On February 17, 2021, I sat in a Skype meeting with my manager, HR, and the department manager and listened to the one-sided discussion about my ‘failure’ to ‘improve my performance’ with my PIP. They said that it was my last day. My only response was, “Ok, when do you want me to turn in my equipment?”
The silence was deafening.
I knew my manager, let’s call her Karen, was expecting me to retaliate to her plan to get me fired. Well, Karen, patience is a virtue. I hope you read this on a day when you’re hoping for something good to happen and you find my article.
Seven months before that meeting was scheduled, I already had a deep feeling that I was going to be fired after my initial get to know each other one-on-one meeting with Karen.
After the usual small talk, I found the red flag when she asked me what I do outside of work. I told her that I was a year into my Master’s Program and I was planning on graduating the following Summer. She immediately asked, “How does that work? You’re working a full-time job and doing your Master’s Program full-time? How are you managing your time?”
At first, I thought those were reasonable questions because what got her through her day was telling everyone that she’s stressed but loves the opportunity and her life outside of work was whatever her husband was doing. Karen didn’t want to understand how fucking good I was at time-management and being efficient at the same time.
After I was diagnosed with ADHD, I realized how my brain was working. That was when I got my shit together, got on medication to manage it, and I became a pro at block scheduling.
My response to her question was that I used block scheduling to manage my time for studying and work. I reassured her that I don’t study during work hours because I like to focus on one thing at time. I told her that I like opportunities to learn more and that I will more than likely take on those opportunities.
She appreciated my answer, until about a month later, when it came down to the twins. I’m going to call them Regina 1 and Regina 2 because they had the same name.
The Backstory
Regina 1(R1) was brought onto the team about 1–2 years prior to my employment, as an intern. Her story is that she dated one of the employees and everyone felt bad for her after they broke up. She was a woman scorned every time she did her catwalk to her desk in the morning, with a coffee, and sometimes she was late because she was getting a coffee for herself. That was obviously overlooked due to her publicly humiliating break-up with a coworker. She was the conductor of the office gossip. Everyone was terrified to cross her. Which is why she is rightfully dubbed Regina for my side of the story.
Regina 2 was hired a short time after Regina 1 became a full-time employee. The team thought it was hilariously cute that they had the same name and called them “The Regina’s” or Regina 1 and Regina 2, if they were talking to vendors or coworkers.
I don’t have much to say about Regina 2 because we didn’t talk much.
I was hired November 4, 2019. About a month into my new job, I noticed that many of my new coworkers were very comfortable taking personal calls at their desk during working hours. Especially when my original manager, let’s call her Lisa, made an OBGYN appointment and said ‘pap smear’ at her desk.
I was surprised because I wasn’t expecting the environment to be that chill. This was when I decided to try to adapt to the company culture. It was towards the end of the workday and the managers were in a meeting and I was sitting at my desk with literally nothing to do because they were still transitioning all the work from my coworker to me.
To keep myself busy, I started looking at textbook prices for my one of my classes that I needed to buy. I quietly called my mom at my desk, and talked to her about textbook costs and asked if she could help me cover some of the cost and I can pay her back after I get my first paycheck. That’s when I get a Skype notification on my screen from R1.
It said something along the lines of, “OMG I can’t believe she’s taking a personal call at her desk and she’s always on her phone.”
I read the message and looked over my cubicle to make eye-contact with her because I wanted to tell her to repeat what she wrote out loud by saying it to my face. That was when I got something even better.
I witnessed the moment R1 realized that she sent it to me instead of Regina 2. Her eye’s got big, her face red, and she smirked because she lacked the emotional intelligence to understand shame and embarrassment. She composed herself and I was itching to stand up to her. I wanted to see her have a reaction to me standing up for myself. I messaged back:
“Gossip Gossip Gossip, leave me out of it. Everyone uses their phones around here. I’m just following your lead.”
She hated that.
I listened to her start to type so fast I thought one of her nails was going to pop off. Her face turned red again and she attempted to appear calm. I looked to my screen to see if she was replying to me but she wasn’t.
