At the end of January 2019 I took a job working as office manager for two companies with the same owner. I had withdrawn from a PhD program a few months earlier, and I was just trying to find work until I could figure out what I wanted to do next. As you can expect, I was bored as an office manager quickly, and so I reached out to a project executive to tell him that I wanted to learn how to do the job. I even created a list of questions / topics that I was interested in learning more about based on what I understood about the role. I quickly moved up in ranks and was soon working as a project manager in a field I had no previous experience in. While I am grateful to the owner of the companies for allowing me to get my foot in the door, that was the extent of his support / opportunity.
During this entire time, I had a work bestie who was controller for one of the companies. She had only worked this job since she was 19, and she had no plans of leaving to find another job. She just wanted to stick with this one company until retirement. While I thought we were close, in retrospect she would call me repeatedly to complain about the things she didn’t like in the company, but when I would try to vent, she would say, “I don’t know what to tell you.” More recently, we were both venting, and when I complained about how I was being paid / overworked / treated, she told me, “If you don’t like the job, why don’t you find another.” I was hurt, and I used it as motivation. I updated my resume and started sending it out. Within a month’s time, I had a job offer with better benefits, higher pay, and a lower workload.
I put in my two weeks, and it has been awful ever since despite my best efforts at professionalism. My former bestie isn’t speaking to me except to find tedious tasks to send to me / try to find things I didn’t do correctly. She has repeatedly sent me emails about all of the admin access she’s removing me from, letting me know she’ll be shutting my credit card down at the end of my final day (as though I would do anything retaliatory / unprofessional). I’m honestly dumbfounded. We talked about our personal lives as much as we did work. This Boomer mentality is too much. She knew I was the lowest paid with the highest workload, but she believes that because the owner of the company opened a door for me, I should be eternally grateful. She told me that the owner “took care of me” because he gave me a raise the year before. I guess I’m not supposed to want the best for myself. So depressing.