‘She makes me feel like a fraternity pledge’: Bossy coworker treats temp lab tech like a personal assistant, demanding non-work-related chores and favors

Some offices churn out future Nobel winners. Others just invent new ways to haze temps for sport, and a twenty-two-year-old lab tech gets to live the dream as a not-quite-pledge to a bossy twenty-four-year-old teammate who treats department chores like personalized initiation rituals. The workspace promises low formality, equal parts teasing and test tubes, and the kind of humor that hints at solidarity until it becomes a game of who-makes-whom-fetch-the-cake.

The lab etiquette this young temp was expecting is one that's supposed to keep things light, especially when there's no customer in sight, but the line between inside joke and unpaid assistant is always sharper for the person fetching crumbs. When job security hinges on likability, the rookie is supposed to laugh off "why are you always sitting" and pitch in with extra scrubbing, even if all the actual learning gets swapped for cleaning experiments and off-brand errands. The campaign escalates when a chair gets physically relocated, not maliciously, just a quirky bit, at least until everyone else starts whispering about boss complaints and a team lead quietly takes notice.

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management boss workplace-stories hr manager bosses work PTO managers supervisor workplace Horrible Bosses work-life balance
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