So about two weeks ago I had a rather severe breakdown at work; my meds had been helping a lot but just seemed to fail that day. My mental health has been a bit rough since and my godawful minimum wage retail job along with my petty manager certainly isn’t helping. Even though I’ve been having welfare meetings since January after my last meltdown, and not asked for any kind of time off or work allowances and also tried to not let my mental health effect work as much as possible, my boss still seems to just assume I’m faking it. At least that’s how it seems from his passive aggressive attitude to me (but I do have anxiety and paranoia soooo…).
First I tried asking for time off to sort myself out (gave the two weeks required notice for holiday) and had it rejected. He also rejected some time off I asked for around Christmas, which I expected. What I didn’t expect was for him to try to go back and remove the permission he’d already given for my friend’s holiday request at Christmas. (Read above: petty manager is petty). He’s also then cut my hours down to my contracts minimum, put me on arguably the worst area to work, and only that area. He’s also training more staff to work the area I usually work, and is seemingly gearing up to replace me on it. He just seems generally annoyed at me.
Well, seeing as my mind hasn’t been great I kinda snapped and called another member of management who works under the petty boss. I asked for his advice on how to deal with the perceived pettiness; and I trust his opinion because he has similar mental health issues and was there for the recent breakdown to talk me down. He suggested just being upfront and getting a conversation going with the petty manager. So after our call I text petty manager, I asked for a meeting with him for the coming week. Petty manager rejected the idea of the meeting, even though I explicitly said it was to deal with the aftermath of my recent mental health crisis at work.
This lead to me snapping completely. I sent an essay of a text where I fully explained the personal nature of just what a state my mental health is. I insisted for a meeting with a witness (nice member of management). Petty manager rejects having a witness. So I lay it on heavier, and now request two witnesses (nice supervisor and petty manager’s boss). Now petty manager is panicking, gas lights me that he had no idea just how bad it was and blames nice supervisor for not telling him what happened (I have messages to show I explained it to PM after the incident happened but left out the S tendencies part). He finally agrees to a meeting with the two of us, my friend at work, and Petty’s boss. He refused to let nice supervisor attend because it’s his final week at work, which I can understand, but nice supervisor was happy to attend.
Now I’ve had time to calm down and the meds are slowly working I’m unsure how to handle this upcoming meeting. To make it worse my doctor has signed me off work for two weeks too. So it’s starting to feel like I’ve set this big anti work battle into motion over my mental health, and while I think in the long run airing the petty nature of the manager and his favouritism towards other staff might help. I’m worried about the fallout just making an insufferable work environment worse.
My friend just thinks we should go all out and if it gets worse then it’s the excuse we need to quit. The braver side of me agrees. The doormat side doesn’t want to deal with more aggression from petty manager. Any advice would be great, and sorry for the long rant.