Hi all. I've seen a couple vent in this sub and wanted to post my own and tell you about possibly the worst work experience I could ever go through. This one's gonna be long, though (sorry if it's like, *too* long.)
I was in uni back when I was freshly 18 but while I had a scholarship and some help from my father, things were getting hard money-wise. So I started looking for a job.
I'm currently 19, soon 20, from France, and I have 3 diplomas in IT and 5 certifications from other well-known companies in IT. I came from a vocational school and had a bit of experience as I had to do internships, but companies kept telling me that I didn't have enough experience. So I started looking elsewhere.
A company people didn't recommend me to work for called me for a job as a customer support for a big energy company. I wasn't working for the company itself, but the energy company subcontracted another company. (Please note that this was my *very* first job.
After a few weeks of training, I started taking calls and I immediately took the hang of it and I was pretty good. I had good wordings, I was friendly and found the help the customer needed very fast while keeping my calm with more angry customers. Then after a while, HR asks me if I'd be interested in taking on the English phone line as they've seen and heard that I have a great level in English. I was stoked. So I said yes. At this time, I was doing; Customer Support (French) and Customer Support (English). I wasn't doing sales or anything. Note that I didn't get a pay increase at the time for that.
Then moved on a couple more months, I started getting good at selling services and everything, so they ask me if I would be interested in doing sales. I asked if it was possible to do it only in English, along with customer support, and they said no. I still said yes because I got a commission off every sales I've made.
I started being successful, but I had very, very long days at work. I was doing 10+ hrs a day, while still being paid like I was doing 35 hrs a week. But it was my first job, and they told me that at the end of the year, they'd pay me back. But since I was successful and my paychecks were getting bigger thanks to the commissions, colleagues started to dislike me and started to harass me.
I warned my superiors, hypervisors and HR about this. They all said that they're going to look into this. But months later, nothing has happened.
They continued adding more and more lines. Along with doing customer support and electricity sales in both French and English, I also now had to so two specific kind of customer support for one kind of contract each (in both languages). But this time they didn't warn me or tell me anything. They reduced my lunch breaks form 1 hour and 30 minutes to just 45 minutes, which is the legal minimum.
In September, I asked if I could take a day off at the end of the month, because my boyfriend at the time was getting surgery and I wanted to be here. They refused.
And after I asked for this, my superiors started putting a lot of pressure for me to do more sales. The thing to know is that, the team I was in was supposed to do 135 gas contract sales in a month. All by myself, I did over 150, sometimes 200 a month. But I still got pressure to do more and more.
So at some point, I just stopped.
After my boyfriend's surgery, I never came back to work.
They paid me the bonuses I made the month before, but I didn't even sent them a mail or a letter that I quit. And I started applying for IT jobs.
When I finally found a job in IT back in December, I had to officially resign. My hypervisor was the person supposed to receive that letter that I handed to them personally. He asked me why did I leave when I was doing so great. So I explained all of that.
He apologize and I left after that. But the story doesn't end here yet.
In January, I received a letter from the company asking me to pay them over 500€ because apparently I had been overpaid on a month, even though when I didn't work, I didn't receive anything.
Now I work for a company that actually cares about me, in a job I've always dreamed to do. The people are nice, the workplace is beyond great, and the paycheck is better than I could've imagined, especially for someone that's new at the job.
Might be going to court soon to fight off that 500€ they ask me to pay them. But hell, I'm gonna fight for it and they ain't gonna take it without me fighting for what's right.
Thanks for reading. <3