each 8 people's liking on a next to zero budget, around two other projects. That I bit off more than I could chew and was trying to throw her and all the partners under the bus rather than take responsibility. I told her to look at the emails we've been sending and why wouldn't I want to make sure everyone is on the same page before we take a long break before our start date, through giant tears. I attempted to defend myself and express why I felt that we were in last minute territory, and apologized for the parts I felt I was responsible for. When I said I don't understand why I'm taking the brunt of the responsibility for this when I have been having my ideas turned down and my coworker has been throwing lots of wrenches into the process, encouraging me to attempt projects that are divisive despite my protests, ignoring my input and expectations, and constantly accusing me of doing things behind her back; when I'm really trying to clarify details with our bosses, taking care of delegated work, and overall trying to avoid everything that was happening in that moment. I was informed that even though I'm the supervisor, said coworker has been regularly meeting with our bosses and telling them I'm incompetent, and that they want to promote her over me despite the fact I've done 90% of the planning and execution. I lost it, hyperventilated, started getting tunnel vision, had to ask for water. The partner that had problems I was trying to resolve suddenly didn't have any problems with the plans I'd put hours of work into and my boss got even more mad at me because that was proof it was all in my head, despite the partner agreeing that having to go through 7 other people to get these plans approved would be stressful, and he didn't know that was my approval process.
What they don't know is that I have obviously noticed that they have problems with my work, and have invited them to be more direct with the feedback. I've got a journal calendar at the beginning of the school year and started recording issues that I was experiencing in the workplace. It's also where I record my work hours, or other musings). Times I was dismissed, times there were last minute changes, miscommunications I was blamed for when I attempted to fix them. I have all the conversations where my coworker argued with me, accused me of something, made a joke at me expense, and essentially set herself up to get promoted within our roles by essentially getting me demoted for a leadership position I had no idea I had. I have emails, texts, docs on our shared drive and phone receipts to corroborate my part of this story.
After we resolved the issue and got the okay to move forward on our previous plans at this last meeting, I asked my boss why I should get all the blame and my coworker should get all the praise, and that I feel she plays a huge role in why we had slow communication, kept having to redo work, and that she is misleading me into making mistakes. That I would like to have a meeting with both of the bosses me and her to resolve these issues. Since one of their criticisms of me is that I don't have enough experience in education to understand why they are always right and why I'm wrong, and that they interpret the reason our projects aren't meeting their goals is because I'm “unorganized” based on my coworkers word alone, I want to really fucking blow them away. I plan on showing them the handbook they wrote and about how they're supposed to conduct feedback when employees request it, and all the times I did and what if any feedback I got. All the meetings and our comments are listed with times and dates. All the documents that recognize us equal partners, and times they ignored my advice to accommodate my partner, and the results (not 100% bad, but more than you'd expect for someone that's trying to make you work harder to give herself a $13/hr pay bump). The final estimate of how many hours the work they want would take and how many hours I was hired to get the project done.
Please antiwork, how should I present this stuff to them to show them how poorly they fucked up and all the times I attempted to warn them and ask for help? I really want to emphasize to my sabotage partner that I'm confronting her in front of her face and not behind her back and I have the emails, texts and journal entries to expose her lies and deception. I know for a fact the boss that made me cry sees it as the ultimate sign of weakness, and I've seen her roll her eyes when being told a child's feelings were hurt so much they cried. I know for a fact she'll be defensive. But I want her to feel like absolute shit. Like really. Right now I have two rough draft essays written out, and I'm thinking about using my plethora of documentation as a works cited in MLA format. Or I'm thinking about making an excel sheet that outlines their specific failings in categories and listing them chronologically. Or maybe a PowerPoint, we do a lot of presentations, and they think I suck at them despite never watching even a single one. Let me know. Sorry for the length… If you can believe it this was majorly edited down.