Daughter quits stable job of 10 years to work for her father, he fires her within months

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via Andreea Avramescu

AITAH for blaming my dad after I quit a stable 10-year job to help run his business and then he essentially fired me?

I’m looking for honest opinions because emotions are obviously involved here.

I worked for a major company for about 10 years and had stable employment, benefits, and predictable income. Earlier this year, my dad asked me to leave that job and help run the office side of his HVAC business. He needed help with operations, invoices, scheduling, customer communication, and administrative work.

Because he’s my dad, I trusted him and took a huge risk. I left my stable job and started helping him. There was never really a formal employment structure, payroll setup, HR process, etc. It was very much family helping family.

via Getty Images

But that quickly turned out to be much more of a dream than a reality. Her dad needed much more of her than she could give, and wasn't great about controlling his temper. As much as working with family can seem like a great idea, it seems like it devolves into interpersonal drama more often than it doesn't. Maybe it's because you don't feel like you have to hold back around family, so you can let your professional filter slip. Where you might use coded corporate language with a regular coworker, you might not stop yourself from saying what you really feel to a family member. 

The issue is that my dad tends to expect immediate responses at all hours. He owns an HVAC company and often says the business is open 24/7. One night he was repeatedly calling me because he wanted invoices completed. My phone was charging, I was putting my daughter to bed, and I planned to finish the invoices later that evening. I wasn’t ignoring the work and the invoices weren’t due until Monday morning. Instead of asking what was going on, he became angry and told me something along the lines of “this isn’t working out” and said someone else could do the work. From my perspective, that was basically firing me. What hurts is that I gave up my financial stability based largely on trust. Now I’m left trying to figure out how to support myself and my daughter after leaving a career I had spent a decade building. We exchanged a lot of texts afterward. My dad’s position is:

We argue frequently.
He feels I don’t respect him.
He thinks mixing father/daughter and employer/employee roles doesn’t work.
He admits he gets stressed and sometimes takes it out on me.
He says he still wants a relationship as my father, just not as my boss.
My position is:
He created an emergency that wasn’t actually an emergency.
No employee should be expected to be available at all hours without boundaries.
He overreacted instead of having a conversation.
He made me leave a stable job and then pulled the rug out from under me.
He struggles to communicate respectfully and threatens people’s jobs when he’s upset.
One thing that stood out was that he eventually admitted he gets stressed and takes it out on me. He also said he talks to his employees the same way.
At the same time, I know we both contributed to the arguments. I was angry and told him that everybody says he doesn’t know how to talk to people and that his ego prevents him from admitting when he’s wrong.

via Getty Images

This isn't a great idea for developing professionalism and keeping it cool. It certainly wasn't, between this father and daughter. Sometimes it's better to keep your work life and your family life separate. It can be hard to come to that conclusion, though, especially when you left a stable career to make that leap. It's hard to find a stable career in today's economy, and the woman in this story left one to work for her father. But what she thought would be a nice switch-up turned out to be a huge mistake. She resented her father for setting her up for that and had a lot to say about it. Keep scrolling to read all the details.

So my question is:
Who is more in the wrong here? Am I unfairly blaming my dad for a decision that I ultimately chose to make, or is it reasonable for me to feel betrayed after leaving a stable career to help him and then being dismissed over what seems like a single disagreement?

-u/tortillawbudder

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