This might be a bit of a rant, but many years back I was working as a programmer in a company that sold networking and wiring equipment. Within my first two months the first of many red flags popped up. My boss, who sat next to me in a row of cubicles, asked if I was married. I replied yes and he asked what her name was, I said “His name is James” (not real name) and got a response where he just shook his head and went back to work to ignore me for the next hour. I'm gay, but I never expected this kind of reaction at work.
Our team grew and being the first programmer hired I thought moving into our own room away from everyone else would afford me pick of seats. The two other programmers got in before me and I was given the leftover seat. Kind of irritating, but OK.
After that things seemed fine for many months. Then there was a policy change of no working from home for whatever reason, this week I was sick one day and mentioned I could answer emergency questions if anything came up, then later in the week I told one of the guys I did programming for that if he needed something to send an email and I will fix it. This meant taking my own time off and giving it to the company for free. The following Monday I get pulled into a meeting with boss and HR, being written up for working from home and not answering an email over the weekend. I kid you not. Long story short I refused to sign without any evidence of this email (I was told to sign first and then they will look, yeah, right.) After the refusal I went right to my boss to show me the email. After much hemming and hawing he finally found it and brought the email up on his screen saying, “See, this was sent to you and you never answered it.” I then asked him to read the To line, to which he notices my address is not there. So he cancelled the write up (both items for it.)
Did he get written up? No.
I had emergency surgery in November and went over my PTO by one day. My boss had a meeting with me the day I came back to tell me he was going to write me up for going ONE DAY OVER my PTO allowance. But, graciously, he wasn't going to, but I can't take any more off until next year and to not be sick or I could be written up.
December of that year we got a notice all non-manager employees will get a raise. I didn't get one and was told our group was exempt from it. OK, so no raise at all. Later one of my co-workers mentioned the raise and I got fairly angry. Another co-worker looked at the first and said, “Boss said we were not supposed to tell OP.”
Well, that did it for me. I did minimal work until I found myself a new job. To top it all off, I found out after I left my boss was doing his own personal work on company time and company property, basically spending about half his time being paid to do his own work. He still has his job to this day.
In hind-sight I should have sued for discrimination (I am gay, Boss was a hardcore bigoted “Christian” who ironically once said to me, “I'm a good Christian, what makes you think I would steal?”) Not bashing Christians, I know a lot who don't fall under that type and are good friends.
As of today, I am just tired of being trapped into needing to work or loosing everything I have. Working 40 hours a week, and having to commute 10 hours every week just seems entirely unfair while watching those like my ex-boss get away with so much and not being reprimanded at all. Seeing a CEO make millions a year and having golden parachutes while people who add value to a company get little or nothing in return and can be fired or let go and denied money to continue to live is just not what a civil society is supposed to be.
Anyways, if you got this far then thanks for listening to me.