If this isn't the right subreddit in which to post this, I'll take this down with no problem.
TL;DR: Paycheck is one day late at least half the time (it's a small business and the lady who does payroll has also been training me); regardless, I think I might be in a hostile work environment because of her and I'm not sure if my boss even cares – they're also married; not sure how to go about this at this point; I live in Idaho.
Please bear with me, I know this is long.
I usually don't post on subreddits and have been an antiwork lurker for a long time; I guess I wanted to post this to seek advice and vent a little. I'm young and don't have that much work experience.
I started this job a little over a month ago as an underwriting assistant and title insurance policy writer for $12.93/hr ($14/hr before taxes, approx. $12.93/hr after taxes) for a small business.
I did underwriting assistance for the first three days working there, and then never again so far, as 90% of my work is just writing policies.
Tbf, I don't have experience working in title and escrow whatsoever (just one year experience in admin assistance and data entry), and when I interviewed for a title assistant position, I got rejected – but for this job, the boss gave me a second chance. I'm realy grateful for it, but it's not like I'm “honored” to be a part of this workforce or anything.
This job is a lot to understand, so since the day I started, I've taken detailed notes (which was my idea to begin with), and I've taken hours just to organize my notes at home. It's been a huge learning curve.
At first, my boss invited me to the workplace to see what my job would be like – I met the lady who would train me since day one. I'll just call this lady “Lady” from now on.
Lady seemed nice and while telling me about my job, also told me (verbatim) she has been “doing the work of six people.”
“Ah, okay,” I thought. “I'm gonna be hired so we can do the work of three people each, instead of one person doing the work of six people.” I pictured a red flag in my mind, but unfortunately only pictured a lighter shade.
Lady seemed unprepared for me on day one; she taught me underwriting assistance first, but she had me start on a batch of “remittances”, in which they turned out needed to be sent off within a 24-hour window, and told me to come in earlier the next day so they could later be sent off by 3 PM. I did so, but ended up working on entirely different things as I was asked to. The day after this, she told me the remittances were sent off incorrectly, but didn't seem to blame me for it and seemed to have shrugged it off a little. For some reason I didn't question this and felt a little guilty instead.
Over days and weeks, Lady has gotten increasingly impatient with me. I would often have trouble understanding what she was trying to tell me or what she would want from me, whether I knew how to articulate this into words or not, and so I would make a ton of mistakes. I like details in my notes and in what I communicate, especially with this big of a learning curve – I'm not sure if we just have communication issues/different communication styles or what, but either way, Lady has had little tolerance for my mistakes and confusion. This has driven me to tears at work at least twice.
Less than a month into my job, I stayed home for a week due to tonsillitis – the boss didn't want me to come in considering the majority of my coworkers are seniors/boomers, including Lady and the boss themselves – so technically at this point I've been learning for approx. a month or so. Point is, I would have learned more quickly had I not been sick. Lady knows about this; she gave me a couple hours' worth of remote work to do, which I completed and communicated with her regarding it in a timely manner; the remote work was my idea. I offered to do that, if there was any.
Still less than a month into my job and after the tonsillitis, there was one day Lady got fed up with me for not learning policy-writing fast enough. I barely knew what I was doing and a lot of my notes were wrong, despite my best efforts to understand the material and get them right. I only remember three moments from this day:
- (1) Lady handed me a policy, I told her I would “try my best”; in response she said something like, “You won't try, you will”, clapped her hands twice in the air and said, “I'm done!” while I was in tears. I told her I would e-mail her all of my notes later that day.
- (2) She said something I don't remember but ended it with, “I need help.”; it sounded kind of whiny, almost. I told her, “Of course I want to help you, it's just a lot to understand.” She didn't respond.
- (3) She handed me a folder with only 2-3 sheets and said in an unexpectedly soft tone that felt condescending, “See if you can do this. This is all the material you'll need.” I attempted this and turned this in to her before leaving for the day. Later that day, I e-mailed her all of my notes; she didn't respond.
At this point I've emphasized more than once that I'm willing to help her and I just have no experience with this whatsoever; she doesn't seem to care.
The next day, Lady printed my e-mail and brought in her granddaughter to help me learn how to do my job. Lady told me to take notes on the e-mail, but I continued to use my phone. The granddaughter was really nice and stopped talking for brief periods just so that I could take notes before moving on. Until she helped me, I thought the learning curve was impossible. I was happy at this point and enjoyed my work more now that I fundamentally understood what to do.
For a few days, I worked on writing policies with only deeds of trust (DTs) or warranty deeds (WDs) – I did fine with these, but one day, Lady told me to get policies with both of these things done. Instead of asking her for help as I've started walking on eggshells around her, I figured I would try these myself. Plus, the granddaughter mentioned this and said it's not hard to write policies that contained DTs and WDs besides combining what I had already learned.
I completed four of those policies in five hours that shift, and when I turned them in to be checked, all Lady said to me was, “What's stopping you from completing more?”
Meanwhile, Lady and the granddaughter made their own notes together for me; even though the notes have been vague while I prefer detail, I still have really appreciated their efforts – I still have yet to integrate their notes into mine, though. I still have all my own notes to organize.
Everything went smoothly again and Lady seemed slightly more patient until one of the last few days of April when the granddaughter was back to help me with DT and WD policies.
At one point Lady came up to us and asked me to look up info into a site; however, what I think happened was, neither of us understood what she wanted, nor did we know how to articulate this – so we somehow assumed we needed to download documents and send them somewhere as opposed to simply opening up a window.
