(This is a repost, because I was so terrified of everyone hating me that I deleted the original before anyone could comment. Please don’t be angry at me for quitting this job)
I’m 16 years old and have all sorts of mental health issues. Anxiety, Autism, Depression, and OCD are the main ones. I can’t go anywhere, I can’t talk to anybody, I can’t do ANYTHING or else I’ll have a mental breakdown. So my family and I decided to have me work at a nearby community center under a supported work program for mentally ill or handicapped people. I was going to be paid $12 an hour. The job description said we would be doing customer service, sitting at the front desk and checking people in.
Instead, they made us wipe windows. All day for two days. Then they ran out of windows, so we dusted the railings. They ran out of railings, and by the end of the week we were literally dusting the outside of trash cans. I decided to have a talk with my manager. She kept looking at her phone while I was speaking to her, she seemed uninterested. Then, she brought in the supervisor. This woman spoke to me like I was two years old, and told me that janitorial was on the description, and I should have known (janitorial was close to the bottom of the list on the description, under where it specifically said that the job was in customer service).
She told me that I was “refusing to participate”, and that’s why it felt like we had nothing to do. I’d been busting my ass all week wiping tall windows and dusting between railings. She told me that the other kids were enjoying it. One of those kids was completely non-verbal autistic, how the hell did she know he liked it? Yeah, I quit.
I’m just kind of in shock now. I honestly believe that the reason they made us clean all day was because they thought a bunch of autistic kids like us would be easy to manipulate. This was a work program specifically for teens on the spectrum, to learn how to function in the workplace. I didn’t learn a thing, to be honest. If anything, I learned that calmly talking to your employers when you’re having a disagreement is a bad thing. Is this how I’m going to be treated as an employee on the spectrum?