I fucking loved watching it. R1 was not used to someone standing up to her.
When the managers came back, she met with Lisa, her manager, Frank, and Regina 2, and they went into a room down the hall. I knew that meeting was about me because when they all came back, nobody said a word to me, no eye-contact, not even a ‘have a great night’ when they left for the day.
This was my FIRST month working there and R1 is trying to act like she’s an elite employee.
I called my mom back on my drive home and her advice was, “You shouldn’t have said anything. Now they’re going to talk more.” I agreed, and I knew her advice was good. On the flip side, my mom also knows that I don’t like a bully, or someone who has the same job title as me and wants to act bigger than they are towards me.
Things started to change over the next few weeks. My invites to team lunch stopped. My coworkers only talked to me when they needed to train me on something, which they barely did, and they intentionally isolated me.
Then our team’s favorite manager/director, Sarah, came back from maternity leave. At first, I was nervous about meeting her because we shared a cubicle space. Eventually I felt silly for being nervous because she was always asking me what I had been trained on, learned my boundaries, and we laughed a lot. One day she saw me sitting at my desk eating lunch while everyone was out at a team lunch. She asked me about how I was doing and I kind of mentioned/confirmed with her that nobody keeps me in the loop or invites me to anything. She immediately took note of that and told me that was going to change.
At this point, I was undertrained, overwhelmed, and started to consider looking for a new job. That was when Sarah tested me.
A few days went by and she messaged only me over Skype about Lisa. It was very private information, and I knew it wasn’t something that I was meant to share. I think the reason she told me was because Lisa had to leave early and I’m pretty sure she saw this as a calculated risk to see if the team ignoring me was reasonable or unreasonable.
When I received the message, I sent a sympathetic message back and continued working.
My coworkers returned to their desk and eventually asked me about Lisa. I told them she had to leave early. They asked me why and I told them I didn’t know and that was when R1 did her investigating. Within 5 minutes, the entire team knew why Lisa went home early because R1 messaged everyone, including me, about why Lisa went home. I played it cool while I read her message and stared at her previous message about me being on my phone all the time.
Almost immediately after the message was sent out, Sarah came back to her desk and made eye-contact with me. She sent me the clearest message I have ever received telepathically. At that point, I needed an advocate or at the very least a cheerleader. Being isolated by the team destroyed my confidence. I was second guessing myself about what I was being trained on and I wanted to quit. After that trust fall, she was adamant about including me in everything.
Sarah became my #1 supporter and that meant so much to me, especially because she wasn’t just being nice, she was empathetic and understanding.
I grew so fast with her. I began feeling confident about myself and my job again.
I felt like I deserved the opportunities she gave me. Whenever I made a mistake, she kindly explained everything to me. She knew that I wanted to learn more and took advantage of my relentless ambition by inviting me to meetings with the directors. These are the meetings that people with my job did not attend. She brought me into those meetings, introduced me to the directors, and volunteered me for projects. I finally felt seen, and I finally felt like I was capable. That was when I got on The Twin’s radar again.
What I have come to understand about mean girls, is that they are the most insecure people, and they give themselves the opportunity to be mean for a quick confidence boost. As a sidenote, I will always be friends with people who are genuine, and I will be nice to the people who are not.
Sarah made a point for The Twins and my coworkers to come to me to get any information about projects. She even gave me an independent side-project to work on, but that fell through because I didn’t have the respect I needed from the team to get any help with it. She also noted that, but never used it against me. Sarah told me to only tell them what she thought they needed to know, and I would relay the information to them exactly how she said it to me. They hated that. They hated that feeling of being left in the dark and the fact that Sarah was setting a foundation for a more equal work relationship that R1 tainted.
I worked really hard to solidify the foundation that Sarah was building by being nice to the team who bullied me, but never forgetting how they treated me. The Twins and the team had to eat crow and I enjoyed that.
Fast forward to March 17, 2020, that was the day we had to sign our work from home paperwork and pack up our desks. At the beginning, my productivity didn’t slow down while I was working from home. I was less stressed and lost 50 pounds by the beginning of 2021 and I was still in my Master’s Program at that time.
