Hi all, I’ve posted on this sub before and you all were extremely helpful (thank you and shoutout to the millennials). As a recap, I’m 22 and just got a full time position at a company where there’s always volunteer stuff going on, people asking for donations, mandatory learning modules, and “fun” activities. I don’t mind some of these things (minus constantly being asked for money), as long as they’re within working hours.
Recently, my company created a competition where everyone can track their daily physical activity and put it into a public log for points. My department decided to join as a team, but whether I enrolled or not wouldn’t make a difference for their score whatsoever. My coworkers are in there late 30s and 40s and seem pretty into it, but I honestly don’t care to join or participate. I know it’s a small task but I still don’t want to do it. I don’t even have time to think about it while I’m at work because there’s always so much to do, 100s of emails, and I’m still being trained. For the past 2 weeks my manager’s been constantly asking me to join. At first I just avoided signed up but after she kept bringing it up I just brought up that I was going on vacation soon and won’t be tracking my steps or logging my physical activity. Again today, she said “I emailed you an invite to join, you should be checking your emails and always outlook open in a tab” (she sent me like 4 invite emails just this the week).
I told my manager I didn’t want to join the work competition and reiterated that I was leaving on vacation and won’t be thinking about logging my activity. She then explained how I could log all my walks while I’m there and went on and on. So I straight up said “I don’t want to be thinking about work while I’m on vacation.” And she was like “it’s NOT work, it’s a competition,” and was clearly extremely offended and shocked. I then just said, well yes but it is still work related. Anyways, to me this is just setting boundaries. This whole thing is optional, but it seems like a consistent pattern w this manager in terms of expecting/pressuring us all to join the “fun” activities instead of working on how she can support us through managing heavy workloads. Work is not my life. I’m 22, I want to party and have fun while I’m gone, not think about logging my physical activity or anything work related I know she’s not happy about AT ALL and I probably seem like one of those employees. Am I an asshole for this? How do you even deal with these types of situations?