Hi, all. I am a big corporate grind-harder who doesn't get the program. I figured my constant reliability would help with negotiating power if i was the best employee, but i was wrong.
TLDR; was sick, went to work anyway and did a half-shift. 10 min before I'm scheduled to leave, sup gives me big stack of checks to mail out and i got thru 90% of checks, then gave rest stack back to sup, maybe 6 checks. Next day, sup gently tells me that if they assign me a task, to please finish. I said “I'm sorry but if i have a 100.88 fever and I wasn't even supposed to come in today, so if I have to leave at 12, I'm sorry but I have to leave at 12.” First time I stood up for myself.
I might have said “sorry” like 3 different times, sup just said “okay” and left. What was embarrasssing is i got an “anxiety rush” and experienced increased heart rate, shaky hands, and shake voice, so i ended the conversation quickly.
Just wanna say my sup is a very nice and wonderful person, and i dearly hope my boss [who was initially supportive] didn't ask her to say this to me. In fact it might have been a sassy coworker who prompted her. honestly i don't know. also my sup is very dedicated to work, she's married with kids but still shows up on-time every day, meanwhile 2 of my coworkers (my team is 2 upper mangement, 4 workers) are late daily. I'm not sure why she gave me a hard time about “finishing my work” when I was sick. I mildly suspected I'd be talked to about not finishing the checks, but i was 100% surprised to be told “You have a fever, but we still expect you to finish the checks.”
I really like my job, but I will shorten my time to 1.5 years instead of the fulll 2 years. I do not even mind being overworked, but context: i show up 10 min early 90% of the time, give advance notice when i will be even 5 min late, and the only time i same-day called-out was when I caught Covid this year. Normally, if you're sick, you're supposed to stay home, but if you work small businesses it can be common for people to still show up because there is such a high workload for so few people.
TLDR 2: I showed up for extra work and got criticism that I didn't do enough work.