Imagine going to college to study for your future career. If you needed a working professional in your career field to sign off on your work, what would you do if that supervisor took way too long getting around to signing things, resulting in you not being able to get nearly as much work done as you should have?

In this story, one woman going to school to become a veterinary nurse is in that exact situation. It got to the point where she thought she was doing everyone a favor by finding a loophole to avoid waiting around for the supervisor’s signature, but that just got her in more trouble.

Now, she’s doesn’t want to work with this supervisor anymore, but she isn’t sure if she’s being too harsh.

Let’s read the whole story to decide.

AITA for refusing to work with my supervisor any more

I (30f) am a student veterinary nurse in my second year of college.

Part of the course is creating an eportfolio of evidence that I’m competent in various veterinary nursing tasks, and these need to be signed off by my clinical supervisor (38f) who is also the head nurse of our practice. We’ll call her Lily.

For context, I was supposed to have 50% of my eportfolio done by the end of my first year. I ended up on 15% because of the delays that Lily caused.

She needed to complete online training in order to open tasks for me, and she took months to do so. Then, I waited even longer for her to start opening tasks, and even longer to start tutorials with me.

It got worse.

I recently uploaded a document that I pasted her signature onto (it’s needed for her to approve all the evidence of my competency) because she was away on holiday.

She assesses and approves any section before it’s added to my eportfolio so I thought this would save time.

When I got back, Lily told me that what I’d done was fraud and she had reported me to the college. An investigation has now been opened.

I stormed out, and now I refuse to work directly with her as my clinical coach. Someone at the college can act as an intermediary while I find another nurse willing to help me.

She wasn’t trying to do anything wrong.

I didn’t know that adding her signature was fraud – I literally sent it to her for approval.

If I was trying to pull a fast one then I would understand the accusation, like if I’d send it directly to the college. But I thought it would save time – she wouldn’t have to print it out, sign it then rescan it.

She didn’t even talk to me about it. She just reported me straight to the college and our HR and now I’m scared I’ll be kicked off the course.

She’s not sure what to do.

I don’t know if I’m being too harsh in refusing to work with her on my college work. She is very busy as the practice manager, and throughout the year I haven’t been as communicative as I should have been in expressing my concerns.

But I’m tired of giving her chances – she has repeatedly let me down and I feel unsupported, anxious and depressed all the time. Every tutorial leaves me feeling hopeless as she nitpicks and makes me redo so much, and she wastes so much time being unorganised.

People tell me that I’m being difficult and have an attitude, and I just don’t know objectively whether I’m in the right here or not.

AITA?

Lily clearly sounds hard to work with. I’d want to work with someone else too.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who took a new dress code policy to a whole new level.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person thinks she should’ve known better.

Another person thinks she should’ve spoken up sooner.

This person thinks she’ll be kicked out of the program.

But this person thinks the supervisor is the problem.

Well, if she gets kicked out of the program, she won’t have to worry about working with this supervisor again, so there’s that.

She really shouldn’t have forged the signature, but I understand why she did it. It would be extremely frustrating to be relying on someone who clearly doesn’t sign the things she needs to sign in a timely manner.

If she’s given another chance, I definitely think she should request to work with someone else. Clearly they do not work well together.

Regardless, after this I bet she’ll never forge another signature again!