I started in the last quarter of last year in a huge, well respected firm in their IT department.I wanted to work there as I have heard so many good things about this place.
But a week after I started , my Team Leader, who was also new started. Obviously, he had years and years of experience with several big organizations. He was extremely studious, asked a lot of questions when he started and I could see that he was trying to please and impress the manager from his first minute in the job. Red light flashed in my head and I had a bad gut feeling about this person but I brushed it aside since I was also new as my new job jitters.
Since we are in a global pandemic, the company we were working allowed us to work from home and I have have never seen anyone from work including him, in person. On the first day of the second week, he got the phone number of my colleague and me. My colleague was contracting from India and she was working in Indian time. Let’s just say that the time difference between us and our colleague in India was very huge!
Once he got the phone numbers, he used to say that he called and spoke to my colleague. I would think how did he speak to her when it’s 1 or 2 AM in India. I thought, if she didn’t mind these late night calls, why should I. Until this point he didn’t call me on my mobile phone and I counted this as my blessing as we both worked in the same time zone so most of our communication happed through the chat softwares.
After a month he joined, I stated getting calls from him as late as 11:30 pm asking me “check” stuff that will only take “10 minutes “. And trust me when say this, once I opened my laptop, it will take at-least 1-1:30 hours. This was not a one off occurrence. This happened every other day.
I am a type of person who completes my work by 5-5:30 and after that I have a life. But I am sincere in my work in my work hours. But he, for whatever reasons sat on the job until early in the morning and then logged back in at 9:00 am. I didn’t have a problem with that, he wants to do the job this way, and it’s his life and he can do whatever he wants with it, but he expected me to do the same. He did not explicitly say this to me obviously. And when I logged out early (according to him), he called for one reason or other and made me waste my evening.
I couldn’t take this anymore, and I resigned my job in 5 months!