This happened last year into the beginning of this year but I’m still completely baffled by it. Last year, I (26F) was working for a pharma company testing vaccines. The chemicals we use in the testing have the potential to be teratogenic (for those that don’t know, it means they can cause severe, potentially fatal, birth defects. They DO NOT make it into the final product). My employer was the first person besides my husband to find out I was pregnant due to this. I was immediately removed from the lab and put on work from home doing tech review.
Enter Chad (not real name). Chad decides he needs to check my work even though he’s not my supervisor or manager. I have no idea why he thought he had any bearing on my work at all. He checks an experiment I signed off on and noticed a period was missing. So he berated me over Microsoft teams about it until I was in tears. Over a period. I told my boss and he said Chad has a “blunt personality” and I needed to “learn to get along. Oh and periods are important in Japan”. This was not a Japanese client so I don’t know what relevance that had. A few months go by with no issues and then my boss suddenly demands I come back to site but not work in the lab. I’m 36 weeks pregnant at this point and site is an hour and a half commute one way. I tell him this and express concern about going into labor while at work and he responds with “we can discuss going back to work from home when you get closer to your due date”. Because apparently 9 months isn’t close enough (I didn’t even make it to 39 weeks). Everything I was able to do could be done from home. So I go to my doctor and get an accommodation to work from home until the end of my pregnancy.
I found out later that he made me come back to site because my coworkers were drowning in work and asking for more help. So making me come back was his solution. But they needed LAB help. Which I could not do.
I logged in to work the day I went into labor (first timer, didn’t know what labor felt like and it wasn’t “bad” yet). Chad decides to berate me again over a correction I requested for one of his experiments. Then, without waiting for a response, deletes said correction from our correction tracker and tells me I care more about quantity of work done than quality. So I tell him if he doesn’t like the way I do things, he can find someone else to check his work. Which leads to a zoom meeting with my boss telling me I was being very unprofessional. Yeah, probably. But I was in labor and he’d made it clear he wasn’t going to help me with Chad. My daughter was born about 4 hours after my shift ended.
I knew once my maternity leave ended I’d be expected to go back to site full time and I was really uncomfortable being around Chad face to face so I decided the first 6 weeks of my leave would be used to recover and bond with my baby and the last 6 weeks I’d spend job hunting like crazy.
I didn’t have a new job lined up yet when my leave ended so I begrudgingly went back to this job. Only to find out they’d terminated my health insurance. I worked a standard 8 hour M-F schedule. I had my daughter on a Friday. So technically my leave ended on Friday. But all of my return documentation said I’d be coming back the following Monday because you have to get special permission to work weekends and since I’d been at home for almost a year, I was required to go through refresher training before being allowed to do anything in the lab. I’d literally have been there by myself with nothing to do. Since I didn’t show up on Saturday, HR considered my position “abandoned” and cancelled my health insurance. When I complained to my boss, he told me to “avoid having babies over the weekend” to avoid this problem. They reinstated my insurance as of the Monday I returned but that Saturday and Sunday I was basically uninsured.
I finally found a new job in the same field with a $7/hr raise that’s only 15 minutes from my apartment. Management was shocked when I left but my coworkers weren’t surprised in the slightest. All of them were also looking for new jobs. Oh and I never had to work with Chad. They did an investigation into our conversation the day my daughter was born and decided to give him a write up which pissed him off so he quit on the spot.