I ranted about this to a lot of people but not in full and I recently started a new job so I just wanna complain about how awful the last one was. It's very very long I'm so sorry I just hated it so much lol
(This seemed like the right place to post because of how the job ended.)
It's sad 'cause I was really really excited about Nursing Home job – it was nonprofit and Jewish (like me) and my manager seemed nice and told me (lied) that it was an environment where I didn't need to dress super professionally. I got to run social media and do graphic design and maintain the website which is all the stuff I like to do.
The first few weeks were majorly uncomfortable. My manager (the department was just her and me, our offices had a shared door that was always open) constantly telling me how much she wanted me to work with her forever, constantly talking to me while I was trying to work, making jokes about setting me up with her son (I'm a lesbian and yeah she didn't know that but also…it's just awkward).
I didn't return her affections cause I didn't know her and I'm not a fucking weirdo but I played nice just assuming she was excited after working alone for almost a year. But then she started asking me annoying questions at the end of every work day (“what's your favorite thing you did today?” “what's the accomplishment this week you're most proud of?”) and I tried giving her an answer once, to which she said “really? I think you should be more proud of this other thing” and after that I told her I wasn't good at answering those kinds of questions.
After that she got a bit more dismissive of me, belittling my interests and saying how I'm such a “unique and interesting person” with “so many opinions at such a young age” (I'm almost 30, also what the fuck does that mean?) She even made weird comments about me having a preference for one car brand since that's what my family drives. She also kept pushing trash into me: if she didn't want a donated item or didn't know what to do with it, she'd tell me to take it. If I said no thanks, she'd said “take it take it! It's all yours!” as if I'm poor and begging to trash to decorate my house with.
Just to be clear, I did my work and I did it quickly and I did it well. If I made a mistake, I fixed it right away, and the only actual work I didn't enjoy doing was taking photos of the residents for our social media. Fun fact about Manager: she loved taking dishonest pictures and was very adamant that there NEVER be a wheelchair visible on our social media. It's a fucking nursing home, 100% of the residents were at least sometimes in wheelchairs and most of them were completely wheelchair-bound.
There was another manager I worked with very often (who I really liked and enjoyed working with), and my manager frequently warned me how this other woman is a Terrible Gossip and I should avoid befriending her. Okay? Meanwhile my manager talks shit about other employees all the time. She seemed to get agitated with me when I worked with this other manager even though that was a big part of my job.
During Passover I set up the big Seder in an online stream so families could watch with their loved ones. Manager says I can relax while the stream is ongoing. I'm doodling in my notebook and she 1. Takes photos of me without my permission (she did this to many people and said too bad, your employment contract includes automatic permission to be on our website and social media), 2. Grabs me by the shoulder and says “remind me to never let you draw me! He looks like a gross donkey!” referring to my doodle of the rabbi.
We do not have a jokey relationship, I have NO idea why she would think that's an appropriate thing to say to anyone ever. I'm not an artist by any means but I was just baffled.
That's when I decide okay, I'm not staying at this job for than 4 or 5 months. Time to start looking for something new.
Cut to: maybe two months into the job? Manager goes on a week and a half long vacation immediately before a huge event that we've been prepping for all month. I am forced to handle everything before the event by myself, despite not knowing half the employees or where to find things or what I have permission to do or not.
She comes back and is upset that I don't have everything ready to perfection when I did everything she asked of me and as much else as I was able to do. Fine, whatever, big stressful event. I don't care.
Then she points out some of the graphics I made for the event and asks condescendingly, “was this design approved?” Yes it was. “Maybe I should look over it again…” I've already printed 300 of them and tied them by hand to the stupid little gift bags.
(She insulted a lot of the designs I presented to her, which makes sense because the designs she'd been using before me were ugly as hell. I didn't say that but my god she would use these squiggly blobs overlaying each other messily for every background and it looked terrible. I tried to balance the design just a bit and got SO much pushback. She obviously didn't want a new brain working for her, she just wanted another set of hands to continue doing exactly what she was already doing.)
I get an email two days after she's returned from her trip and she confesses that her entire family has COVID. She puked during lunch the day before, didn't say anything to me (we share an office!!), and continued to work with me all day even when she knew she was sick! We work at a NURSING HOME!! Avoiding COVID outbreaks was a top priority all the time and she just stayed put!
That's when I said oh okay, I'm leaving. This is ridiculous. But she's going to be out for at least a week and I want to leave the job on a positive note since I liked literally everyone except for my manager. So I give three weeks notice, an extra week because she wasn't going to be there and she'd need time to catch up when she got back. I know I didn't need to do that, but I was trying to be nice.
I said I was leaving the area to help my dad with a project back home. Now, she'd been regularly calling me a liar for random things the entire time I've been working there (especially if she asked how I was doing and I'd say oh fine, just tired. She'd get in my face and say 'youre such a liar' like no bitch I am tired I woke up at 7 what do you want), so naturally she assumed I was lying about this, too. In my defense, I did plan on helping my dad with a project after I left this job. Just for a week or two, though.
