It's nothing like what many of you experience, but it threw me and I am both upset and angry.
I've been at a company for four months. What I do is write reports in 3-4 days, each time under the direction of a different manager.
Today I got a gentle talking-to from my direct supervisor that there had been complaints from two of my managers on previous projects.
For the first, the report was on Animal Crackers. So I started writing about the movie because it was capitalized as I've described. I turned in draft of my work at the end of the first day, then again at the end of the second day. On the third day, manager emailed me “Hey, this was supposed to be about animal crackers the food.” I wrote back, fixed the report, and turned it in on time.
The second one was one of those managers who writes in corporate-speak. This project was about dogs and how trainers work with them. So I chose a variety of breeds to look at and set up a table to show how they respond to training. The feedback during the project was like “I don't think a chihuahua belongs on the list because their characteristics aren't relevant to our client's needs.” and “You should include Labradors and Dalmatians, etc. because they are more in line with what the client wants.” (The etc. was verbatim what he wrote)
So I wrote back explaining why I included chihuahuas and why I thought they'd be useful for comparison, and also why I excluded Dalmatians, and he never said another word about it, so I assumed he agreed with my explanation. I included my methodology in the report.
Well, fuck my assumptions. The complaint from the first was that I was sloppy and careless in not checking to be sure, and for the second that I'd been biased and following my own interests because I didn't psychically interpret what his “etc.” meant. If he'd said “take off chihuahuas and add this list of breeds,” I would have done it.
Both of the managers had draft copies of my reports from day one and didn't give me any feedback that i did not apply.
Sigh. So my direct supervisor had a chat with me today and I was just stunned. All these problems that I'd thought were solved during the process were apparently major enough to whine about.
I feel almost guilty even writing this as I know this is nothing compared to what so many of you experience, but i just felt the need to vent. My face has broken out in hives from the stress. I live in constant terror of being fired and losing my home again, so shit like this is really upsetting. I'm 57 and I really can't bear to go through that again.
The reports weren't really about Animal Crackers and Dogs. I wish. 🙂