I wrote some background for context and it went on longer than intended. To skip to the meat go to the 3rd paragraph.
I work in research and data analysis for $21 an hour. The amount of work we do for the pay is of course ridiculous but the job has been good, it's remote and I like my team. I adapted well and my feedback until last week has been 100% positive and I either met or exeeded expectations. That's important.
My duties consist of using individual research and content-management platforms to curate information for clients, a lot of research/analysis, data entry, coding and clean-up, various ad-hoc projects, writing newsletters and e-mail blasts, and spending the prime of my life in Excel. I was also supposed to “own” certain reports but it kept not happening because everything that was meant for me to take on the client decided they didn't want or a bigwig said we didn't need it. So I'd be trained on one slide of a 14 slide presentation that was cancelled, but never gained any actual experience. I couldn't assign myself reports, only my boss could, so I would not say this was my fault.
Well anyway a year goes by and a month ago they “restructured” which of course means they fired a fuckton of people to cut costs and please the stockholders. My regular boss who I like went on a two week vacation and a person I've never met before asked me about why I had categorized my hours a certain way which has never happened before. That was fucking weird so I just asked directly if there was any concern with how I was spending my time and of course the answer is bullshit; they aren't tracking every minute of my day, they just want to make sure no one is overwhelmed and it seemed like I had a lot of hours assigned to a specific category. What a nice and kind company to make sure I'm not working too much. So I explained a bit about my day to day routine and why it fell under that category and why that's normal for me.
Well the next morning at 10 I got a message on Slack for a call with her, the subject is “Mid-Year Performance Review/Transition to New Team”
What the fuck. Turned out the e-mail invite had only been sent 10 minutes earlier, I hadn't even seen it. Was this about the time tracking? How come my boss wasn't reviewing me? Why wasn't it through the formal review platform? Why didn't I get 1000 reminders? I've never worked with this person. Am I being fir–NEW TEAM?
Well anyway I get on the call with my heart in my chest, I'm on camera (at least I wasn't in my pajamas for once) and the first thing she says is this is my Mid-Year review and she has critical feedback for me and that I should view this as an opportunity to grow. I'm reeling. Last week my real boss had said I was doing great and he was looking forward to having me around for the busiest month of the year this year. She shares her screen and there's a list of formal expectations for my position that I have never seen the entire time I've worked here. She goes on to tell me there were “several significant knowledge gaps”, but there weren't. She had no idea what my job was. As she went down the list of formal expectations I was never given, I kept having to explain I do know how to use that platform, I use that for __, I am experienced with _ I use it for my work with so-and-so's team, I do know how to clean up duplicates I do it every week in __. She seemed disappointed. Not for the first time in my life, I feel a case is being built to let me go for underperformance.
Finally she gets to the fucking reports–I should own a certain amount of reports at expert level and be able to jump in and take over other people's reports with no trouble if they're sick or on vacation. So to get me “up to speed” she assigns me three reports, one took the person who did it for years 2 days, since it would be my first time she gave me three days (!). The other reports are for the new department I'm now in (another huge bomb that's gotten lost in all this) and are due in 5 and 7 days respectively, I don't know any of the material involved. I have 60 days to become an expert at doing these myself, and they're monthly reports so that's doing them two times. These are EXTENSIVE PowerPoint decks with very complex, detailed graphs that require a lot of data editing in Excel, 10+ pivot tables, multiple exports, formulas, you name it, as well as written summaries of the information. I'm a total rookie at PP. I feel like if I spent all day for the next two months practicing I could probably be pretty decent by the end.
Not to mention I am taking over the position of a person who was laid off last quarter. Why am I replacing someone they thought they didn't need?
If I lose this job before I find a new one I'll most likely have to go back to living at a homeless shelter. I was happy until a week and a half ago. I hate this.