This is going to be long, I apologize.
After 10 months working as a waitress/bartender, I’ve wanted to start being more assertive with my needs. However, there’s a couple reasons I feel too demanding and selfish and need to know if I’m being unreasonable.
- I’d been recovering from alcoholism for 6 months and recently relapsed. I’ve already requested a 2-week LOA for mid-June to take time to get my shit back together as I’ve been feeling suicidal as a result and need to take care of myself. However, I have yet to tell my managers that I wish to be removed from the bar given the circumstances, as my therapist recommends I avoid any and all alcohol as much as possible. Since I’m only 1 of 2 bartenders, I feel like this would be a problem for them.
- I’m taking a week off right before my LOA (and it got approved) because my parents are visiting from out of state, so that’s just a whole extra week they have to cover for me. The LOA was a short-notice idea after my relapse, and I had submitted the vacation request before that happened, but now it just looks like I want a sneaky 3 weeks off.
- Recently, my manager scheduled me on a Friday which I have off every single week, almost as a blacklisted day. I looked at the schedule and saw that we’re almost actually overstaffed that day, and that me working wouldn’t be necessary at all. When he told me a few days ago I’d be working that day, I was under the assumption it was because nobody else could work and I felt obligated to help out. Now I’m freaking out because I want to tell him I won’t work that day after all, but they’re already cutting me a lot of slack in other ways.
- I have always been picky with people asking me to cover for them. I hate working any more than I’m scheduled to. I always reject people who ask me to cover closing shifts except for two coworkers I genuinely like and respect, and I never cover for the other bartender because he’s a dick and he always conveniently needs a cover on one of our busiest nights. I usually gladly cover for morning shifts from most people, though that doesn’t come up often. I just feel like a bitch for not helping out more.
- I work 4 days a week, originally because of the spring semester, but they don’t know that after a couple weeks I had to drop my classes and I just never changed my availability back because my mental health tanked in February to a really dangerous place. As such, I feel like I’m being a huge fucking baby turning down working Friday.
- I also want to stand up for myself in demanding only morning shifts; I hate closing with a fucking passion. I have asked for mornings ever since I was hired, even asked for them at my interview. I was told no, because they hired someone for mornings the day before, but that kid quit a week later and I was still just kept on closing shifts. I have brought it up several times over the last 10 months and they’ve given me some along the way, but my aim was always to be exclusively on mornings. It’s genuinely gutting to watch them having hired not one, but two new people just for mornings even though they KNOW I’ve been wanting them. But, given everything else, I feel like I’d just sound too demanding if I asked for this too.
The whole thing with working Friday is weighing on my heavily, because on one hand I know it’ll be an insanely easy shift (and it’s only a 5 hours shift on top of that), but if I don’t need to be there, I just don’t want to be, mostly because it’s a closing shift.
I generally like my managers and have always hated making trouble for them, but now that all these needs and requests are coinciding at once, I feel like it looks awful and is a pain in the ass for them. They like me and have stated several times that I’m one of their best and favorite employees, and I don’t want to destroy that. I’ve seen what they do to workers they dislike… they cut their hours until they have no choice but to quit and treat them like shit the whole time, but not bad enough where HR would have a case against them. I don’t want that to happen to me.
Up until now, I really haven't asked for much, have never been late, and only ever called off when I had the flu last November.
TLDR: I’m suddenly making a lot of requests and changes at work and it is undeniably inconvenient for my managers, and I need outside opinions as to whether my demands are unreasonable or justified.