However, by the end of summer 2020, our team decided that we needed a sympathy hire: Karen.
The Downfall
Karen used to work at the corporate office of a large retailer that permanently closed their doors for all locations in 2020.
She was an ex-coworker and friends with Lisa. At this point, our company was restructuring without layoffs. R1 got her long-awaited promotion and took over the managerial position that Sarah once had, but she kept her director position. Lisa began transitioning to another department and Karen was hired to be my new manager.
During the transition, Karen was trained onto the team by R1, while R1 still held her previous position (the same one I had) and transitioning into her new role. She was getting promoted and the girl was a bitch, but she did the work. I was happy for her, but she’s still a fucking bitch.
Karen expected me to work at the same pace as R1 because she had no idea what she was doing. However, I found out that R1 did all of Karen’s work for her instead of teaching her how to do it.
I want to make this very clear: I was finally starting to be properly trained when Sarah came back to the office. Within my first 90 days, I had somewhat of a flow. I was still learning new processes and building new relationships with different departments and vendors. I was technically in the office for about 5 months and about 1–2 months of that was me being bullied by my coworkers.
My manager, Lisa, had a very calm and easy flow about her and the work wasn’t difficult to understand. For example, there was one day in the office I learned about the manager’s receiving a trophy for the week if they could estimate their sales goals close enough to actual sales.
Lisa trained me on how to calculate the numbers, which was the manager’s job, but whatever I was eager. And for the next couple weeks, I was doing the estimations, and we won that trophy. After we proudly displayed the trophy on top of our cubicle, Lisa told me that it had been a long time since she won that trophy, and everyone was so happy and impressed.
Now back to the wet blanket.
There was absolutely nothing you could do to make me explain my shortcomings to Karen when I started to not meet her unreasonable expectations of doing her work for her. Karen began to think I was incompetent because I wasn’t doing work at the same pace as R1.
R1 had something to prove, and I was chilling, taking the small wins when I got them. I wasn’t lazy, my previous manager was laid-back, and so was I.
Within that first month of working under Karen and having to listen to her call me her assistant to vendors that I had already developed a relationship with, she decided to set up a meeting with Lisa and I to put me on a Personal Improvement Plan (PIP).
During that meeting, Karen didn’t turn her camera on, and muted herself. She listened in because she had work to do but needed to be there. No, you were embarrassed and unsure by your decision and wanted to record the meeting without showing your face and you wanted to judge my reaction without me seeing yours. Karen didn’t even stay for the entire meeting that she obviously set up. The PIP meeting blindsided me. I tried to listen to Lisa explain what was happening, but I disassociated and could only hear bits and pieces.
One day, Karen asked me to retrieve something out of her work file because she couldn’t find it. I went into her folder after reenacting that Zoolander scene in my head, and I found the file she was looking for and emailed it to her. But something told me to keep looking, so I did, and I found an excel spreadsheet titled something like ‘notes’ and I opened it.
What I found in these notes were comments from R1, R2, Lisa, and another random manager about me. I took a picture of the file on my phone and I debated whether or not I should send it to Karen. The next day, I emailed the notes to her with the subject line: I found this.
A PIP meeting was scheduled almost immediately after because it’s obviously my fault for showing her what I found in a public work folder that everyone can access. Karen used these notes to beef up her PIP she placed on me.
The cycle that I thought had ended began again.
Within those 90 days of my PIP, I was never told that I was improving. Karen’s micromanaging became too overwhelming for me. I started to take my PTO while I was working from home. I would run errands during the day to take a break because I could feel myself mentally checking out throughout the day. I was waking up in the middle of the night because I had panic-attacks from thinking that I missed my alarm for work and I thought Karen was calling me (because she would call me exactly at 8am just to make sure that I was clocked in, and I would be).
At one point during the PIP period, I stopped showing that I was available on Skype and never changed it back because she would constantly message me and call me throughout the day wanting updates, or for me to verbally confirm that I received an email she just sent.
