I started a job in early January in the defense contracting sector and thought it was going pretty well so far until the end of last week. My coworker who has been pretty overbearing and is one of those people that will make mountains out of molehills (we all know the type, let’s call her Jane) cornered me in the office and went on an hour tirade about my underperformance. I won’t go into specifics here, but the gist of it was that she accused me of ignoring deadlines of work assigned to me, being unresponsive, and falsely charging hours to the client (a Gov office) because I haven’t done enough work to justify charging 40 hours per week. Then after explaining my side to her as politely as I could and thinking we cleared things up, I get an email at 11:45 PM on Monday with all her accusations in writing with the contract manager cc’d (I’m a subcontractor and coworker works for the prime contractor). Now the subcontracting company that I work for wants to have a “chat” with me because the client reached out to them about me.
This is all real rich considering that they half-assed onboarding procedures and that’s being generous. Onboarding consisted of sitting me down for a few hours one day and then leaving me to my own devices (Jane was the one who did most of this). Sorting through IT issues, figuring out due dates for inputs to reports, a second fucking timecard that I need to do at the end of everyday in addition to my company’s timecard (which I didn’t find out about until I was reprimanded for missing it). Jane, who was supposed to supervise my onboarding, ignored a bunch of my emails, at least two phone calls and more or less left me in the lurch.
The deliverables I was accused of missing weren’t things given to me by managers or higher ups, but were busy work and duplications of effort that Jane “assigned” to me. We’re both analysts, she doesn’t outrank me she’s just been here a few months longer, so she doesn’t have authority to assign anyone anything. She shifted around the “due dates” for these multiple times since I was busy working on an actual important task (which she was no fucking help with and because of my IT issues, she was the one who submitted it and took the credit). The things she “demanded” from me were my notes from the readings I was doing (lots of legal stuff/background to come up to speed on), which I thought was a little weird and intrusive since she didn’t give a reason why. The second thing was a “cheat sheet” on how to set up a meeting. We have like 7 standard operating procedures buried on SharePoint, so I sent her the most recent one. I thought she wanted info on how to set up this particular meeting so I was under the impression I saved us from duplication of effort (which is a big problem in this office – everyone trying to justify their spots).
The reason Jane “assigned” these to me was to “see what I can do” and “test me.” I’m more than qualified for this position and actually took a step down in pay for the job. Look, I’m not perfect and should have communicated my confusion, but we should have sorted this out between the two of us. Instead she throws me under the bus to her company, my company, and multiple managers. Now there’s a very real possibility that I’ll get fired.
I want to make a career change from defense contracting (i think the military industrial complex is immoral and harmful) to tech and have a plan on how to get there, so maybe this is the kick in the butt I need.
Sorry for the steam of consciousness. The way this seems to be going down is a bit of a gut punch and I needed to get it out.