I was a receptionist for a company that takes third party claims. A part of this receptionist position was being the “facility assistant”. Basically, I helped the facility manager take care of the building and maintenance (by calling in vendors to do repairs and work, I cannot do any of that shit myself lol)
Only thing is, the actual facility manager managed multiple buildings across the states. He was never at my location, maybe once or twice a month and only for 30 minutes max each time. I was the real facility manager. Just didn’t have the title or the pay to match it. I was paid $13 an hour. Keep this in mind.
So anyways, I was a receptionist. And the fucking facility manager. Oh, also, HR. But we’ll talk about that another time.
One day, I was informed of bedbugs on the right side of our building (there’s two different buildings connected, it used to be a grocery store so it’s pretty big). I told my boss, and he told me to keep quiet and not tell anyone. Makes sense I guess, you don’t want to cause hysteria over a potential bedbug infestation. Then, my boss instructed me to take pictures of the supposed bedbugs. I had to get up close to them and take pictures. All you could see was the casing because they were all inside of the chair. I wasn’t moving the mesh around to dig for them. Fuck that. I was terrified tbh. And of course, my boss told me to dispose of the chairs that had bedbugs on them. Because who else was gonna do it?
I had to roll them out to the dumpster. All while trying to keep the chairs extended as far away from me as possible.
& then, finally, I was instructed to call pest control. They found casings of bedbugs (exoskeletons I guess idk) but no proof of living bedbugs, so case closed.
The bedbugs were living in the chairs y’all. They were in the fucking chairs. The guy who brought me the infested chair had video proof, I fucking saw them moving and shit. So yeah. Had to pretend like nothing happened because my boss told me to. People were literally reporting bites, but they were just ignored I guess.
Edit- I wanted to add that I was young & dumb when I was in this position. I didn’t realize I was being taken advantage of, I thought my workplace cared about me because they made it seem like they did. I was fired after they promised me a raise. I had slaved away, doing so much for so little. They didn’t want to give me the raise that I deserved, so they cut me off and hired a “receptionist” who gets paid less than she deserves, too.