She continued to add her workload onto my workload and I eventually took over a huge project that she had no idea how to do and that was my last attempt to prove my worth. I didn’t know that I was being quietly fired by a woman who had to prove that she’s a hard-ass and had unreasonable expectations that her assistant has to meet or they’re fired.
Karen didn’t know what the fuck she was doing, and she told me that every single day on every single meeting. I stopped comforting her after the PIP. I pulled back at any attempt she made to get to know me on a personal level because I didn’t trust her. When she spoke to me, I would have flashbacks during our meetings of my childhood because she triggered me. She spoke to me in the same way that my dad spoke to me when I was in trouble, but all the time. She was a transactional bully. If I did something for her, she did something for me, no more, no less. When that became too comfortable for her, she decided to give me the job of writing her weekly reports and I used weaponized incompetence to get out of that because I knew there was no way I would get paid extra to make this woman look good.
I was at my breaking point. I was going to become malicious and start to make her look as bad as she was making me out to be.
I took the high road for the last 3 years.
Another side note, I applied to the company for over a year, not consistently, but I’m sure HR was finally at peace when they could put a face to my resume coming across their desk.
I wanted to get out of working in a liquor store and wine commission sales and have a stable income, a solid career, and I felt like I could excel in this position I held at this company. I told them during the interview, I planned to be with them for the next 5 years and I wasn’t going anywhere.
Karen’s sympathy hire changed everything with her mediocre management skills, I blame her for destroying my confidence that Sarah and Lisa helped me attain.
I want to say that Lisa and the rest of the team were fake fans of Karen and they were fake as fuck to her face and rolled their eyes behind her back whenever she spoke. Karen truly believed that they were all friends. But they had to respect her because she got the sympathy manager position after losing her job at a company that permanently closed during a global pandemic. She worked in the HQ jewelry department if you were wondering.
I have not been able to hold a job since I was fired 3 years ago. It is extremely difficult and I want to say that I experienced some form of workplace trauma in the form of bullying that I am still recovering from.
It wasn’t the normal office gossip, it was indescribably toxic. I know I’m writing this with a callous tone, and I meant for it to sound that way. I am so fucking angry that I got fired from that job because after I got fired, I began unemployment, I dropped out of my Master’s Program until the following Spring semester in 2022. I had to get my GPA back up to continue because I technically failed the classes by dropping out halfway through.
I managed to bring my GPA to where it needed to be, but because of money, I have not able to finish my final semester of my program.
During 2022, I had difficulty finding any job, so I decided to deliver for GrubHub and temp jobs here and there. Then I signed up to receive rental assistance from the state after my unemployment ran out. I did hit one lucky streak by investing in certain stocks during my previous employment, that went to the moon and held me over for a little while. However, once I received the assistance money, my apartment management company refused to take the checks, so I had to get a lawyer, take them to court to get the judge to force them to take the checks until my lease ended in June 2023. Then I got rid of all my belongings and lived out of my car for a couple months with my dog. I moved back home, started working for Instacart, got an apartment with my mom’s help, my car was repossessed, and now I can’t find a job and my lease ends in 1 month from today, March 23, 2024. Unfortunately, I have had to plan to be homeless and live on the street with my dog because there’s bad vibes between my family, who has been paying my rent and never let me forget that they’re doing that for me.
I’m not proud of what I have done to earn any kind of money to maintain my light bill, phone bill, food for me and my dog, and I live on the barest minimum I’ve lived on since living out of my car.
And when I think about my previous employer, all I want to do is send Karen glitter bombs every weekend for the rest of her life and hope that she reads what I wanted to say to her and what I was going through while she micromanaged me to panic attacks.
Being a horrible manager is different than being on the receiving end of horrible management. I thought that the toxicity ended after Sarah came back, but she managed it and basically onboarded me enough to have a working relationship with people who despised me from the beginning for standing up for myself. The little respect that I felt like I earned, with hard work, was completely forgone once Karen was hired. It’s almost daily that I think about everything that I endured while on the receiving end of her poor management. But I continue to hope that I will be hired by a company that is opposite of what I experienced. Fingers crossed I meet the deadline.
