TLDR; my boss thinks my colleague is a perfect little angel and let them undermine me for the last 18 months.
I’ve got no one to share this with and I’ve got to get it out before it devours me whole, so strap in.
I’m in a tiny company doing admin work in a legal office with a small 8-12 member team, no hr, no management, just the daily ‘get this done and if you have problems just solve them yourself’. There’s no performance reviews, there’s no procedures in place, all word of mouth.
Throughout the last 18 months my director (let’s call them Trevor) has been working remote and has ceased pretty much all direct contact with me, and now only communicates indirectly through my colleague (let’s call them Steve). They have been very clear that this is just for the sake of micromanagement and that no one has any authority over eachother. However every time Trevor had something to say to me, Steve will receive a call, step into a private booth for 5 mins, then return to grill me ‘on behalf of Trevor’, everything is always ‘on behalf of Trevor’ or ‘Trevor said you must…’
Some background, Steve has a history of being above reproach from my boss and constantly spreads gossip about everyone else behind their backs, and is constantly the office ‘snitch’ where they will contact Trevor privately to get ahead of the blame of things they were involved in while throwing us under the bus.
Well over the last maybe 12 months Trevor has been slowly cutting back my workload and training, becoming more and more distant to me, and I am basically at the point now where everything I do on a daily basis could be done by 50 lines of code (Trevor is aggressively old-fashion and would never even consider automating something).
Trevor just recently let our whole team know that Steve will no longer be contributing to the workload and will instead be Trevor’s personal assistant, and the slack will need to be picked up by the rest of us (obviously no compensation for us or plan to increase staff, I imagine this is just for Steve to spy on us full time for Trevor now).
I just found out today that not only have I been blamed for basically everything over the last year, my boss thinks I show up drastically late daily (they casually mentioned I’m 30mins late every day), take long lunches all the time and have drug problems (I literally had a client ask about it because apparently my boss told them, to gain face or something?) Yet despite having no evidence of this and not even confronting me about it, just sidelining me in the hope I get the memo and quit.
I’ve heard of soft quitting around here, but it seems instead I’m getting the soft termination treatment, instead of confronting me and firing me they just leave me on bare minimum wage being a robot for them. A robot that they can keep deflecting their issues onto every day…
It’s sickening to find this out after half a decade working directly with both of these people, and terrifying to know that if I tried to speak up now, they would just gaslight me into thinking it never happened (there’s literally no paper trail in this business on purpose to hide our business’ immorality from a very heavily regulated industry).
It would come down to a he said arguement between someone who in my boss’s eyes is above reproach, or me a lazy drug addict. I need to get myself the fuck out of this business asap…