I have only been working at my current position for around 5 months. I am a contractor and this is my first position since graduating college. I was really happy I was given this opportunity, and I was really excited to learn the ropes and get started.
Except I kept being told I wouldn’t learn everything right away. I would ask my manager questions, who works remotely in a different state, and felt I was being pushed away and not getting the answers I needed. Because of this, I relied on my office mate who’d been in the position I currently supervise, also as a contractor. She was really great help at the beginning, but a lot has happened and I feel she is undermining me now.
From the get-go, my office mate told me she wasn’t my boss and wouldn’t tell me what to do. I leaned on her to understand different aspects of my role, and to understand my clientele better (I don’t want to give away my role, so I won’t go into better detail). Unfortunately, I feel she really took advantage of my naïveté, as I would share my lack of confidence in my abilities and I believe it caused her to doubt me. Since then, she has pulled out the contract and explained how she’s technically my manager. I know this is incorrect and double checked by asking my actual manager who also said this isn’t correct. My office mate is also telling my employees what they can and can’t do, when they are contractually obligated to perform certain duties that she is now saying they can’t. My current manager essentially tells me to play nice, because she is our “customer” and there is not much she can do.
I know I made a lot of mistakes, including oversharing, relying too much on this person, and even allowing this person to get inside my head and believing they know everything. At the same time, this person is very volatile. I would ask questions and she would get really snippy with me, even though she said I can always go to her. She told me I don’t have the authority to speak to the higher ups of our clientele. We had a discussion back in May where I stated I feel that she didn’t trust me to conduct one of the meetings I’d been conducting for a while because she corrected me multiple times in front of clients. She also wanted to route my phone to hers and take my calls when I wasn’t there. Since then, she has also messed with things at my desk, joked about me quitting, and generally just reprimands me for asking questions. I just don’t know what to do anymore and if it’s worth staying. I won’t quit without having a job lined up, but is it time to start looking? I’m worried that I will simply have the same issues elsewhere, and I’m not toughing it out enough. I do have more confidence in my skills though. I was also told that this is professionally a dead end job, and truthfully I don’t have anything to do 70% of the time. I have been stressed the last two weeks since she has tried to state she is our manager. The employee, whom she told couldn’t attend an event she was contractually obligated to, did wind up going but now I’m nervous about her finding this out. I feel that it’s an uphill battle that has only just started.