Imagine going to work where you know your superiors do not want you there and would be happy for you to leave. For absolutely no reason other than you do not fit in the ideal team in their heads. So they ride you incessantly, nitpick every little thing you do, second guess every single action you make and generally make every day difficult in some way, shape, or form – with the goal of trying to make you leave.
But finding a new job or transferring to a different team is actually a whole lot harder than people seem to forget, and with a second baby on the way, the upcoming paternity leave is way more valuable and essential at this current juncture than your professional comfort, so you grit your teeth and smile and navigate each day after day, enduring the bullshit with a more important goal in the horizon.
However, since the superiors have failed to grief you until you quit, they have resorted to straight up war: looking for any and every procedural infraction they can find, and writing you up for them, putting you on an official disciplinary probation, where job termination is one of the potential outcomes, and most likely their intended goal at the end of the lengthy journey.
I don’t like to brog about work, because most of the time it’s boring, rarely is it cool, unless it’s a freelance gig that I can actually be proud of. But the little hypothetical tale detailed above is precisely where I’m at right now, and I’m in a position of where I’m quite upset, angry to even think about describing it, and disgusted beyond belief that I work with people like this.
My bosses, and I use the plural term loosely because one of them is quite literally a spineless puppet for the other have written me up for what I feel are pretty minor procedural infractions given the context of the world right now, but officially, I am on a disciplinary probation suddenly to where if improvement is not demonstrated in a determined period of time, I can literally be terminated.
What I was written up for was that I didn’t give an estimate of a project’s completion in a timely enough manner to my puppet’s liking because everything on my team is currently out of process thanks to COVID measures and it’s very easy for things to get out of control, and speaking of COVID, another one of my infractions was that I failed to reassign one of my report’s work while they were out with coronavirus, and nobody really knows what to do when a colleague tests positive for COVID so the wheels spun for a day.
To put into context, my company doesn’t fire a lot of people, but there actually was someone on my team that was fired a while back. The difference between myself and them was that they were going to great lengths to manipulate their hours, through phantom punches, not reporting lunches, and even buddying up with building security to evade badge scans – to maximize inordinately large amounts of overtime, effectively stealing literally thousands of dollars from the company every single year, due to the length in which they were doing this.
This person was actually fired, deservedly so. By my boss.
And I am currently on a track where firing is possible, because of not being on top of my emails to the liking of said same boss.
Somehow, this is being perceived as being as heinous of an employee who flagrantly abuses their hourly status to manipulate tons of overtime.
Needless to say, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that my boss genuinely has a target on my back. And based on their T-1000-level of tunnel vision to eliminate the overtime thief, I definitely feel their determination to get rid of me, which would actually be something very welcome if I could just get something else lined up prior to doing so and believe me, I will be trying hard – after #2 shows up and I used my paternity leave.
Regardless, I’m in a very disadvantageous position, because they are my boss and have the higher ground, and short of there being evidence of physical or any other abuse, there’s little I can do about it, and frankly I have this feeling that no matter even if I cured AIDS, this boss would still try to spin things in a manner in which I should be terminated.
I would also like to put on record that the infractions in which I have been officially been written up for, occurred six and four weeks prior, were discussed with me, acknowledged by me of the things that I can improve upon, but were written up for out of the blue weeks later because my boss clearly was bored and decided to declare jihad on my career, in a very official and job-hurting manner.
Seriously, this write-up sticks to my internal profile for six months, and if they don’t succeed in spinning up bullshit to get me fired, they’re still going to harm my chances to apply anywhere else in the company without a hiring manager or potential lead not eventually seeing that there’s a disciplinary mark on my record, despite the fact that every single year prior to the assumption of my current boss, was rated satisfactory or above.
The thing is, the chances of me getting to demonstrate improvement are not very good, because my team’s workloads have been slashed pretty drastically on account of coronavirus, so it’s actually not nearly as hectic to stay on top of deadlines and workloads, so I won’t be able to really demonstrate any noticeable improvement at juggling projects. Furthermore, I should hope that no more of my employees get coronavirus, even if it means that I won’t be able to demonstrate knowing better what to do in light of the situation.
HR has let me know that no news is good news when it comes to probation, and that even if I don’t/can’t show improvement, as long as I don’t give more fuel for any further write-ups, I should be fine; but I know my boss is always watching me like a hawk, salivating at the thought of me messing up in any capacity.
Basically I’m in a situation where I have become afraid to fail, because I definitively know that my boss is documenting all things that they perceive as negative and will spin them in manners that make me look like an incompetent boob, worthy of the axe. And it sucks to be afraid to fail, because I believe that it’s through failure is the most growth possible, and if I can’t fuck up because my boss is going to shitcan me for it, then I’ll never grow.
Regardless, my bosses have shown their hand now, and it’s very awkward for me at work, moving forward. Not only have they basically declared war on me officially, I still have to work with these shitheads, watching my every word and action. I no longer have any trust in them in any capacity, and my HR rep has suggested to start taking more copious notes, even writing up summaries in order to have things in writing in the event things go even more tits up than they already are.
They’ve gone from trying to get me to leave, to actually enacting actual harm to my career, and there’s no scenario where I can’t not take this personally. At the end of the day it really hurts because I know I’m not perfect, but I still otherwise think I am good at my job, I cultivate and maintain positive relationships with others on my team and others throughout the rest of the company, but none of it really matters because I have bosses that do not want me there because I don’t fit into a mold that works for them.
All I really want at the end of every day is to not be miserable from my job. Prior to the arrival of my boss, I actually liked coming to work, working hard, punching out at the end of the day and going home to enjoy the life part of my work-life balance. It sounds so juvenile to be in this situation yet again in my career, but here we are again, I’m once again at odds with a superior, and the only real solution is to seek out greener pastures. Except in no previous instance was I actually shot, and potentially be bleeding out first, before I could find salvation.
