When I Saw The Email

I hold an Associate Degree of Specialized Technology with a major in Digital Arts from Bradley Academy for the Visual Arts, now the Art Institute of York. I spent 18 months looking for a job in my career field. In 2008 I took a job at a small fasteners company in Maryland that my cousin was part owner of. I thought maybe I wouldn't have so many problems or get treated badly because of it. I was wrong.

I started on December 15th, my birthday. I was originally hired part time to take care of their General Service Administration (GSA) contracts after they had to fire the girl that was managing their office because she flipped out on one of the bosses. I was to take care of everything that needed to be done regarding their contract, including uploading pictures of products, fixing prices, etc. Shortly after I was made full time with the role of Office Manager. Though one boss had the nerve to continually call me their secretary in front of clients. I should have known then that it was a bad idea, but I didn't.

Originally it wasn't that bad. Over the course of the nearly three years I worked there I was creating 99.99% of the invoices and estimates, 60% of the ordering, all of the GSA Work, and any other projects they could think of. The whole time I had to hear one boss joke about my weight every couple of weeks. Complaining that their work wasn't getting done fast enough. It’s hard to do the work of three people when it was only me doing it. They never took into consideration that I had three people sending me work to do each day. I couldn't just do all of one persons work and leave the other two’s untouched. Everyone acted as though their work was the most important

I was sick Monday and Tuesday of the week I quit. Lack of health insurance and low pay meant I couldn't just go to a doctor whenever I was sick. That Wednesday I had planned on being back to work. I checked my work email account Tuesday night and Google was saying there was an update that I needed to do through the administration panel. That responsibility fell to me since none of the bosses are really tech savvy After I completed the update I went into each email account to make sure everything was still working. One of the bosses had called me to let me know one of the other bosses was on a rampage about Evernote, not being able to use it, and some other stuff. I was told that it was resolved earlier in the day. However 4 hours after I was told it was resolved I saw an email about it when checking the email update. It’s kind of hard to miss giant letters in the subject bar screaming “EVERNOTE!”. I won’t lie, it got the best of me and I clicked it. Should I have? Really no, but I am glad I did. It was from the boss that was on a rampage to the boss that called me. Basically it said that they were going to finish out the week and then get rid of me. So that night I wrote my resignation letter. The next morning I left home at 6:30 am to go to the office and remove any of my stuff. I was at the office by 7 and out by 8:20 with everything and the computer dealt with. The last thing I did after I had my truck loaded was press send on the email to them. The subject line was simple, it just said “I QUIT!” My resignation letter is below. (I really wanted to stay nice in the email, and I never intended to quit a job without at least two weeks notice.)

I have been working for this company for almost three years. The whole time being treated like absolute shit. I've had to hear you make rude comments about my weight. I don’t need you to tell me I need to lose weight. Comments like “they have rain suits up to 5x! Do you need one?” and “you need to eat some vegetables”. You have no clue about my eating habits. You assume that because I’m overweight I eat all the time and never eat anything healthy. I have been working to loose weight. Commenting on my weight is call discrimination.

My writing skills have been mocked because I typed something exactly as someone told me to. Word for word. I actually have great writing skills. I know the difference between to, too, and two. The difference between your and you’re. I also know the differences between their, they’re, and there. I make sure that everything I write is spelled correctly and grammatically correct before I send it. I write out whole words and sentences in text messages instead of shortening words like you to “u” and are to “r”. I write more in a month than you do in an entire year.

You have treated me like I was some kind of inept person who couldn't do anything. Sorry that I sometimes would forget about the mail because one of you call me and tell me to do something right away. Everyone gets sidetracked sometimes, it’s human nature. I've been constantly called a secretary by people. If I was a secretary I would have quit 2 years ago due to the amount of work. A secretaries job is to answer the phone, take notes, and get coffee. Constantly forcing me to redo invoices because someone forgot shipping, didn't markup the cost enough, forgot a item, or didn't take 2 seconds to write the word tax on the paperwork for me to do sales tax.

