I keep having the same problem with this boss year after year. I feel that she's constantly nit picking me and looking for me to make mistakes, she has constantly threatened to fire me for the past 2-3 years.
At the beginning of this week my boss and I got into a heated conversation after she accused me of having poor communication. I did not attend a phone banking session another employee hosted, after this co-worker communicated that it was optional and that if I did not plan on attending that I should reject the calendar invite. I rejected the invite and did not attend the event.
My boss said that I needed to explain why I did not attend to my other co-workers and that attending these events was mandatory going forward. She then said that I needed to work on my communication skills and once again implied that she would fire me. I got irritated, rolled my eyes and told her that the miscommunication was not on my part but that my coworker literally told myself and another co-worker that we could opt out of this event. I told her that since it was mandatory that I would attend in the future.
She got upset that I rolled my eyes at her. I continued to hold my position that the communication aspect was not on me. I didn't do a good job at hiding my irritation and kept rolling my eyes. My boss asked if we needed to end the conversation early and I said “Fine. Let's.”
Today we had another meeting following up on the last. She essentially said that I needed to respect her for us to work together and that if I couldn't do that, then I needed to find another place to work. She claimed that I disrespected her and acted aggressively on 3 separate occasions and that I needed to practice being “grounded” so she could be “safe.”
The first occasion that I “disrespected” her, she accused me of stealing from the organization because she + the payroll team made a mistake and overpayed me when giving staff a raise. She literally called me over the phone and congratulated me on the raise with the specific dollar amount that the raise was supposed to be and sent a follow up email with the amount afterwards. During this initial conversation she constantly prompted me with goading questions to try to get me to admit to something that I didn't do. She essentially framed all of her “questions” as accusations. “If you stole from us you should just admit it.” “If you knew you were being over payed why didn't you tell us?” I told her that I literally did not know that they had overpaid me based on the information that was provided when we received our raises, as it was in line with what she told me over the phone and in her email. I then asked her if I needed to payback what I was overpaid. She claimed that she “didn't remember” the conversation we had over the phone or the email she sent. At this point I'm fuming. I stood up and told her that I needed to take a break from the conversation and left the room to calm down. In the end she claimed that I was supposed to get a raise at that rate anyway and left the conversation alone.
The second time I “disrespected” her I just turned in a evaluation and she didn't think that it was quality enough.
I will freely admit that the eye rolling was disrespectful, because it was. But I've never gotten aggressive or behaved threateningly towards her. I've never thrown anything, slammed anything or made threats against her. If I feel myself getting too frustrated I literally leave the conversation.
I'm so emotionally exhausted from this job and I'm tired of her constantly threatening to fire me/telling me I should quit, insulting my work and pinning others mistakes on me.