I've been working in the financial sector as a backoffice payments employee since August 2019. I was always ambitious and loved my job so I managed to be promoted to Head status within a couple of years after that. I was great at my vanilla tasks, as well as management and always had great references because of it.
Cue my employment with this firm since October. A startup where I had a manager who didn't intro me or train me much but had high expectations as they hired me due to word of mouth from a previous employer. I was hired as Head to setup the department.
My days were spent in a typical sink or swim, trial by fire kind of scenario where I kinda had to “guess” how their systems worked and finish tasks despite not exactly knowing how to use them efficiently. I was made to feel stupid for asking questions so I thought f it, I'll just figure it out by myself. The rest of the staff (about 20 people) were great and we had good chemistry, but I was picking up weird vibes from my manager who hired me. I asked for feedback to track my performance and all I got was “you didn't fuck up, which means you're doing your job”.
Nevertheless, despite all that, with some anxiety and intuition, I was able to complete my tasks.
Queue Christmas corporate event on Friday. I was able to attend the daytime events of the company, but not the Christmas dinner. I let the office admin know 4 hours before the dinner that I wouldn't make it due to personal reasons.
Yesterday on Monday, my manager tells me that I didn’t inform her as I should have, and that as a Head I was obliged to attend the dinner. Due to violation of conduct, she hands me a written warning notice.
I read my contract, and find nothing stating that I am obliged to attend the events. I confront them about it and they said it states I should inform my manager whenever I decide to take a leave of absence from work, and since the event is regarded as work, it counts for this too. I decided to sleep over it and write an e-mail to refuse the warning today.
This pretty much killed any motivation I had for this job. Since I'm on probation, I might just hand in my resignation.