Going to HR is something most employees use as a last resort.

This employee finally reached that point after spending weeks dealing with a coworker who constantly criticized her and made every shift more stressful than the last.

Even though everyone else in the office seemed happy with her performance, this one coworker kept complaining to management and eventually pushed her to report the behavior to HR herself.

She expected someone to take her concerns seriously.

But, in a move she never saw coming, HR actually defended the coworker with an excuse about being pregnant.

Two days later, the employee walked into work only to learn she no longer had a job.

Read on to see how it all played out.

Weirdest way to fire someone

I have a pretty frustrating story about how I ended up getting let go in the most bizarre way ever after being bullied at my job.

I was working as a part-time office manager. I was doing an alright job, receiving fantastic feedback from office visitors and keeping the office supplies well stocked. My only downfalls were the office events that I stupidly **volunteered** to help out with (not organize myself). Kids, don’t do this.

I was managing a small office with most of the sales team being a really competitive bunch, workaholics to the bone. Nice people, but they worked their butts off.

It all started after she upset Laura.

One person in particular, let’s call her Laura, was very clearly a perfectionist. She was a young, first-time manager with a small team of very young, passionate, hard-working people.

For whatever reason, she was ticked off about how I handled the office events. I think I may have put her in a bad situation with clients because I mishandled a presentation. I’ll never know. I messed up, and I apologized for it. The feedback from the event was still positive, so I didn’t think it was too serious. Lesson learned.

After those mishaps, she made it her daily mission to micromanage me.

She literally acted as if she were my manager, asking me about my work at least three times a day. Then she went and complained to my actual manager about what a bad job I was doing. My manager would ask the rest of the office for feedback and receive positive reviews about me from everyone except Laura.

Then, HR witnessed the behavior.

This continued for two weeks before I started realizing that my performance was dropping drastically. I was making stupid mistakes all over the place that I’d never made before, and I was so stressed out by her that I had to take breaks in the bathroom just to cry it out.

She triggered an anxiety I didn’t even know I had. Three months later, I started therapy for the first time in my life.

One day, she shouted at me in the kitchen area in front of our HR representative. She said, “Look, I will not be nice anymore. You know you’re doing a terrible job. You have been for months.”

I was stunned. I couldn’t reply with anything. I was at my limit. I was confused and didn’t know how I’d let myself get this way or how I’d let it affect me so much that it was impacting my job and performance.

Frustrated, she scheduled a private meeting with HR.

After some deliberation and a lot of courage, the following week I requested a one-on-one meeting with HR and complained about Laura’s behavior.

I provided messages and emails she had been sending me, asking me to do tasks that were outside my job description, following up on them within literally minutes, and overall being extremely aggressive and disrespectful.

What HR proceeded to tell me was far beyond anything I could have imagined.

In my head, this was going to go one of two ways: either they would acknowledge it and do something about it, or they wouldn’t do anything at all.

She did not see this coming.

What happened instead was they said, “I see. That’s really unfortunate. But Laura is under a lot of stress right now. Did you know she’s pregnant?”

… Once again, I was left speechless. All I could utter after what felt like an eternity of silence was, “Being pregnant doesn’t give you the right to be mean to people.”

Then it was their turn to be silent, so I just left the room.

Literally two days later, my manager showed up that morning and asked me to hand in my laptop without using it and leave. Yes, she “fired” me. On paper, I was let go because my contract had ended. I still feel so weak when I think back on the situation. I wish I could’ve handled it differently.

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Wow! That’s a pretty crappy response to that problem.

Let’s check out what the readers over at Reddit think about what happened.

This would be really crazy.

So true!

That’s definitely not cool.

What a great comparison.

It really seems like she did everything in her power to fix this situation.

Unfortunately, that just goes to show that some jobs simply aren’t meant to be. No matter how hard someone tries, they can’t fix a workplace that doesn’t want to change.

The good news is that usually means she just hasn’t found where she belongs yet.

Hopefully, this puts her one step closer to finding a job where people treat her with the respect she deserves.