An Intern Refused to Do Kitchen Dishes Outside His Job Description—And Triggered an Unintended Demotion for a Senior Staff Member
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Imagine working at an unpaid internship. If you were busy doing the task you were assigned to do, what would you do if an employee asked you to stop and do another task? Would you do it, or would you refuse and keep doing your assigned task?
In this story, one person is in this exact situation, and he refuses. After all, he’s busy with the task he’s working on.
The employee gets really mad at him for not helping him out, so the intern later talks to a couple other people who work there about what happened.
Now, he’s wondering if he messed up.
Let’s read the whole story to decide.
AITA for calling out a superior to the director?
Last year I was doing an internship (not paid) in a retirement home.
What I had to do was entertain the oldtimers, make sure they had someone to talk to, go on walks with them etc… helping them on a psychological level mostly.
One day when I was getting ready for a poker day, someone higher up asked me to go help with the dishes if it didn’t interfere with my planning.
I told him that I’d rather not since in 30 minutes I had to do the activity and I was still setting everything up.
The supervisor was really upset.
This apparently didn’t sit well with him and he started to raise his voice and told me (as far as I can remember) “You will never get a real job if you don’t want to do something extra now and then, you’ll get fired immediately. If you think that you have a choice you’re quite wrong because you’re just an intern so you have to listen to your superiors.” and a whole bunch more which really caught me off guard.
When he was done with his rant I was irate and told him that if he didn’t want this for an answer he shouldn’t have asked me and just tell me I had to help. If you give me a choice, I’ll choose.
Again he got mad and went on scolding me.
I waited until he was done and went on with getting ready for the poker day.
He went to wash the dishes because there wasn’t anyone else.
OP later talked to the director.
When I was done I had 10 minutes left so I went to the director of the retirement home to ask if I was in the wrong.
She, an amazingly sweet woman, told me that I wasn’t in the wrong since I was doing my job.
The guy scolding me got transferred to another retirement home at a lower function because I “told on him”.
But he also talked to his supervisor.
Later the person who was training me, my supervisor, told me that I was wrong and if she’d be there then I’d have to go help with the dishes.
So I got 2 people telling me different things.
AITA for going to the director and unintentionally getting the guy demoted?
OP was doing his job. Was it unreasonable to expect him to do more than that? Did he go too far by reporting the other employee?
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Let’s see how Reddit responded.
Here’s the perspective of someone whose mom works in a retirement home.
This person thinks OP messed up.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about customer who won’t take no for an answer when it comes to outdated price-matching policies.
But another person thinks everyone messed up.
He wasn’t necessarily trying to get anyone in trouble or demoted. He was just trying to do his job without being side tracked to do something else. Saying “no” to the request for dishes doesn’t sound like a big deal since he actually was busy doing something else. Where he may have went wrong was reporting the employee for getting mad at him.
However, the director had the final say, so really, if she doesn’t think he did anything wrong, he probably didn’t.
There’s a fine line between standing up for yourself and snitching on your coworkers.
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