I've been working through a myriad of stomach related health issues this summer, with the crown symptom being some mornings I vomit and am super sick to my stomach from when I wake up for about 5-6 hours. 90% of this time I am in bed, curled in a ball, thinking about ripping my stomach out.
My two bosses, my office manager and my divisional manager at my current job are amazing. My office manager (the one I call out to) has been incredibly compassionate and understanding with me while I've been working through these health issues. My coworkers have been just as understanding, too, especially when I have a rough day at work and am making routine bathroom trips.
I should have no reason to feel fear or shame when calling out when I feel incredibly sick, right? But I still do, I still feel a tremendous amount of fear (especially) and a large amount of shame for letting my team down.
And that is f***ing stupid!
I feel this way because of my two previous jobs, one was at a cell phone repair chain that shares it's initials with cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and the more recent one at a bullseye themed superstore. My boss at the cell repair store was, no joke, probably a sociopath. They would use transaction data to find people who left bad Google reviews and essentially bully/bother them until they removed it. They had a similar level of, let's call it “unhinged-ness”, when you called out of work and they'd ask for doctors notes, Walgreens receipts, and to talk to us on the phone to see if we sounded sick. I eventually left and when I did I had to contact the labor board to ever be paid (I think my old antiwork posts dealing with this situation should be on my post history).
While I was working at the bullseye themed superstore, it was a normal big box retail job until I requested time off because my mom was having a tumor removed from behind her ear canal pressed onto her skull. I never heard back on my request and when I asked about it, I got pulled into a meeting berating me for wanting to take time off so soon into my employment (I believe this was month three). I ended up quitting after my shift that day.
And now here I am, in an awesome job in my preferred field with an awesome cast of supervisors and coworkers, but because of the experiences I've had with other employers, I can't even fully enjoy being treated like a human instead of a profit generation device.
My advice to any new antiwork viewers or really just anyone is to never ever let your employer scare you. Ever. Period. That should NOT be normal and you deserve to work in a workplace where that does not happen. Find a new job. If you're not working something incredibly serious or permanent (like a career type job), just quit. Take the power back.
Thanks for reading my rant, I figured the subreddit was a better place for it than my notes app. I'm gonna go curl into a brave little guy with a tummy ache in bed now.