I (35F) am now on a medical leave from work for the next month. I could no longer cope with all the stress.
I moved a couple of months ago, then 2 weeks later my bf broke things off with me. Then work went to hell and I'm pretty sure my boss is a narcissist who is scapegoating me. So all the stress has been piling up and I fucking lost it. I'll focus on the work stress for obvious reasons.
About 2 years ago, I promoted to team lead. I work at a help desk for one of the state departments in government. We assist county/tribal government workers in two of the processing systems they use for public assistance benefits. We help them troubleshoot and fix problems, patch status problems, remove pending applications, etc. Generally make their lives easier so they are incredibly grateful to us.
About 2 weeks after I started as team lead, we hired a new supervisor as our previous one retired. He came from the county so was brand new to the state and to our team.
In the 2 years he's been our supervisor, he has not once logged into our phones. The last time he signed into the systems we support was a month after he was hired, yet he co-facilitates meetings about system changes and improvements. He lost access after 90 days and only just last week had his access restored. Last I checked he still had not logged in. I don't think he realizes we can see that information. He lied to the team last week, saying he was able to get back into one of our systems after it went down. He didn't even have his access back by that point.
He has told me repeatedly that he feels like the team is against me and I'm against the team. I have asked him repeatedly to draw boundaries around my position but he never does. He fails to follow through on things and then I have to take the fall for it. He rarely gives me any guidance. I never got trained in on my position. He told me that he's gotten lots of complaints about me and that everyone on the team has complained.
I know last winter I struggled with my performance. I was burnt out and tired of feeling like all I was doing was answering phones, when there are a lot of other things I needed to be doing as the team lead. But unfortunately we are too short staffed so I kept getting pulled onto phones. My boss never addressed this so I just swung the other way and didn't really do anything cause I was so burnt out. There were legitimate complaints from the team then, which he addressed with me. I had a come to Jesus moment then and turned things around. He finally laid out expectations for me (after a year and a half) and I genuinely thought things were getting better.
Then they got worse again and I kept getting pulled into phones. This has made me completely ineffective because I don't feel like I can be off phones or do anything else I've been tasked with out of fear that someone on my team will complain about me not being on phones. And my boss has failed to level expectations with the rest of the team. He tells me he wants me working on other things then tells me I'm never available to the team. I don't know how else to make myself more available to them. And it's not that I don't want to help them, I just need them to understand I'm not always going to be available due to meetings and other projects. My boss has failed to reinforce that with the rest of the team.
There are a lot more details, but everything came to a head 2 weeks ago when our phones upgraded and we were given new extensions. We didn't find out until the last minute and it was only because my coworker still has the supervisor role on phones from when our last boss retired and we didn't have a permanent supervisor. So she was scrambling, trying to get information to us that she didn't know she had to send out cause she's not actually the supervisor. Meanwhile, our actual supervisor remained SILENT on it. When the upgrade happened, it was up to me and my coworker to make sure everyone was able to sign in. There were lots of issues and I was the only one signed in and taking calls for the first half hour we were open. My supervisor never addressed it, never acknowledged it happened, never apologized, never said thank you, just let me and my coworker deal with it.
He has been lying about other things. When I confronted him on his lack of leadership with the phone upgrade, he flipped on me and told me everyone is complaining about me. We recently had a coworker leave to be on a different team. He told me that he did her exit interview and she said she could never come to me for things. She has confirmed she never said that to him, she told him I was doing a lot better.
I have spoken a couple of times with my manager (his boss) about these issues. I told her I no longer feel safe reporting to him and asked her to be at our 1-on-1s and my performance review. She was shocked by some of these things, so it seems he's lying to her too. He is running our team into the ground and I have no idea how we are still functioning. I told her that we are all in a mental health crisis due to stress. We have been in an emergency situation the entire pandemic and it has only gotten worse. We are all burnt out. We are barely able to have enough coverage on phones so wait times are longer and our work is getting sloppier. We barely have time to think about what we're doing because there are more people waiting for help.
And the next week I had a mental break. I signed into work on Monday and just sat there frozen for like an hour, crying and terrified to do anything. I ended up in a crisis center that evening and stayed a couple of nights to stabilize. Fortunately I got FMLA approved and started a claim for short term disability.
So yeah. I'm struggling a lot with processing the impact work has been having on me over the past few years. Our team has been through a lot. Everyone turns to us for support but no one is here to support us. And when shit breaks down in the system, we get the brunt of it and because we continue to deal with it and still function, it's become normal. We deal with it because we have to. We have to answer our phone when it rings. They'd be fucked without us and they have taken that for granted. They don't realize that we have to maintain the same output of work regardless of how many staff we have in. If we only have 2 people available for phones, we can't say “Oh we can only take 40 calls today due to staffing.” Nope, we still have to deal with over 120 calls a day (plus tickets and all of our other duties) regardless of staffing.
I'm just fucking over it and I have no idea what to do about my boss.