This is a bit of a long one so I apologize. I need advice for dealing with micromanaging assholes.
I started a new job a couple months ago. I was kinda thrown into it at first and didn’t receive a lot of formal training, so I was making a lot of mistakes. My manager was patient at first and checked a lot of the work I was doing (the industry I work in is sales-y, working with clients, etc) and would correct mistakes as they came. Now that I’m more comfortable with our customers and the systems we use, they’ve let me off the hook and allowed me to work without them checking everything I did. I was very confident at first. Any mistakes I made I would take the constructive criticism well and make sure they didn’t happen again.
However, that criticism has now become constant, and not so constructive anymore. It has started to become so numerous and so constant that I know every time he stops to talk to me it’s just to tell me I’ve done something wrong. And to speak plainly, it’s for dumb shit that I didn’t do. He got mad one time and tried to claim (in front of my other coworkers) that I put in a customers order wrong…when he was the one who put in their order. And he was adamant that he wasn’t, and even when my coworkers backed me up, he just mumbled and grumbled that he didn’t remember being there. What?!
It’s shit like that that I’ve been putting up with. Another time he forgot to get started on a customer’s order so it was delayed a couple days, and he got mad at ME for not catching his mistake and reminding him (when I have a million other things to do and also…that isn’t my job). I thought I was going crazy until my supervisor stopped by my desk to let me know that I shouldn’t take his moods personally and to just brush him off when he gets like this. You know your attitude has to be dog shit if your coworkers have noticed a pattern in your bitchiness.
Every customer conversation I have he hijacks. To elaborate, any time I’m on the phone with a client or talking with them in person, he will take over the conversation (if I’m on the phone he will talk over me and make me transfer them to him) no matter what the subject is. It’s like I can’t be trusted to do anything. Any time I get off the phone with a customer it’s immediately “who was that? What did they want?” Additionally, he will switch up on customers to make me seem like I lied to them or like I don’t know what I’m doing. The other day a customer was quoted for an order and didn’t explicitly state if they were ok with the cost. When the order wasn’t processed, they reached out over email and were confused. When I explained that they didn’t explicitly approve the cost, he jumped in and was like “don’t worry about it (customer name), you approved the cost. I’ll get this going for you.” Like…what the fuck? I feel suffocated and that confidence that I initially had is totally squashed.
I don’t want to argue with him and play the blame game whenever he insinuates I’ve done something wrong (when I haven’t), because that feels childish and like I’m trying to get out of punishment. But I don’t want to feel like a doormat or punching bag. I want to be confident in my abilities and not made to feel like I can’t do the simplest of tasks. I have no idea how to handle this and although my coworkers tell me to just brush it off, I go into work not wanting to interact with him at all and knowing the minute I have to perform my job he will take over whatever I’m doing. I’m sure other people have had managers like this. Help!!
ETA: He is the only one bringing up these “mistakes” btw, my supervisor isn’t and none of my coworkers are. Just him.