Dealing with the clusterfuck that you've made of your GSA schedule. Adding any item you've started to sell often. Great idea, add more items to your schedule when 98% of your current items are not selling. The goal of GSA Advantage is to sell items to the government by giving them either the same prices as your current customers or a discount. Instead you chose to charge ridiculous prices that are above anything your charge your regular clients. Ten times the cost of the item is completely gouging the client. But you fuck over all of your clients with high prices so what else is new? You make up random shipping cost without having invoices or by adding $15 to every order. There is no reason shipping on a $23 order should be $30.

Not one piece of office equipment has ever worked the way it needed to. There was always something that had issues. A printer that doesn't work, a laptop that constantly has issues, no backup plan until it was too late and we had lost everything on the computer. You never seemed to be able to afford anything. Laptops are not meant to be used as primary work computers.

I can’t count the times I had a question about a order and couldn't get a hold of the person who sent it because she decided not to work that day because of something like a hangover. I've never called out of work because I was hungover. Probably because I’m smart enough not to drink on a Sunday knowing I had work the next day.

Just for the record $10 an hour isn't great pay for someone who had to do all the work you gave me. You always said you wish you could have paid me more. God forbid you each give up $20 a week to let me scrape by with an extra $40 a week after taxes. I doubt you’ll find someone else that will work for $10 a hour for the amount of work they will have to do.

Thanks for never letting me have my entire lunch hour that I was told when I started that I had to take each day. I guess maybe it was your way of trying to help me lose weight by not having the time to eat as much. I really truly appreciate it.

It’s funny that you buy products from Home Depot, Lowes, and Office Depot for clients because instead of telling them you can’t get it for them you stupidly tell them you can get them anything they want. You made a remark last year about Fastenal and their high prices to a client over drinks after work and laughed about it. It’s funny when the truth is you buy some items from Fastenal and mark them up for the same client. Eventually the clients will figure it out.

Selling items like camera’s and marking them as tools on the invoice kind of falls outside of your scope of work. A camera is a not something you buy from a tool distributor. Instead you told the client you could get them for them and bought them from Best buy.

I’m wondering what the legality is of hitting someone’s credit card and not placing the order or giving me the breakdown to the invoice for a week is? I doubt it’s a legal practice. That’s why you have to keep changing invoices and adding items that the client never actually gets because you fucked up when you made up a random number and told me to hit the credit card for.

You act like it’s my fault that you can’t purchase anything from your vendors. It’s not my fault it’s your own. Letting clients have Net 30 terms and then not paying for 60 to 90 days and letting them continue to have those terms. Maybe you should stop selling them products. Racking up $25,000 of debt with one vendor is a pretty stupid business move. The idea is to payoff your vendors as you get paid by the clients for the items. The money coming in from each order should be paying off the invoices for those orders. Not for paying off other invoices from people who aren't paying their invoices on time.

You have so many vendors you can’t keep them straight. Half of the vendors on the list I was given when I started are only used once a year max. Some don’t even get used.

You might be a million dollar company this year but you will never have a million dollars in profit in a year. Good luck with your business I’m sure it won’t be around for much longer. Eventually you will learn that the customer comes first, not your wallets.

I was going to do the polite and professional thing and give notice today. I wasn't going to give the normal 2 weeks notice. I was actually going to give a months notice so that you would have time to find someone to replace me and get them trained before I left. But that’s changed.

Don’t worry I won’t be asking for a reference. I already have another job setup, I start Monday.

So that’s where I stood. I did eventually receive an apology from the one boss who was causing a lot of the problems but it was forced by the other two bosses and it wasn't sincere. They also tried to get me to stay by raising my pay to $15 a hour. While it would have been nice to make an additional $200 a week it just wasn't worth it. I knew it wouldn't get any better.

While my pay isn't as constant now because I started my own business, I am a lot less stressed and happier. So it was a good choice in the end.