Author: Olivia

Friday morning, I signed in to start my shift. I noticed we had about 8 new trainee hires, awesome! We have really been needing more staff. 30 minutes into my shift, they notified me of an immediate layoff due to a staff reduction. A little backstory – this was a remote job, went remote at the beginning of covid and then permanently went remote. The job listing was hiring for Oregon/Washington residents only. A few months ago, the company I was originally hired by was bought out by a bigger company. The past couple months, they've stopped hiring in the US and has been onboarding a lot of new employees from India. They are still operating under PST time zones, where the main business is located. They are offering me 3 weeks severance pay and told me they will not be appealing unemployment if I sign the separation agreement. Which…

So, this won't be an overly long one, however I have some decent details. So I've worked at this pizza place for about 8 months. It was probably the best place I'd ever worked. My General Manager (GM) was the nicest person I'd met. She cared about her people on a personal level and we took care of each other. The whole store. (Despite a few bad eggs) Our District Manager (DM) was a horrible human being. She constantly was mentally and verbally abusing my GM. On a constant. Would call and harass my GM on her days off, and made her cry almost every visit. This woman (DM) is horrible to her people. Aside from the constant abuse to my GM, the DM had also cheated multiple people out of raises and promotions. This DM, just in all possible ways, should not have been in charge. So, fast forward…

I finally quit my job last month after 7 years of 60-70 hour weeks, evenings and weekends, barely seeing my spouse and working remotely on every “vacation” including my honeymoon, for bosses who treated everyone below them like garbage. I was so convinced I could never succeed anywhere else and that fear kept me from leaving. I am six weeks into a new gig that is less hours for the same money and most importantly, for a boss who actually cares about other human beings and their work life balance. It’s like waking up from a coma. If you hate your job and are scared to move on, I am sending you encouragement and positive vibes. You deserve better, we all deserve better. Fuck employers who think they can treat you like trash. You can do it!

I haven’t seen doctors in years. Finally got insurance through my job and decided to put it to work, dental, primary, dermatologist… The fact I feel like a criminal or that I am doing something wrong when I need to make a window for personal medical appointments is disgusting. I should not feel an ounce of shame for having to take off work for this. I need to fill out a form why I’ll be not coming in, how long it will be, and get approval with signature from a manager. I feel like a goddamn child.