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Antiwork

Super proud of my wife – stopped putting up with BS and persisted until finding a remote-only job which is poised to change our lives

My wife is aware of this sub but hasn't joined it because she finds, rightly, the modern worker's plight unpleasant and hard to deal with. She started working as office staff at a local company that makes truck mirrors. When we looked them up, they'd been fined 2 million for literal toxic waste detected at their location. Likely in the factory section not the office section, but it still rubbed us the wrong way that they had a bunch of “unskilled” Hispanic and Vietnamese workers plugging away in an environment that's likely to give them cancer. She was hired for a “data entry” position but quickly the scope of the job expanded to include customer service emails and calls, and most troubling, dealing with freight companies and coordinating their shipments. Some of these companies charged fees in the hundreds of dollars if you made a mistake, the factory regularly had…


My wife is aware of this sub but hasn't joined it because she finds, rightly, the modern worker's plight unpleasant and hard to deal with. She started working as office staff at a local company that makes truck mirrors. When we looked them up, they'd been fined 2 million for literal toxic waste detected at their location. Likely in the factory section not the office section, but it still rubbed us the wrong way that they had a bunch of “unskilled” Hispanic and Vietnamese workers plugging away in an environment that's likely to give them cancer.

She was hired for a “data entry” position but quickly the scope of the job expanded to include customer service emails and calls, and most troubling, dealing with freight companies and coordinating their shipments. Some of these companies charged fees in the hundreds of dollars if you made a mistake, the factory regularly had edits to shipments that invalidated her whole day's work, and because she was seen as more competent than another employee who was supposed to share her job duties, she was often given additional work to do and procedures to learn without any additional compensation. All of this was also wildly outside of the scope of pure data entry and led to a lot of worry and sleepless nights where my wife was waking up at 2 am and was too racked with work stress to go back to sleep. It led to her dreading leaving the house (and often did so in tears) as this was a 100% in-office job.

At work she had a boomer woman sitting near her who spent her entire shift talking at her, constantly being a distraction and chatting endlessly about online shopping and food. It was always a one-sided conversation that my already introverted wife didn't care to participate in, but even if she did, it would have been pointless. Her supervisor was a boomer man who would throw fits and whom she regularly heard talk poorly of employees and factory workers, even firing a factory worker who'd been there 20 years for “talking back”.

The final straw came in the third week of March or so, when the boomer woman she sat next to had to unexpectedly miss a day of work for her cousin's funeral after a sudden death, which the male supervisor had a HUGE problem with and told my wife the absence was “not okay”. He then also complained about a factory worker named Miguel who said he had to miss some time to take his kid to the hospital. My wife's supervisor said “I hope it's true” and she replied “so you hope his kid is actually in need of being in the hospital?” he realized what a piece of shit stance that was and walked away without saying anything. My wife said “I hope Miguel and his kid got ice cream and spat at cars from an overpass”.

By this point though she was so stressed out with the responsibilities of the job that some days, especially on Mondays after a weekend, she would be in tears from work stress. She started looking for a new job, specifically something remote only, often with literal tears running down her face as she fired off application after application on Indeed and other platforms before work, often at 5 am. Needless to say I felt horrible and tried my best to help with anything I could and offered a variety of outs including just living more lean and having her quit. Eventually she started getting some interviews for remote positions and they seemed to be going well so I suggested she just quit on the mirror factory now that she had some irons in the fire. My stance has always been not to be discouraged at not hearing back from potential jobs, you don't need to hear back from everywhere you apply to, all it takes is hearing back from the one job you'll be content at. She agreed and we knew she was going to be quitting.

On Friday the 18th she went in to gather a paycheck and do a last half-day of work. We were concerned because the boomer male supervisor had previously thrown huge fits when people quit, including deciding that the company would not pay for (steal) hours the quitting worker had been entitled to, and part of these tantrums included him yelling sexually explicit shit in his office, with the door open.

Literally at the end of that in-office day as she pulled into our parking space she got a job offer from a 100% remote position she'd had a few good interviews with. On Sunday the 20th she sent her supervisor an email letting him know she was resigning effective immediately, citing a lack of notice being commensurate with her job title and the treatment of the company to its employees. I'm so proud of her for fighting to get a better situation. I'm so proud of her for quitting on this piece of shit without notice. I'm so proud of her for working so many mornings to get a remote only position as she's always wanted.

Now we're setting up a side-by-side work from home office station and she's spent a lot of her free week happily doing some organization we had put off from being too tired and stressed to deal with, and our whole home has a fresh and exciting vibe to it. I'm just super proud and couldn't be happier, and I'm happy she's having a multiple week mental break before starting her new endeavor.

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