#noooooooo.

The woman that I was assigned to train under and who I was effectively the assistant to was a 49 year old with a very difficult personality. By “difficult”, I mean that I was taken aside by four different people, all of whom told me that she was very difficult, don’t take anything that she said personally, and that if she ever got too cruel, to just go ahead and inform them, and they’d intervene.

Said woman frequently interrupted people mid-sentence to cut them off, or to explain what they were saying. She was almost always wrong.

She was functionally incapable of actually making the shit she said concise, or having it make much sense - one of her favorite moves was to continuously nab people for meetings that should’ve only taken 20-30 minutes, and were blocked for such, and then extend them to an hour long, frequently up to 90m.

She had a specific way of doing things that she wanted everyone to follow, and that she’d go behind you and change everything if you did not follow it, regardless of if she was actually involved in the project.

One of her favorite moves with my projects is the fact that everything had to be kept in the shared HR drive, so she’d continuously go into my section of it, go through my projects, and delete what she deemed extraneous files. In the process of pawing through them, she also managed to completely overwrite a month’s worth of work and roll it back.

This turned out to be on purpose, because she was.. convinced, I think, that I wanted her position, instead of having the actual coordinator position that they drew me in the door with? So I started keeping logs, keeping back-ups of all of my files, sending off e-mails noting exactly what I’d worked on and done each morning, and trying my best to force her to confirm everything she said through e-mails, and she was just so dreadfully disappointed there was a fucking papertrail of her changing her mind 3x times in a day on what, exactly, she needed from me.

She also enjoyed trying to snipe me to talk about insane bullshit at every turn. Angels are real, and people should be religious. Did I know that someone online said they could angels, and did I know that people have had after-death experiences and are guided by spirits, sometimes good, sometimes evil, and DID I KNOW --

Most wtf-worthy moment towards the start of my time there was when she stopped me at lunch to tell me about a book she read. This was fine! Casually mentioned someone getting tied down and “used to repopulate a were-tiger population”. This.. was not fine, but okay, I can blink and make an excuse to go to the bathroom.

Significantly not fine? Her showing me a picture of a man who survived getting a railpike through his head.

This would have been a lovely point to stop and complain to HR, except that she was the de facto manager of HR complaints! :)

I worked at Megacorp for a few years, and eventually left over the combination of 1) continued, escalating harrassment from the male managers, which: great!, and 2) the awful racial atmosphere, which involved things like “everyone catcalled our single black admin on location, and she was punished for shutting it down viciously and taking it to the overhead”, and also involved things like “people actively celebrating in the break room the day after Trump’s election, and informing the sole mexican-american worker in the department that they’d mail him a card when he got deported”. 

.. but at least I never heard people whispering about how someone called someone else a porch monkey!

.. but at least everyone there would talk to me and be baseline civilized, unlike this place, where, at with 40-55% black employees, there were 4-5 white employees who steadily refused to even meet my eyes while talking to me, and 2-3 who would flat-out go silent and refuse to speak if I was in the room!

Did I mention that I was working in HR, and that my direct overhead was one of the main HR people? Did I mention that, when I complimented someone’s accent and said “oh, I think it’s a French derivative,” she corrected me with “no, she’s a African, it’s an African accent”? Because that was a thing.

I have a cane, because I was run over by a car when I was 18. My ankle was shattered and had to be rebuilt. I do not always use my cane, because if it’s warm outside and I’m not tired, I don’t limp - and I was advised by my doctor that it is not necessarily great to use my cane if I’m not actively needing it, due to hip wear-and-tear, or something. I also don’t always use it, because the reactions fucking suck.

I started off using my cane there, because it was snowing outside and icy still. They asked me why I used a cane, I explained, and it was all peachy. When it warmed up, I stopped using my cane.

So they started asking why I stopped using my cane. I explained, again. The director of the department stops me to ask me why I use a cane only sometimes, and if this was a fashion choice. I explain, again.

I start using my cane when the rainy portion of summer begins. They ask why. I explain, again. When it stops raining, I don’t need my cane. They ask if I’ve gotten better. Right before I left the job entirely, the director joked again that I was like a cybernetic person, and that my cane was very fashionable.

I have an intense amount of allergies, because I have an auto-immune disorder. My body hates everything, including - but especially! - me. I pack my own meals to work, I eat only certain things, and I take allergy pills if I have to eat something for manners’ sake or work reasons, but I still.. have reactions, generally, even if I take them. They’re just not debilitating reactions.

This was explained to them, because food is a huge part of the job culture. I said, hey, I’ll bring in food, but I can’t eat anything that I don’t bring in.

They bought me an expensive pizza for my birthday regardless. I smiled, took my allergy pills, ate a few slices, and was drowsy and ill for the rest of the day, but hey, it was expensive, they thought it was fine because I mentioned buying it for my father, so. Manners!

They proceeded to use that for the rest of the job as 1) a reason that I should be able to take allergy pills for the rest of any work meals, and 2) a springboard for trying to figure out what I could eat, that they could bring in for me.

They did not appreciate the actual answers I gave when they kept pushing, which was largely “vegetables, unprocessed, and very, very simple, 1-5 ingredients foods”, because.. it turns out most people don’t want to eat those. Who could’ve known?

So they started bringing those in, and going “oh, Mar’s the one who asked for these to be brought, they better eat all of these! here, take this home! here, eat this!” and then wing-dragging sadly if I didn’t eat all of them. Keep in mind, too: I’m a very small person! I don’t eat a lot, because I have an immune disorder, and I get sick.

Also looped into this: constant ad-nauseum commentary about the fact “oh, yes, Mar never eats food! they don’t eat breakfast, and I don’t see them eat lunch..”

Which: I brought lunch almost every day, except for the days I was too sick to eat. I ate lunch at my desk, largely, and often spoke about what I brought for lunch, so I don’t.. even know what that was, except that I guess it’s a lot easier to notice when the skinny person isn’t eating then it is to notice when I am? |D

This has been a bizarre trend of commentary at every place that I’ve worked at, so I guess I can’t necessarily get too pissy over that, but it’s still actively agitating to deal with.

There were also other things like the fact, when I gave my resignation, the boss of the department gathered everyone into the conference room to publicly announce it, and then sent three different people to try and convince me not to quit over the next two weeks, which: horrifying and exhausting and completely unnecessary! But those were the big kickers that I’ve steadily been chewing sand over for the past few months.