When I worked in packaging, the company was absolutely terrible. I was 10k underpaid. My boss was a giant bitch to everyone but we got along ok. By the end we had spent 2 years working together, and for most of it we had a decent relationship. We were kind of like aunt-niece more than employer-employee. We joked a lot, she told me about crazy her life, I made her laugh. I would drive her to the train station for free every. day. I drove everyone in the department. It was my pleasure, really.
Then I confided in her about how my previous boss caused me to burn out. I had therapy and everything. It was 8 months of pure hell, I cried every morning and had panic attacks, which I don’t usually have.
Little did I know, all I did was give her ideas about how to effectively abuse me.
I noticed it almost immediately. Like a switch. She started comparing me to others, saying they were better than me. She wouldn’t let me use overtime for time off, though others were allowed. She reprimanded me for something stupid, told me she wouldn’t bother me about it for 2 weeks if I tried to make an effort to improve and immediately started in on me the very next day.
I was hurt. She took vacation and I used the excuse of having found a better route in the meantime to stop driving her. The people in the department had changed. I stopped carpooling (or rather taxiing).
One day in the worst of it, I needed to reboot my piece of crap computer and it decided to do updates (like Windows does). She was so upset about it she hit me. Not hard, but she hit me!
Near the end of that day we received these bendable hands for glove photography. They were for my projects so I started unwrapping one. I wasn’t really thinking, I folded all the fingers down except the middle one. My boss was approaching me from another office as I did this absentmindedly. She reached me, and I dunno what possessed me but I just.. slowly extended my arm.. and gave her the middle finger. My colleague was wide-eyed and silent. I said nothing. My brain went, WTF YOU’RE GONNA GET FIRED! To my surprise, she said “I deserved that” and later forced a hug on me to relieve her guilt.
Despite that, nothing improved, it actually got worse while she claimed she was the best boss ever. My colleague and I tried to have a conversation with her about it. I left a month or two later with 4 days notice, the same day my colleague left on mat leave.