Hello,
I’ve never posted here before thinking myself the lucky few with a trustworthy boss who treated me like family. Now I see it’s all a bunch of bullshit set up to make you work hard for basically nothing.
I was a collage student when I first got recruited to this job, my friend and I worked there until my friend got sick of it and left, I should have left with her but I was desperate because I come from an abusive household and my mom was basically pushing me out since I was sixteen. He seemed nice enough, a bit mean when you didn’t follow his insane instructions. Ex: redo the entire filing system because he can’t find one document and it’s quote “chaos”.
We would regularly have bitch meetings just to complain about how insane he was. Eventually both people quit besides me. Then he offered me a job to work in person and I jumped at the opportunity. It sounded like an artist’s dream. A company where all I would do all day is teach kids my passions and get paid with benefits and then go home to work on my portfolio. It was also more money then I had ever seen coming out of collage and I was excited for the learning opportunity. He made it seem like it would be a 52000 dollar a year job with bonuses and a sign on bonus, but the sign on bonus was eaten up by the cost of moving which he said is what it was for, and the “bonuses” two years later have never come. It was actually 31000 a year which is barely a livable wage where the place is stationed. I make 15$ an hour give or take which when I actually analyzed it was far less then my 25$ an Hour I was making teaching online.
I never questioned why everyone else was leaving, I figured I was just different and since I was younger and unmarried I had less opportunities, but I was constantly struggling. My apartment filled with roaches, my car barely started and I didn’t have the money to fix any of it. I thought it was normal to not be able to order out with out not being able to make ends meet and living paycheck to paycheck. I can’t even get another apartment because I don’t make enough money to and my boss new this the whole time which is why he co-signed for me on my first apartment. Now that I’m here and I want to move for obvious reasons, he sees it as unprofessional. Meanwhile he spends thousands of dollars on fruitless missions to up business like parties and activities, and lives in a mini mansion with his family. I’m his longest working employee and he almost fired me because a random customer started harassing my sister in the parking lot and he didn’t believe me. The woman would later come out and say she caused everything and let her temper get the best of her. My sister is still banned from the center Because he refused to believe she wasn’t harassing students when she came in to use the bathroom.
Most of our conversations are him criticizing me before going on another vacation with his family and when I wanted to call a meeting to talk about how I wasn’t feeling appreciated despite doing the work of three people (I do since he kept letting people go and moving them to other things) he didn’t even bother to show up. Not to mention I have a BFA in fine arts and I’m now basically a glorified babysitter with a job that no one else wants to do. I‘m in a perpetual state of needing money and not being able to do anything about it because of the shitty salary I agreed to not knowing any better. I wish my school had just plainly told me what a reasonable salary of someone who learned how I did was instead of teaching me to use a bunch of out dated media that I couldn’t use in the real world regardless. But they’re a money making business too. My success is their gain but it doesn’t mean they’re actually there to help me.