A little info:
I (18M) work at a labor intensive job that physically requires me to walk over 20 miles a day for as long as it takes me to get the task done. Yesterday I worked 14 hours. My boss (25F) is extremely kind and patient. We have gotten along so well and we’re always texting back and forth about work and sending memes. I’m a supervisor at said job with roughly 3 people underneath me. There are no other employees besides us. I also have a form of arthritis, which she’s aware of.
This morning my boss sends me a message asking me to come in a few hours early, no big deal. Due to our close relationship, I say something along this lines of, “Sounds good. I can be there at ___! Just curious, why are we starting then and not later?”
Her response was, “We’ve not gotten a text back from ____ & ____ letting us know if they’re going to be there today. We’ll come and check on you after while and make sure you’re doing okay!”
Those two people have not showed up in 3 days already. It’s pretty likely they’ve quit anyway. However it speeds up my process a lot and keeps my legs and knees from hurting.
A couple minutes goes by, I send a confirmation text to my boss letting her know I’ll be there. Then I call the people who haven’t texted verifying they’re showing up.
Both of them say they are in fact showing up, so I shoot my boss a message saying, “Hey! Just letting you know I called them both and they said they would be there today! I’m still coming in at ___ just in case they don’t. Just passing the message along!”
All hell broke loose. For whatever reason this set my boss off a tremendous amount. I get a long paragraph back saying all sorts of ugly things. Basically along the lines of, “You overstepped your boundaries. I am the boss making the directions and you need to follow them.”
At first I was just thinking it was maybe a bad day. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. So, I did what anyone would and apologize. “I am so sorry! I had no idea I was overstepping whatsoever, I was simply just passing a message along. As you know, with my knee problems, it’s very painful to do this by myself everyday. Again, I’m so sorry.”
I wasn’t sorry. However, I’m so close with her and she knows I work super hard for her. She had no reason to talk to me this way as is… but it got worse.
30 minutes go by and I open my phone to see YET ANOTHER paragraph. She said, “I appreciate all the work you do, but you had no reason to overstep and act this way. Obviously you can talk to your coworkers, but I’m the boss and they need to text me. If your knees are hurting you so badly and you can’t finish that, my question is are you going to be able to do other things?”
Some of this is filtered out due to my privacy and hers. However, she was basically threatening my job. Saying she’s going to cut my hours if I’m unable to do something grooling that takes 10 hours by myself. (It takes around 3.5hrs with help) At this point I’m furious. I didn’t send anything back but a confirmation I’ll be there once more.
What do you know, 15 minutes later she sends me another message confirming they were going to be there and finally sent her a message.
Does anyone understand why she would be so angry with me? I know I’m 18, but I’ve no joke been working since age 12. I’ve had nice bosses, mean bosses, shitty bosses, all types of bosses, but I’ve never had an experience like this. I never said I was contesting the time I came in. I never overstepped anything. This is the type of thing that has previously lead me to finding another job. Hoping this isn’t the first step of toxicity, because unfortunately I won’t be present if this type of behavior consists.
TLDR; I work at a labor intensive job requiring 20 miles of walking daily. I called my coworkers to see if they would be there to help me and my boss got extremely angry and threatened to cut my hours because I overstepped.
Am I wrong here?
EDIT: I forgot to mention, I was supposed to have the day off today.