Tragic Work Tales #2

        My first job was a tough one. It wasn’t tough as in what the job entailed. It was tough because I was a 19 year old kid just trying to make enough money to pay for school, get experience, and to set foot into the working world. I didn’t anticipate the amount of drama that would come with the responsibility. It was the type of drama that I hadn’t even experienced in high school. I got to see first hand how petty and backwards so called adults were. There are many things I could say about this place. MANY. I want to tell this one tale in particular because it left me the most puzzled. Trust me, I’ll tell more of this place in the future.
        I stayed with my first job for almost seven years. Most of the people in my department I got along with and loved like family. The few who barely lifted a finger even had a place in my heart (except during work hours because I was doing the majority of the work and seriously fuck them for that) but one did not. On the surface he came off as a good guy. He was very talkative and very much a guy who wanted to be liked by everybody, but I assumed he played the likable guy to keep people’s attention away from the fact that he didn’t do shit but gossip for eight hours. I was always amused how he did very little and never got called out on it, but I would get called out on the smallest things even though I did 75% of the work that came through our department.
        There was always something about him that made me uncomfortable, but most of the time I’d just ignore it and concentrate on my work. Since his job was to repair items that were returned damaged he spent his time in the back. Well he spent time back there when he wasn’t roaming the building to gossip to all the women in other departments. As the years went on more responsibility was placed on me which meant I got to do more work that called for me to enter information into our system. Some days when it was slow on the floor I’d work on projects in the back as well as I’d always take my breaks in our work room anyways. One day while on the computer, after this guy had left for the day, I noticed he hadn’t closed all the windows he had open. As I was closing them I noticed a few were pornographic. The first time it caught me off guard, of course. By the 20th time I was disgusted. Look, I have no problem with porn at all. What I do have a problem with is someone doing it at work and on a shared company computer. I noticed that he would visit sites, but most of the videos and images he looked at were being emailed to his work email from his friends. It got to a point where it seemed as though he was trying to taunt me. He’d open images when I was working in the back even though he might’ve been on the other side of the room working on something else when I walked in. It also seemed as though he’d leave this stuff open when he left for the day so that I’d have to be the one to get rid of it.
        People always say there’s a straw that breaks the camel’s when they’re dealing with bullshit. I had two straws and both incidents happened pretty close together. By this point there was another woman, with the same job title as me, who had started to notice what he was doing and we’d compare notes. Also, being who I am, I started becoming vocal and speaking to other coworkers about it and how grossed out I was. The first final straw was using the computer on a break one day, and again having to close out all of his emails after he’d gone, but one image looked familiar. One of our other coworkers (who was fairly new and also did about 10% of work if any at all) had taken a few photos from my MySpace and emailed them to him. I. Was. Livid. I decided not to speak up on that because I know how I am and the things that come out of my mouth when I’m legit angry, and trust me, I was fuming. I told a few folks who were all on the same level as me when it came to job title and who also knew of the stuff this guy did. The last final straw came not too long after when this particular computer got a virus. When it was finally fixed the manager in our department (who is the biggest twat I’ve ever worked for, honestly) left a note on the computer stating that the cause of the virus was because of MySpace, Facebook, etc. and that all of the people who were in the same pay grade as myself could only use it for work purposes (mind you this dude got right back to his porn habits as soon as it was fixed, but yeah sure Facebook did it *eye roll*). When I saw that note I was again fuming. I’m sorry, but if I bust my ass around here while most everyone else in this place does jack shit but gossip all day then I’m going to spend my breaks/lunches winding down the way I want. I texted a coworker, who hadn’t started his shift yet, that we were being punished for this dude’s bullshit. My coworker texted me back “Fuck that. I’m gonna put in my two weeks notice when I get there. Watch me.” And that’s exactly what he did. I was even more upset, because this guy and I had become close and he’s one of the few people that made my days there bearable. Now he was going to quit all because our boss treated this perv like he was gold.
        How I handled the situation was writing a strongly worded letter to my supervisor and the director of the company. I won’t even drag this part of the story out because of course nothing was done. I was down a friend. I was up enemies because people didn’t want to believe that he was doing it. Actually I’m not sure what they thought, but the fact that no one sided with a young woman who was clearly uncomfortable working with a grown man who watched porn at work, on a company computer, oh and I forgot to mention that he would also have phone sex with women in other departments during work hours. That was always a fun listen, but I was the bad guy in the whole situation. A family member once suggested that I’d tell the police since this job was only a few blocks away from the police station. My one regret while I worked there is that I didn’t do just that, but my thought at that time was that it wasn’t that serious. I really should have done that though. Not sure what that would’ve accomplished, but if you have someone who can’t get through a workday without watching porn then no telling what type of individual he may actually be.
        I gladly left that job in the summer of 2008. That place got under my skin so much that I left the damn state. I mean, my main reason was to transfer to another school, but my second reason was to get a clean break from that place. I visited once on winter break early 2009 and that was the last I stepped foot in there. When I moved back home 2013 family kept saying “Go back there. I’m sure you’d get hired back.” No. I’d rather be in poverty than return to that establishment. Not joking. This is only one of many problems I had with that place. Never again. Not today, Satan.   

-Asia Aneka Anderson, 2015©

Tragic Work Tales #1

        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