I’m 43 and have always tried to be the best employee I could without ever giving a second thought to why am I doing this. My last job I was the head of janitorial at a nice/expensive private school and I made decent money for not a terribly difficult job. Initially I started with another company sub contracted to do the janitorial work. In the 8 years I worked there I was hired away from the company I worked for because the school wanted me, I never once called in sick(NOT ONE TIME TIL THE END), I was always careful when scheduling vacation time and for what? In the end, after the first year of covid, when they realized they needed to downsize because enrollment was WAY down and I was the last person on staff that had not been vaxed suddenly my work wasn’t up to snuff and I wasn’t a team player, I never had 1 disciplinary action and I was recognized as an mvp employee at least 20 times. The first attempt was to try to get me to quit, the headmaster called me into her office and began to berate me in a manner I could only explain as insane. She specifically brought up 1 thing from my first 3 months of employment as proof of my poor performance but I was sub contracted at the time and completing contract work. When I reminded her that wasn’t part of the original job and when you complained we jumped. She screamed at me “DO YOU WANT TO GO TRY TO FIND A NEW JOB DURING THE TIMES OF COVID?” I let her finish and left, almost quit then but called a friend to see if he had any openings. He reminded me “fuck those ppl try to use all your pto”. The next day I turned in a time off request for all 4 weeks of my paid vacation starting the next week and it got approved, I’m sure they knew something was up as I had never taken that much time off. On my last day of vacation I “tested positive” for covid and had to use my 2 weeks of sick time, I had already started a new job and quit the day I was supposed to come back. I treat my new job in a different way. I am an area supervisor for a large janitorial company, I am good at my job and don’t have to prove anything else to anyone, jumping when asked, picking up all the slack and covering every time your asked is fuckin stupid, I will NEVER let a job make me feel like I have to break my self to move up or whatever because in the end no matter what you’re little more than a replaceable line item on a spreadsheet when some asshole who has no idea what you do deems so. My new job is going great, I recently dialed back my gung ho go do it all attitude and focus on continuing to be great at my job and my job only. I’m no longer trying to be super employee. Over the last cpl weeks reading all these crazy stories has made me realize some stuff, thanks chumps and chumpettes I’m catching the next pimp mobile outta here.