TLDR: My younger boss has been deliberately pulling highschooler bullshit in the workplace making my job harder than it has to be simply because he seems to be jealous that the guy who recommended for the job was disgracefully fired from the job before I was hired.
I started a job as a route driver “salt delivery” for a water purification company back in early February of this year. Overall it's the best gig I've ever had, the pay is decent it has full benefits at no cost to the employee and the place is actually pretty good about rewarding people for their efforts via actual cash bonuses.
That being said, my only real contention with this job is my most direct boss “I'll call him X”. He's ten years younger than myself at only 24 years old, much of the issue I believe is age/experience related. A brief context to what happened is that the guy who did my job before me was a friend of my boss that he helped get the job, he was fired for not making all the required stops on his route but still charging people for the service.
Fast forward to now, a best friend of mine “I'll call C” who works here informed me of the opening and helped me get the job. Several months into this job now, X is constantly on my case about how I'm never getting route done fast enough, my shortest routes are about 40 stops with nearly 100 miles of driving and my longer ones often times involve nearly 80 stops with sometimes close to 250 miles of total driving as we handle a lot of surrounding area / out of town business as well.
On average I leave the office between 8am and 8:30am to start my route, I usually finish up between 1:30pm and 4pm depending on the length of the route and if everything went smoothly, I have to use GPS a lot right now as I have 50 different routes that I have to follow and learn, even then they are constantly changing and expanding because of new business.
X's constant pressure to be back sooner and sooner has led me to start skipping my lunch hour to try and meet his deadlines. C who not only helped me get the job but also has done route work for the company as well told me yesterday that X is being petty and is even treating C like its a competition between C's guy “me” and X's guy who got fired. Despite some growing pains, I am getting the job done as to where X's guy made business look bad for fucking people out of money.
X has insinuated to me a few times now that if he had the authority to fire me he would have for minor things that essentially amount to growing pains while learning how the job works. Upon finding out about this under the table imaginary “competition” X has between his guy and myself I became livid and confronted him on it yesterday.
It started when I got what is referred to as a call back “not a good thing” because there was a bit of salt spilled on the floor in a customers garage, X took it upon himself to follow me in a separate shop truck the entire 30 miles out to this customers house because I guess he didn't trust that I would actually go clean up as instructed, C called me on the drive over and informed me that he had just had huge falling out with X over his treatment of me and he graciously informed of how X is deliberately setting unrealistic route times for me essentially setting me up for failure and giving himself and excuse to come down on me while simultaneously acting like he could get it done within his own time frame “C informed me that X's times were consistently slower than mine when X was doing route work”.
Upon arriving to the customers house I cleaned up what little salt was on the floor and finished just as X was pulling up. In my anger I immediately confronted and told him that he and I have a problem and explained to him that word around the grapevine was that he was making comparisons and setting unmeetable standards for me. I told him flat out that if he thought I was incompetent or wanted to get rid of me than we would head back to the warehouse right now and I would turn in my notice and that I'm not playing these fucking kids games with ANYONE ever again, boss or not, of course with us being kind of short handed he in no way actually wanted that to happen as it would also mean he would need to provide and explanation to his boss that would in turn lead to C exposing his shitty managing.
X actually had the audacity to tell me one of the main reasons he's treating me the way he does is because his boss was harder on him when he started rout work than he was on me and that X simply doesn't understand and thinks it's unfair so he treats me the same way his boss treated him.
Further infuriated by this childishness I told him from here on out, I will be making my own deadlines, that I am grateful for the job and I will do my best to keep a reasonable pace but I am not skipping my lunch's anymore and I am not going try and meet his ridiculous arbitrary standards for route times.
I'm not doing it anymore, I'll be 35 this year and I have reached a point in my life where I do not have time for this stupid petty bullshit.