'That was basically the "last straw"': Overwhelmed employee gets scolded for working overtime, starts working only 5 hours per day

Advertisement
  • 01
    Boss "punished" my by reducing my hours, but didn't tell the other boss
  • 02
    Boss "punished" my by reducing my hours, but didn't tell the other boss
  • 03
    This happened quite a while ago. This story is incredibly long (TL;DR at the bottom). I was working remotely for a staffing agency, organizing and managing events. When I was initially hired on it was due to the fact that 3 employees were quitting. They all seemed to be leaving amicably to pursue other ventures, so I didn't think anything of it. They had hired myself and 1 other person to replace them and everything was going fine. Over time I started to notice little things here and there, like
  • 04
    A few months in, I was assaulted and had been injured pretty badly. It was really difficult obviously but I worked remotely so I was still able to work. I told my bosses I had an emergency and was injured, and needed to take time off. Almost immediately one of the owners called and left an angry sounding voicemail. I called him back and ended up having to tell him I had been assaulted and went to the hospital and all that. He seemed sympathetic, but near the end of the conversation he noted that
  • 05
    I was afraid I would get fired so I ended up having to work that weekend. It wasn't so bad but I was in an incredible amount of pain, and due to my injuries the doctor said they couldn't prescribe me any strong pain medication due to complications that may arise. I worked that weekend and pushed through.
  • 06
    Shortly after that, they fired another employee, and gave me her workload. THEN they chose me to do a very long running (2+ months) event taking place in 2 different time zones. They initially decided the event would be split between myself and another employee (she was pregnant, it matters for context), due to the size of the program. So while I was dealing with the assault and healing (took 1 month for my injuries to heal), I was also doing the majority of the workload of this event. I was als
  • 07
    Eventually the employee who was helping me went on maternity leave, so the whole program landed on my shoulders. One day I got reprimanded for working overtime. I explained that the workload was heavy and since I was managing events in 2 time zones, I was having to wake up super early in the morning (4am), work during the day, take a long lunch, work some more, then wrap up the other event which ended in the evening (10:30-11pm). They basically told me I needed to manage my time better. Well, I
  • 08
    and there, but nothing that was damaging or severely detrimental to the business. There were days I would just sit there crying at my desk. It was awful. Another employee had also been reprimanded for working overtime, and she was as swamped as I was. Eventually one of my bosses emailed me and said I was still working too much overtime, and that he wanted me to work only 5 hours on days where I wasn't managing the big event. I was relieved, honestly. I was looking forward to having more time for
  • 09
    Well, he didn't tell his wife (the other owner) about my new hours, and she had a tendency to ramble about stuff during meetings, making them last way longer than they needed to be. One day we had a meeting in the morning that lasted 3 hours, and it was the first day I was to only work 5 hours. I didn't even need to be in that meeting, but they forced me to stay and would get irritated if they knew myself or other employees were quietly working while listening to the meeting.
  • 10
    After that meeting, the wife sends me messages on asking the progress of some things I was working on. She then added more things for me to do. The back and forth with her took about 20 minutes. I told her that I knew I wouldn't have enough time to finish those things that day, because I only had a little over an hour and a half to complete the other tasks I had already been assigned.
  • 11
    She had no idea what I was talking about, so I told her that her husband had reduced my hours on non-management days, and forwarded her our email exchanges where he confirmed I was only to work 5 hours that day. She got an attitude with me and said "well, these are high priority things and we need you to work on them. You can go ahead and work longer today." I told her I couldn't because I had confirmed a week prior and had made arrangements and was not able to work. So once I hit my 5 hours, I
  • 12
    I eventually got fired because they said that was basically the "last straw", but I was so relieved and also got unemployment benefits, even though they tried to fight it. TL;DR: boss reduced my hours, didn't communicate it to the other boss, and I happily complied, causing the to hit the fan.
  • 13
    G-Kira The first red flag was that three employees quit and they only hired two to replace them. 3.9k Reply Share Anonynominous OP . Yes! I was super desperate for a job at the time, so I wasn't super concerned. But now I know!
  • 14
    NEP Tina_Belmont Sounds like they expected you to work the hours, just not charge them for those hours... 753 Reply Share Anonynominous OP. Right. And we got paid time and half for overtime, so sometimes my paychecks were quite large. Lol no regrets!
  • 15
    yParticle Oh man, I'm so sorry. There's no way that could have ended well with that sort of dysfunctional "family business", but you did the very best you could with what you had to work with! Perfect malicious compliance.
  • 16
    Anonynominous OP. Thank you! It was toxic all around. The wife had a difficult time communicating in writing, so she would often jump around between topics, which made it hard to follow what she was referring to. I would have to copy and paste her messages into a document and organize it, and then list the items in order. It was such a headache. And she was often wrong (both of them were) about stuff, but never admitted it.
  • 17
    One day the husband accidentally deleted important documents one of my coworkers had been working on, and just laughed it off. My coworkers were sweet and we would help each other out as much as we could. If I found mistakes in their work I would quickly fix it, in hopes that they wouldn't notice. We were all so stressed. They made both myself and another coworker cry during a meeting one time. The husband would practically yell at us and then lecture us over the tiniest
  • 18
    mistakes. We had both cried because we were the ones working overtime and were just completely stressed by the workload.

Tags

Scroll Down For The Next Article