Manager interrupts with a message every time employee is on a call: 'It took me a while to realize it was intentional'

Constant interruptions are just as hostile as icing someone out.

Nobody likes to be interrupted. It's one of the more frustrating things about modern life. We are constantly being interrupted- by notifications, by ads, by news. There is so much going on all the time that it's easy to feel constantly inundated. It makes it difficult to do deep work. It's not often that you get to focus on something 100% with no distractions unless you set yourself up that way, which is hard to do. You have to turn off all your devices and completely unplug. When we're at work, we're not usually allowed to do that. Most jobs require some level of on-call. You're expected to respond to messages in a timely manner, and you have to be available to take on new tasks. This means that you can never fully, two-feet-in immerse yourself in a particular task. Especially if your manager doesn't respect your boundaries.

There are lots of ways that micromanagers try to exert control over their employees. They want to monitor every task down to the degree so they can have their fingerprints on it. They want to constantly check in with you about your work, so it really becomes their work too. They don't want you to succeed on your own because that would mean you didn't need them. Nobody wants to work with a micromanager, but they keep popping up no matter what we do.

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via Vitaly Gariev

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A woman looks frustrated typing on her computer at work
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Why would a manager intentionally contact you only when you're on a call?

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Commenters speculated about what might be going on here.

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$Zestyclose_Welder864 Original Poster's Reply Control for what though? I do my work and keep my head down. Work is a small fraction of my life. I would do this but she knows my calendar, so she knows I'm on a call with my coworker (her other direct report)$

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via Vitaly Gariev

_{Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}
An employee at her desk checks her phone while on a video meeting
The employee in this story was dealing with their own micromanager when they realized that something that was once a usual annoyance was actually an intentional strategy. Every time they took a call with another coworker, their manager interrupted it. Even if it was with an innocuous message, they realized that there was a bigger method of control going on. They were tired of having no privacy, and they wondered where this behavior might be coming from. They weren't sure if they could quell it themselves or if they needed to rope in outside help. Scroll on to get all the details of the story and see what you think about it.
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