When she returned she proceeded to bully the hell out of me. I had severe anxiety coming into work everyday, not sure what she'd make fun of me for this time. My clothes, my hair, my interests, my work. She started nitpicking like crazy and saying that all the work I was submitting was subpar and I “clearly wasn't trying to do good work anymore”. The quality of my work was the same as ever.
Then she asked for a copy of every file I'd ever worked on. I assume she's not including the files I've already sent her. Then she asks specifically for the files I've already sent her, and I said they're in my recycle bin I'll have to go through it.
This, of course, leads to a huge fucking freakout. She says that I'm making her very uncomfortable and how DARE I delete anything that I've worked on. I asked what happened to the copies I sent her and she says she deleted them because she was done with them, but I was supposed to hang onto everything. First time I'm hearing this after over three months. She then throws my bag on the floor and sits down next to me so she can watch me move every relevant file from the recycle bin into a new folder. This took maybe ten minutes but it felt like over an hour.
At our next morning meeting she proceeds to tell me that she “heard me say she was horrible” (I did no such thing though it's true, she was, but arguing was pointless because she would just call me a liar). Then she tells me for the very first time that I have been disrespecting her since I started working by not telling her where I'm going every time I get up from my desk. She's never expressed this as an issue before, especially since my job very frequently involves me going places around the two buildings that we work in. She says if I'm going to be gone for a long time I need to tell her where I am.
To be clear: I'm not a secretary, I'm an assistant. I do my own work, my job isn't to help Manager with her work. But okay, I assume this means if I'm going to be gone for than 20 min I should say something. Fine. I only have one and a half more weeks of work and then I'm done.
(I specifically told Manager that I wanted to stay until the beginning of June to get healthcare for the month of June. She didn't seem to have a problem with that so long as I continued doing my work.)
I leave for fifteen minutes to grab some papers. When I come back, HR is in my office and informing me that this will be my last day. “We just talked about this” Manager says. I respond “I was gone for fifteen minutes…” And she, of course, responds with “That's a lie, you were gone for much longer than that.” Okay.
I had a ton of work I wanted to get done before I left because a lot of that work was specifically for the other manager that I really liked. But whatever. So now I'm not getting healthcare for June, so I walk over to the office of the woman who handles COBRA stuff and let her know that I need the COBRA info rushed to me since I'm being fired a few days before the end of the month.
(This took about one minute.)
When I get back to my office, I'm told to pack up and leave immediately. Even though I was in the middle of a project lol but whatever. I started packing and then notice Manager is just standing there and watching me. “This'll probably take me a few minutes” “that's fine, I'll wait”. Did she think I was going to steal shit? Meanwhile she keeps pointing at things that obviously aren't mine and saying “is that yours?” It's like she's trying to make me steal or something.
She chases me out the door with my arms completely full and says, “You're very skilled!” And that's it. It was a humiliating experience all around.
I stop at the other building on my way out to say bye to the coworkers I actually liked and let them know id been fired. Quickly I learn that she told everyone I'd quit, fortunately I have a copy of my letter of notice that shows I was supposed to work into June but was forced to stop working at the end of May.
Despite this, I haven't been able to get unemployment benefits. Unemployment said I was due money and then suddenly the benefits went under investigation and I heard nothing. It's been 5 months and I haven't seen a penny of the money I'm due and I haven't been given an opportunity to explain what happened because I know the Nursing Home people will say I quit.
This whole experience was an absolute bummer. Worst manager I've ever had, and I had a manager steal my identity and ruin my credit! Still, at least she was nice to me when we worked together. I'm not an anxious person usually so this was my first time experiencing nonstop work anxiety and I feel terrible for anyone who lives with that.
I haven't told anyone this but I frequently can't sleep or wake up in the middle of the night because I can't stop remembering how badly I was mistreated. It feels pathetic, especially as someone who was bullied throughout middle and high school, but this was so much worse. It's hard such a dramatic impact on how I view work relationships and it's why I wouldn't settle for a new job until I found something where I could work from home.
I know Manager lives not far from where I'm living now and I'm constantly worried about running into her. I've blocked her everywhere but we could just bump into each other at the grocery store and I know I would just walk by and pretend I didn't see her but I know she would try to talk to me and that would make me wanna scream.
I'm also worried about my standing in the local Jewish community. The Nursing Home is nonprofit so there's a strong relationship with Jews in the area and shes good friends with all of them. I'm not religious at all but my mom is and we're not from this area originally so I never know whose gonna know who.
Anyway anyway this was so fucking long but I needed to finally complain in full since I never had the chance to before. Id never been mistreated and bullied like that in the workplace before and now I'm constantly worried that my new manager will flip a switch and suddenly hate my guts.
TL;DR: manager was creepy, then started bullying me, then when I put in notice to leave she fired me before the date I planned to leave which cost me over $900 in healthcare coverage and I can't stop replaying her bullying in my head