Reading about the guy who won a settlement for being fired for having an anxiety attack. It reminds me of when I had a job in 2016. Things had been going great for two years, part of my job was managing deliveries of frozen foods, and sometimes shipment issues happened or trucks got delayed and the food got spoiled. The policy was to immediately refund the customers because if they knew they were risking losing money every time they ordered (most were on subscription) they wouldn't use the service. Things were going well and that worked for me, until the owner's husband started “getting more involved” with the company.
I had a great deal of emotional ownership over that part of my role, and I was good friends with the owner. I felt like family with her. I had developed good relationships with many of our customers. Then out of nowhere, this dude decided it was more important to meet some random percentage of loss that he pulled out of his ass, and that I had to keep refunded product below like 3% a month or something. When I got this e-mail, I thought it was ridiculous and completely counter to everything his wife was trying to build with her customer base (loyalty was a big deal in our industry). How exactly was I supposed to control that percentage other than by screwing our loyal customers over? I couldn't control the weather or FedEx.
I should also point out that it was in Utah and throughout my career challenging men at work has been a problem – men here expect what is called the “primary voice” where women only speak like they are addressing third graders. So they definitely don't like being challenged or spoken in any way but the sweetest, most motherly way possible. So when I sent back a polite but firm e-mail letting him know that I saw issues with his new policy and that it would lose us customers, “he did not like this.”
He and his wife called me into a meeting and he told me that I had been rude and insubordinate. To a tech bro who had been “working” there for two weeks.
What they didn't know was that the weekend before (it was a Monday), my then-husband (who worked for this man and was an abusive alcoholic) had gotten so drunk at their office Christmas party that his co-workers called me to come to pick him up. He was a vicious drunk and got so mad at me as I drove away that he punched out my windshield as I was driving down the freeway, and started hitting me while I was driving 80 miles an hour. I had to pull over at a random freeway exit and kick him out of my car and I had one of the worst nights of my life. I was sleep-deprived and facing divorce, and my life was falling apart. As this guy chewed me out, I started to feel myself shutting down and having a panic attack. I told them, “I am not in the best space to have this conversation, I think I need to leave now, and we can discuss this later.”
This man whom I barely knew, who I knew from my husband fired people at the drop of a hat, looked me in the eye, and said, “If you walk out that door, you're fired.”
Cue a full-blown panic attack. I started hyperventilating and crying, my voice got louder, and what did he do? He decided this wasn't his problem anymore and left his wife to deal with me. Neither of them had any understanding of anxiety or mental health, I had heard her talk about her daughter having panic attacks and needing to “suck it up.”
I don't remember a lot of the rest but expressing my frustration that he didn't care about our customer base, that she had done such an amazing job with her company (she literally took it from mountains of debt others had left it in and turned it into a profitable business single-handedly) and now he was coming in and bossing her around like she didn't know how to run a company (she had a business degree from a good university). Her response was “he's my husband and we are a team” and I felt my world shattering around me, because I had seen myself at this job for a career, and my job and my friendship with her were crumbling right along with my marriage.
I don't remember how it ended, but I sent a profuse apology the next day to the man who had threatened to fire me and told them how much I loved the company and wanted to repair what I had done. They said it was fine and that we should just move on, but things were awkward after that.
Three months later they fired me with a lame excuse about my husband's new job being a competitor to them (it wasn't at all). They just kept me long enough to hire someone to do my job without it hurting the company. I was heartbroken and traumatized.
I've been at my current company since 2017, I am extremely appreciated and reasonably well-liked. To this day I can't get called into a meeting unexpectedly without having a mini panic attack that I'm going to get fired.
Had I been an actual employee and not an illegally categorized “independent contractor” so they could avoid taxes, maybe I could have sued them for disability discrimination like the guy at the birthday party. That would have been pretty cool.