Some people can be great humans, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re good at their job.

Imagine leaving your role as a manger due to stress, but then the manager who replaces you and is now your boss makes your life even more stressful.

This woman shares how a new manager took over and made her life miserable.

Let’s see how she handled it.

I’m not allowed to leave early? Okay, I won’t.

Our store had been going through major renovations, official reopening, the works.

There was a new department manager after I’d stepped down from that position, from too much stress and a lack of support from upper management.

This is where it gets bad…

A little about the new manager, she was a nice enough lady, but perhaps more ill-suited to the position than I had been.

I was helping her learn the ropes of how our department worked. All fine except for a major inability to self-solve, which led me to turning my phone off outside of my working hours.

She’d call me constantly in a panic with minor questions that plenty of other people in-store could have answered.

The store manager was an all-stick-and-no-carrot kind of person, who treated every question and issue as an inconvenience.

Things got really tricky!

She was a nightmare to work for even if she liked you, many good people quit when she took over our store. Myself included, after about 6 months. I’d worked for that company for 10 years.

There was one particular day, where we were already going to be short on staff and it was a busy shopping day (Thursday – pension day).

I needed to leave by a certain time in the afternoon (lets say 3pm) for an important doctors appointment. I’d given plenty of notice but the day before I was told I couldn’t go.

UH OH!

It was too late to reschedule without being charged the entire appointment fee.

Cue whining from DM: But I neeeeeeed you, it’s so busy and I don’t have enough cover! What’s this appointment for anyway?!

Me: It’s an important doctors appointment. I’m not telling you any more because last time I shared with you, the whole store knew my personal business.

DM: But what am I supposed to do?!

Me: I don’t know, you’re the manager.

That’s INSANE!

Cue later in the day, I’m summoned into the store managers office.

I’m informed in no uncertain terms, that I am not allowed to leave early on this day, because the department is short staffed and they need me.

Being a meek little thing I bend to my store managers will. I say “Okay” and shuffle off with my head down.

Now, I’m understandably upset, my fragile mental state is in tatters. I feel that this is all really unfair and somehow wrong, so I call the only resource I have: The union.

She was not expecting that!

I’m crying and explain the situation to the kind lady on the phone.

Now because there was never any paperwork submitted for leaving early (normally rearranging shifts etc was done verbally then updated in the roster), there wasn’t anything she could do in an official capacity.

But then she threw me a lifeline.

“You’re going to the doctor anyway, right? You’re within your rights to take a sick day, get your doctor to write you a note. They can’t force you to come in, you can’t get in trouble for it, and they will have to pay you for it.”

Things finally got better!

So that’s what I did. I did as I was told – I didn’t leave early.

I called in sick and just didn’t show up at all. Instead of losing 1-2 hours of staffed hours, they lost a whole day for being unreasonable bullies.

The next day I heard all about how the department was chaos.

I felt bad but it also felt good to set a boundary with these people that were taking advantage of my good nature.

GEEZ! That’s so DRAMATIC!

Why couldn’t the new manager just manage things on their own?

Let’s find out what the Reddit community has to say about this one.

This user shares how working in retail can be really difficult.

This user has an important question for the business?

This user wonders if this co-workers think of them the same way!

This user wants unions to prevail again.

This user is jealous that she is part of a union.

Employees should always be allowed to go to important doctor’s appointments.

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.