Some places feel like a dream to work in, while others are a complete nightmare.

And a lot of that is down to the people you work around – from your colleagues to your manager, and even the people above them, people can really make or break a workplace.

But with a friendly team and a positive, supportive manager, anything can feel possible.

Unfortunately for the guy in this story though, the opposite was true. He wasn’t being supported by his manager, and his colleagues were basically non-existent.

Read on to find out how this situation finally blew up.

I am a bad employee? Ok

For about 8 months I worked at one location of an office supply chain store.

My position was a tech sales supervisor: essentially, when someone came in for a computer, printer, label maker, etc. (pretty much everything electronic that the store sells) I was there to help them and answer questions.

Whilst helping them, we had to ask a series of questions to try to upsell other things in the store, as well as our in-store warranties.

The idea was to convince the customer to buy more things, so essentially the company could make a bigger profit off of each customer.

And this employee regularly found himself in the direct eye line of his boss.

My direct manager was overseeing the sales of the entire store and, since my department was where the big ticket items were, he worked more extensively with me and my coworkers in that department than most others.

And since I was the supervisor of that department, that meant he would hound me the most often.

Now I admit that I quickly realized I didn’t have a strong sales skill, which is one of the factors that led to my eventual decision to leave – but how he treated me was also a strong reason too.

He and I had very different personalities that conflicted. Or rather he was too conflicting in and of himself and he didn’t realize it.

Read on to find out more about the things they butted heads over.

I could count on two hands how often he would confide in me that he doesn’t know why customers would turn him down when he tried to upsell to them, why they would only buy the things that they came in for and nothing else.

Then in the next breath, ten minutes later when I would talk with a customer, he’d complain that I’m not succeeding at that very same thing he was ranting about him struggling with just moments before.

He would list five to ten things for me to get done each day.

I’d start working on them, but then later he would find me and complain that I was not doing what I should be doing and part of my job is severely lacking – despite the fact I was doing what he told me to do that morning.

This frustrating workplace just kept getting worse and worse.

They seemed to limit the number of employees most of the time, so during the week only one person was on each department or station at any given time. That would lead to me missing sales opportunities because I was with one customer already and another would walk in and just grab something in my department and go buy it.

Every other time this would happen, my manager would complain that I missed another opportunity, and even when I explained to him why that didn’t seem to matter to his small brain. Not being able to clone myself and be in two places at once is apparently a flaw that can be held against me.

One day I walked into work and realized that the day before my sales manager had made a huge sale with a computer. A couple of software items needed to be installed, which were in progress – it was hooked up from the day before.

Normally with certain items being installed, we work with a third party IT company that works on the computer remotely to set things up. On this particular computer though, there was some issue with one of the software pieces that the customer bought, and the IT department was having a hard time in setting it up.

And despite the fact the employee had little to do with it until this point, this ended up backfiring on him.

It ended up taking all day and the customer eventually got tired of waiting and just returned everything. That of course made my sales manager mad when I told him – and of course within a week I got my first official write up.

With the write up, it was with my sales manager and the store manager. During the write up conversation my sales manager brought up all the examples as mentioned earlier as to why the write up was happening.

He said that my sales ability was severely lacking when it came up to the in-store warranties, as well as upselling other things. He brought up me missing opportunities with customers I didn’t talk to at all, and said that I didn’t get things done that needed to be done.

In this whole time I was contemplating my response when he was outlining why I was the subject of this disciplinary meeting – honestly, I was thinking that this could be a result of what happened the week before.

Let’s see how the employee responded to this disciplinary process.

After he was finished, I began asking my own questions. The first response being that “those are good points. However you did mention my sales ability. How is it that you’re using that as one of the reasons, when you yourself have told me that even you’re struggling to get the customers you’ve talked to to bite on and buy more than what they came in for?”

He acted taken aback for a moment before asking what I meant. I retorted with, “oh you don’t remember the times in which you told me yourself you don’t know why customers aren’t buying things from you? The person who’s twice my age and has been here for 20 years?”

He became a bit frustrated at my smart *** remark and said, “this meeting isn’t about me at all, let’s stay focused here.” As he goes off about the other points he made as well, trying to get off that subject quickly.

During this time the store manager had yet to say anything.

But he didn’t stop there.

After he was done speaking, I brought up another point he made: “You say I missed opportunities with customers in when I didn’t speak to them. The only reason as to why I would do that is because I would be talking to another customer that came in first. I’m not about to ditch one customer just to start chatting up another.”

“I would think that doesn’t look professional on my part. We severely need more than just one person in my department at any given moment if that’s something that corporate is upset about. And that would even help with me not getting certain things done as well.”

Getting increasingly flustered, he cut me off there and stated, “it’s not in the budget at this time to increase other people’s hours. With you being the only full time employee in your department, it’s expected that you are the one that has to work, and it’s on your shoulders to keep your department in good shape and apparently you’re not able to. Maybe this isn’t the best job for you if you can’t keep up.”

Read on to find out how this unfair disciplinary concluded.

The managers pressured me to signing their write up form to acknowledge that we all went over this. After that, I was fuming mad and took my first fifteen minute break for the day to calm myself down.

Knowing that nothing would change, fighting this would be a moot point. After about a month’s time of looking, I found another job which was going to start me the following week.

That next day I walked in, went up to the sales manager and handed him my company provided t-shirts and quit. He acted all shocked stating,“but we need you! Your shift starts in ten minutes!”

I sighed and stared at him saying “you know what, I thought about what you said and you were right. I’m not up for this job.” Then I turned away and left.

Recently, he got a bittersweet surprise when he visited the store.

This was February of 2020 when this happened.

I went to that store recently just out of curiosity and to buy some ink for my printer, and there were not even five customers in the store including myself. There didn’t even seem to be anyone working on my old department.

Guess they didn’t replace me either.

I talked to one of my ex coworkers, and she said that the company had to resort to selling video games and consoles to keep up with them losing money. I couldn’t help but laugh.

Sometimes the decisions that managers make are laughable.

If you see your employee struggling to speak with all the customers, or struggling to manage the size of their workload, the answer isn’t to discipline them, it’s to put support in place.

Ideally, to increase staffing.

Clearly this manager didn’t think that way and ended up without any employees in that department as a result.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit thought about this.

This person thought he was better out of this workplace.

While others explained how he could have pointed out just how bad his manager was.

And this Redditor gave some helpful advice.

This store sounds like a really toxic environment, it’s good that he was able to leave.

The audacity of the manager to see he’s struggling and instead of stepping in to help him out, and writing him up instead, is astonishing.

He has all the hallmarks of a bad manager.

No wonder the employee couldn’t get out of there soon enough!

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.