10-15 minutes later, Lady came back to the room we were working in and commanded me to use the mouse for specific little steps she wanted done – I did what I was told and got to the page where I was supposed to simply get info from. Before leaving, Lady yelled at me in front of the granddaughter and two other coworkers who were also working in the same room; few minutes later, the granddaughter handed me a note saying, “I'm sorry for how Lady spoke to you”, and gave an explanation for her behavior, specifying it isn't an excuse, either. Yeah, what I did was kind of stupid, but I don't think it warranted yelling.
Two days later I e-mailed Lady about her impatience/yelling and basically told her, “All I'm trying to do is learn, and when you yell at me, it makes me afraid to talk to you or ask questions if I get stuck on something or if I don't know what you want from me. I want to get along with you. I'm just asking that you'll be a little more patient with me and that you please stop yelling at me.”
Lady was able to last a whole nine days before becoming hostile again. I know you can't change people; I just hoped that maybe her behavior would change.
Within these days, I found out Lady and my boss are married, which surprised me – I thought they were siblings. Plus, the receptionist in particular is their daughter. I don't know of any other staff members that are their children, and our staff is very small (we're a group of approx. 9-11 people, including me; my guess is 10).
I've worked in Lady's office this week and all of last week as every other spot in our tiny building has been taken. My stomach is in knots whenever we're in the same room, and so I've been taking my time to write policies, relying on my notes, and (as always) only asking her 1-2 questions once every few hours if I need to.
Anyways, this next story took place two days ago. She didn't yell, but what she did felt worse.
I worked as usual, and Lady held up a piece of paper, asking me, “What looks different about this?” It felt condescending and I was scared she was bothering me again, so I guessed, “It just looks like it was formatted differently.” She told me I set the underwriter name incorrectly; I asked her to explain as I didn't know what she meant; she did, and specified by pointing at Policies under our really slow software we all use, and there was no way to undo or fix the mistake.
In response to this (I have this tendency to defend myself when I don't need to, and I was trying a tiny bit to get onto her “good side”), I told her, “I don't remember having been taught that, but I'll look out for it in the future.”
Lady responded, “So it's my fault, then. Good.” and stormed out of the room without another word. I was embarrassed and thought I was about to cry. Less than a minute later she came back to get her purse as the receptionist hurriedly got Lady's lunch, and they both left.
At this point I turned the other way, choosing not to engage; I was shaking, waiting for this to all blow over.
Lady came back into the office again a couple minutes later to collect stacks of papers (slamming them at least 2-3 times) and left again.
After she left again, seemingly for the last time, I wondered what the fuck just happened. She did all of that without a word.
I thought, “How do I know she's not going to come back and go apeshit on me again?” So I stopped my work, closed the laptop, put sticky notes on the policies regarding my progress, got my stuff, and left.
Later that day I e-mailed the boss about this and included, “I tried e-mailing Lady but doing that hasn't worked, so I thought I would e-mail you instead.”, and with help from my friend, added, “This behavior is making me feel intimidated and is interfering with my ability to work, which means that this may qualify as a hostile work environment.”
I'm the shiest person I know (and am a bit of a people-pleaser), so if I wrote this e-mail by myself, I definitely would have sugar-coated that last part.
The same day, the boss gave me this long explanation basically saying, “Lady wasn't mad at you, she was mad at me; you didn't make the underwriting mistake, I did.” And said verbatim, “I'll mention it to Lady that you felt that she was upset with you, which isn't true.”
Next morning (the 11th), I replied, “I appreciate the explanation – it's just that she seemed she gave no indication whatsoever she could possibly have been mad at you, only me”, and repeated what Lady told me before storming off. I hope you understand why I'm still confused about all of this.” Still no response yet.
With this friend's help, I added, “I appreciate the clarification. I do still feel it's important to mention that I had no idea whom at the time she was upset with, yet it seems she took her emotions out on me.” No response to this either yet.
I realized (didn't say in my e-mail) that it doesn't matter whom she was mad at, because she still chose to act like that.
I have no intention to quit, considering I've heard in this subreddit you shouldn't quit and make people fire you so you'll have a chance for unemployment. Plus, I looked up and read that Idaho is a one-party consent state, so from what I understand, technically it is legal to record someone as long as I am at least partaking in the conversation with them and we are both in a public space – which, technically, we would be, because it's work.
I know that quitting due to a hostile work environment is constructive discharge. Besides the e-mails between my boss and I, I'm worried that if a constructive discharge happened, I wouldn't have enough evidence – hence, why I've been thinking a little about recording conversations – BUT I have no intention to actually do that – plus I'm uncomfortable doing that to people at all. The e-mails should be enough, right..?
Just looking for advice on what exactly to do. I've wanted an admin/office-type job for several months and I really like the work. I don't want to give up this job unless I have to.
I took yesterday off, but I'm going back to work in less than half an hour. I won't record or plan to do anything. I would just like help from people who have more wrinkles than I do.
A semi-related problem is, my paycheck is one day late at least half of the time. I haven't worked here long, so this has happened at least twice. Not sure if this means anything, if at all, considering Lady also does payroll combined with all of the other work people make her do.
Lastly, our workplace is also extremely disorganized; we keep all of our files in physical filing cabinets and electronically, but for at least a few days now, files have constantly gone missing and so sometimes I'll spend good portions of my shifts just looking for missing files. Alongside my notes, I've made lists of where each file ISN'T. We've found many files, but currently 8 are still missing.
Anyways, those are my only other concerns.
Thank you for reading my story. I might or might not delete this at some point, not sure. It has taken me a lot of courage just to post this. I want to keep all of this as anonymous as possible.
Again, if this isn't the right subreddit for this kind of thing, let me know and I'll take this down with no problem. I didn't know whether to post here or on r/internetparents.