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Antiwork

Threatened with being fired by HR because I parked in an unused parking spot at work for a few hours

This happened on Friday afternoon and today is Sunday. I work for a small nonprofit in the city and parking on the street is $2/hr (or $16 for eight hours). I make $55k in an expensive city, so I’m trying to budget my expenses. Anyway, I usually park in my direct supervisor’s spot when she’s not in the office, which is most days. I had parked in her spot in the morning to go to an appointment and when I came back, the HR person for the company was parked in the spot. The building management is going through changes and some business are leaving the building, creating a few open parking spaces. I decided that I didn’t want to park on the street and pay the parking fees, so I parked in one of the unused spots. Now our company rents 3 spots a month and we had some…


This happened on Friday afternoon and today is Sunday. I work for a small nonprofit in the city and parking on the street is $2/hr (or $16 for eight hours). I make $55k in an expensive city, so I’m trying to budget my expenses. Anyway, I usually park in my direct supervisor’s spot when she’s not in the office, which is most days. I had parked in her spot in the morning to go to an appointment and when I came back, the HR person for the company was parked in the spot. The building management is going through changes and some business are leaving the building, creating a few open parking spaces. I decided that I didn’t want to park on the street and pay the parking fees, so I parked in one of the unused spots. Now our company rents 3 spots a month and we had some past issues with others parking in our spots (there are businesses and restaurants below our office, so it was likely one of those patrons using our spots). The management basically told us to just take a picture of any car parking in our spots that’s not authorized and send it to them. Obviously this didn’t do too much to deter vehicles from using our spots (building management doesn’t tow and sometimes/rarely issues fines). The HR person saw that I was parked in a random unused spot (no one has parked there for the past 2 weeks since one business vacated the building). I figured that it didn’t matter too much and it was more of an FU to the building management. After HR said something to me, I immediately picked up my keys to go outside and move my car. Well, she flipped out at me and went on a rant about how I’m disrespecting the whole company (my company) and specifically told me this was a fireable offence. She brought up that no one else parks in the parking lot and everyone else pays to park. First of all, the other employees are rarely in the office. Second of all, yes, they do. She always brings up this one guy’s name whenever she is upset with something I did (and he’s definitely parked in the lot). I felt like she was berating me for what seemed like 10min over a parking spot. She is not my boss. Her boss is my boss. I know she’s going to say something to my boss if she hasn’t already. She told on me in the past for taking too long on a break. I think she’s a bit controlling? What do y’all think. This will more than likely come up on Tuesday when my boss is in the office (my boss’ one day a week in the office). I sit next to her at the office. Also, I could get into the things I see her doing wrong, but I’ll only say that it takes her 3 weeks to onboard one employee.

Edit: I wanted to stress that we’ve contacted the property management company a number of times because our paid parking spots were being taken. The property management company is leaving in the next month or so and the building is being taken over by a new management company.

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