Not appreciating your employees can really bite you in the back.
This employee’s new boss made a huge fuss over an email she sent even though the email was very well supervised. This was the breaking point for the employee.
Find out what she did next!
Boss says I don’t know anything yet so I do the absolute bare minimum.
I started my first, full-time, office job at a corporate America hell hole a week after college.
It was an industry I hadn’t worked in before and I needed to be licensed.
They were great with her at first…
The company that hired me, we’ll call them Smith Inc., paid for my licensing fees, study materials, classes, etc. for me to become licensed. The total cost was about $500.
It was a sweet deal.
They gave me approximately 90 days (paid) to study a textbook and pass an online course. I didn’t have to do any work for the company, simply study and pass the licensing exam.
It was pretty easy and I passed on my first try.
Everything was going pretty well.
My boss, let’s call her Mary, was super excited that I passed and I began training under an associate level coworker who had just been promoted from the position I was in.
The coworker, Jen, was super great and helpful.
She began training me on two simple tasks that I could do, the only rule was if the client had a question specifically about their contract, I would ask Jen or forward it to my team-lead.
There was one particular client question she needed Jen to help her with.
Well, I ended up getting an email from a client about their contract and I video called Jen to ask how to handle.
She walked me through it as I shared my screen with her.
I wrote the email back to the client exactly how she told me and she read the email before sending.
This is where it gets bad!
A month goes by and everything is great. I’m learning and getting more comfortable.
Then I get a really nasty email from Mary.
She CC’s my whole team into the email going on and on about how I cannot answer contract questions and how she’s gone over this with me before (she hadn’t, Jen was the one who told me I can’t answer contract questions).
Both Jen and I try to explain what happened and that Jen was the one who wrote the email, I just typed what Jen said and sent it from my email since the client emailed me and not Jen.
UH OH!
Mary then calls the team up in a video call and goes on about how I don’t know anything and I just started and I really don’t know how this industry works and that answering contract questions is out of my job description.
It went on for about 5 minutes.
I say “Okay.” and get off the call crying.
She decided to get petty.
The next day out of pure pettiness I simply do the absolute bare minimum.
I don’t know anything, right, Mary?
I still complete all my tasks and everything that’s required of me.
Anything more advanced that I would normally try to learn with Jen’s help?
Nope. I just forwarded it to our team lead and said “Sorry, Mary said I can’t do anything outside of my job description!”
She felt the revenge was worthwhile.
Work was much less stressful after I decided to listen to Mary (and what many others told me before) don’t do anything outside of your job description!
Also: Mary later fired me for being a whistleblower when I reported the company to the health authority for violating COVID protocols.
I sleep better at night knowing how much money Mary wasted on training me.
GEEZ! That was a mean boss.
It sounds like doing less work was exactly what her boss wanted.
Let’s find out what The Reddit community thinks about this one.
This user thinks Jen messed up here…
She might want to call a lawyer.
This user shares a great advice for all managers!
This user shares their experience with their boss.
That’s great! This user shares how things are in UK and how losing a job isn’t as easy as getting fired!
A private conversation could’ve easily solved this problem.
If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.