My
employment with C was a roller coaster of fuckery from start to finish.
There will be many posts in this series from this job alone. This place
caused me so much stress, depression, and anxiety. This tale is not
about my first horrible run in with this company, but it is the one that
left me with the biggest “what the fuck?” moment.
In
December of 2010 I was only at this job for about six months. I had only
been out of training for a bit and had received vacation and other paid
off days not too long before that. It was getting close to
Christmastime and I was hopeful that I could be approved for a few days
off so that I could go home for the holidays since I hadn’t been home
for over a year. I logged my time into the system and kept getting error
messages before being added to a wait list. As someone who had never
had a job with these types of benefits and was used to just taking days
off with no pay I didn’t 100% understand what it meant. My supervisor
told me that since it was the holiday lots of people were probably
asking for it off hence the wait list. I asked her since the new hires
had just received their vacation days was there any way to override it
so that we wouldn’t lose those days completely in a few weeks when the
new year rolled around. By that time I had ditched the idea of going
home I just wanted to be able to use the days before losing them. She
made me believe that she understood that we had a short time to use
these days and assured me that she would speak with the manager
immediately to get it taken care of. A few days went by and my
supervisor hadn’t given me any answer on what to do with these days so I
took upon myself to speak with the manager myself since I was promised
that it would be taken care of. I wanted to cry when I talked to the
manager about what was going on as if he’d known the issue when in fact
no one had talked to him about it at all. I was pissed. I waited days to
get an answer about something that wasn’t being discussed as promised.
Days where I could’ve used those hours to leave work early or come in
late all because my supervisor told me that this was an issue that the
manager could, in fact, take care of.
A few weeks into the
new year my father had a stroke. Turns out I was going home anyways. I
was notified about it on a day that would be considered my Friday. I
caught a Greyhound bus in the middle of the night so I could be home the
next morning. When I arrived in my hometown I called my supervisor to
notify her of what was going on. Even though it was our day off I wanted
to call her to let her know where I was so that a.) since I was still
pretty new if I wasn’t allowed to be off any extra days I could head
home the next day and b.) to get guidance on what I was supposed to do
in case of a family emergency in the first place. She told me to just
take care of my family and to keep her in the loop and that she’d let me
know all that I needed to do while I was with my dad.
My
father was only in the hospital for about four days before being moved
to a rehab facility for speech and physical therapy. The whole time I
kept my supervisor up to date and at no time did she tell me that I
needed to be back at work in ‘x’ amount of days. Since I’d had a few run
ins with this supervisor (even before the vacation days incident) I
made sure to get numerous notes from doctors and nurses from the
hospital and the rehab facility. In total I was gone for about a week.
As hard as it was for me to leave my dad, and he was still having lots
of trouble talking (and honestly four years later still has a bit of
trouble), I left a few days after he arrived to rehab. My last day there
I had my phone on vibrate while visiting with my father. As I was
leaving I noticed I had a voice mail from someone at work. It was my
manager. It was a short message, and I can’t exactly remember the
entirety of the message, but I do know that in an irritated tone he said
“So how long is this going to take?!” I could’ve broken my phone in
half. How long is it going to take?!?!?!? My father just had a stroke
and you ask how long it’s going to take. Are you fucking serious?! Are
you trying to win the insensitive asshole of the year award?! I had been
calling these people everyday asking what I should do. If after two
days they had told me I needed to come back to work, then I would’ve
come back, but I never got that. I was told to take care of my dad,
which is what I did, as well as call these morons everyday, With the
tone of his voice you would think I just left town on my day off and
didn’t tell anyone shit. I was furious. What was the point of me calling
everyday?!
When I arrived back to work the following day I
dumped all of my notes on my supervisor. I didn’t say a word because I
know my mouth and I knew if I were to say something I would’ve lost my
job. While she looked them over I went back to work. Since this woman
was so completely rude she called out to me while I was working with a
customer (something I would sadly get used to) and said “When your
father was moved to rehab why didn’t you come back after the dark part
was over?” Seeing as my father just had a stroke I would say that it all
looked pretty dark. I asked her what she meant because I didn’t see the
bright and sunny side to my dad having a stroke. I missed that part.
She said that the hospital seems like that was the dark part and that if
he was well enough to go to a rehab facility then he should’ve been
well enough for me to leave. You would’ve thought that I was there for
three weeks. My dad was only in rehab for three days before I came back.
As leadership when I called everyday to ask what it is that I had to do
the smart thing would’ve been to tell me that I only had a certain
amount of days instead of letting me just try to figure it out on my
own. I had my hands full with trying to care of the only father I have. I
didn’t have time to try and become a mind reader and figure out what in
the hell these people wanted. I had never dealt with a group of people
who were supposed to be superiors and didn’t know what the hell they
were doing or had conflicting answers.
The only good thing
to come out of this confusing bullshit is that not even two weeks after
coming back to work my manager was fired. There were rumors going
around the building as to why he was fired. Everything was said from him
sleeping with or sexually harassing women to him not keeping on his job
and getting things done in time. Both were believable. He walked around
the building too much and flirted with every woman he came in contact
with which means he was never in his office doing the work he was
supposed to be doing. Either way I always felt like it was a little bit
of karma. I wonder how long it took for him to find a new job.
-Asia Aneka Anderson
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