Hello and welcome to your friendly reminder that HR works for the company and most likely will not support you.
To keep a long, painful story easy to digest, I'm keeping things short(er). I know it still ended up being a bit lengthy.
I worked in self storage with a big company for about 5 years. The first 4 were great and I was doing great. My opportunity came that I would be able to live on site, in a much bigger property than I had run previously and in a bad area.
It was framed to me that I would be able to move on to another site if I was doing well.
I found a dead body on property about two months after I started. What had already been a tumultuous start, having transferred at the beginning of rental season and with checked out help, just was the beginning of a nightmare. The circumstances surrounding the body, the way the police handled the situation, and the fact that I had never seen a dead body before just destroyed me. The next three days I only made it to around 12pm before I had to leave because I couldn't stop crying.
I stuck through it the whole year, despite a power outage, a drunk driver hitting our water main and taking out our water and a fire that started on property and ended up destroying my personal computer. Oh, and the rat problem. It seemed confined to just one part of the property, but this will come back.
I persevered and did great. My numbers were great, I never had any issues with any of my coworkers, no escalations, etc. It was just painful to see others being brought into properties in the better part of town, when I kept expressing interest in moving.
I guess my problem was that I did really great in one of our biggest sites and no one else wanted it. They figured they could keep me there and it wouldn't matter.
At the beginning of this year, I had gone to lay down one night to sleep and a rat crawled under my neck. This completely ruined sleeping in my bed for me. For the rest of my time there, I slept in a hammock. This was not taken seriously by management.
While on the phone with my team lead a few weeks later, I was assaulted by a customer. My drawer came up short $20 that day, likely due to my overwhelm causing me to count something wrong. Naive and ignorant, I covered the $20 out of pocket that following Friday/payday, but never turned in a short deposit.
I had finally reached my breaking point and had submitted myself to working only to what needed to be done and nothing extra.
That meant making sure my property stayed clean and secure and customers were helped and happy. I spent more time in the security of my office on my phone, but never neglected my duties. In fact, I had 30 more rentals that anyone else in the district at the time of my firing.
Anyway, management comes to me one day and mentions that they had noticed on footage that I was on my phone excessively and what's up with that. Oh and also, why did I put money in the drawer.
I explained myself open and honestly, as I had here with you guys, and received a follow up email that was disingenuous at what we had discussed at best.
They framed my burn out as being upset at not being transferred, rather than being exhausted and overworked and unheard- and my duties were still being fufilled.
Advised by family and friends, I sent an email back to my manager, CCing HR, outlining everything mentioned here. Two days later, I was fired.
My manager even seemed shocked. He apologized to me more than once. I think he thought it'd be a write up. I thought it would be too.
Either way, it was wrongful and they tried to tell unemployment they let me go because I was “under preforming” but neglected to respond when I submitted a screenshot of my KPIs to the unemployment office. I was successfully approved for unemployment last week and learned a valuable lesson.
I'm still young. This won't be the end of my career, or even a noteworthy job in a few years. But, I'm definitely never trying to reach out to HR for support again. What a joke.