Yes, for the first time, last year. Wall of text incoming.
Disclaimer: my work history has some gaps of unemployment, but my career trajectory has been excellent and a generally consistent upwards growth. Moreover, prior to the role in question, I'd never had issues with supervision, management, or anyone else, at least not in any way that significantly impacted my career. I had (and continue to have) superb rapport with my managers, all of who remain reliable references to this day. Every job I'd ever had ended either by me moving on to a new role with a new employer, or a redundancy due to industry changes. In all cases I left on excellent terms, and am smart enough not to burn bridges.
Prelude: I had an excellent job for about 3 years leading up to the end of 2020. It was not one I intended to stick in, but only due to stagnation. The role itself was easy, paid exceptionally well, I had excellent colleagues and management, a large volume of autonomy, three day weekends every weekend, and was with an employer and industry I fully intended to stick with. The only reason I lost that job was due to COVID related redundancy. My small team all lost our jobs. Shit sucked, but the writing was on the wall and that's just the way it is. My employer tried to offer us other roles as per redundancy procedure, but in the middle of COVID and in a non-for-profit...it just wasn't viable. So we went our separate ways and I had excellent references to back me up.
I wound up applying for a job at a university in their skills/employment department. The role was basically recruitment; assisting TAFE students (so mainly trades) and off-the-street walk-ins with employment support and recruitment, liaising with employers to form partnerships, keep our jobs board updated, etc. I really don't enjoy recruitment very much, but I needed a job as per COVID, and it was a job I could do. I interviewed well and was candid during: I'd moved away from recruitment in my recent roles so if they wanted someone more immediately experienced they'd be better off with someone else. They didn't care. Manager of the site seemed happy, so I got the job. Casual role, four days a week, outrageously good money with university superannuation, but zero job security and limited room for growth unless I moved to an entirely different part of the uni. The team I was in was small, and very focused on a particular set of duties.
I knew shit was wrong by the end of my first week. First thing I was tasked with doing was completing the mandatory COVID Safe University training. Completely fair. This training explicitly instructed staff how to act during COVID. Let me preface this: all of this is happening Q2 2021. COVID is still a thing, and my city (Melbourne, Australia) is on and off lockdown. Every business worth their salt takes this shit seriously and universities in particular are anxious as hell because they've already lost so much money from losing international students and being prime spots for outbreaks. So the rules are strict: we all have an electronic staff pass card, and every single morning you must log into the staff system and complete very short questionnaire. Basic queries on symptoms and how you feel. Until you complete this your card is locked and you cannot access any building. If there's even a whiff of you being sick in any way on the form, it'll also lock for 24 hours. They'd rather staff stay home than risk getting anyone sick and causing another outbreak, and I had no issue with this.
First week was basically this:
- Get to know people in the office. Most people seem cool, there's very few of us. Office manager seems a bit high strung, and one of my colleagues is a preppy, gossipy overachiever who "only dates engineers" (the fact I learned this, from her, so quickly says it all).
- I have almost nothing in the ways of proper equipment set up. I have a computer, but no access to emails or staff systems beyond the basic COVID check-in.
- Despite needing to make phone calls pretty regularly to set up meetings with employers, I am not given a phone (it takes about 3 weeks for this to be resolved). I have to use my personal mobile for the first week.
- Manager has made it clear she gets annoyed by basically anything, especially auxiliary noise. The office is tiny, so the career coaches are confined to two little boxes that have their own doors. I'm stuck in the main room with my manager, who gets annoyed at any phone call.
- I take a phone call on Day 2 of 4. It is a combo of personal / work - someone I am personally friends with who I asked to call me as they work in an industry that would lead to some good vacancies for labourors. I take this phone call outside of out respect for my manager, on my personal phone, and because there's never been an issue doing this in my last three jobs.
- Day 3 I wake up and I feel like shit. Nausea, headache, etc. I feel awful calling in sick but do it anyway. It could be just nerves and adjustment to a new role, as I'd taken the previous 4 or so months off after the last role's redundancy. I apologise in the call and offer to work from home. Management seems fine about it, says don't worry about it, just take the day to rest up. My rational is this: it's my first week, most of my equipment still isn't ready, I am doing mostly modules and no real difficult work (it's not like I have a backlog of clients yet), and I'm casually employed. I have zero entitlements to sick days and leave, so it costs the company literally zero dollars for me not to be there. Also, I'm sick, and that's what happens when you're sick.
- Day 4 I show up, feeling a lot better. Early in the morning I take a second call from another contact in the industry, similar to the aforementioned call, and again outside the front of the office.
- Note: when I say outside the front of the office, I mean literally getting up and walking maybe 7 meters, if that, out of our office into the foyer then outside. It's ~right there~.
Upon returning back to the office my manager took me aside into a vacant room and absolutely grilled me on "what's going on". She refused to clarify what exactly the problem was, only vaguely citing "you keep getting up to take calls", and "you called in sick yesterday". I was absolutely baffled. It didn't seem disciplinary, and she wasn't being directly accusational, but the tone was weird as fuck and confrontational. I apologised for any issued I'd caused, explained myself, stated there was nothing going on and I wasn't entirely sure what she meant, and I was happy in the new job. It'd only been a week after all. I wracked my brain trying to work out what the fuck she was on about, and concluded that maybe she thought I was interviewing for another job? Two phone calls taken outside the office, a day off in the first week. Maybe she thought I was arranging and then interviewing for another job?
It might have been what she thought but that doesn't really matter, because from that point on I was gaslit, bullied, targeted, made to feel like shit, and generally pushed to a point where I didn't give a fuck about the role over the course of two months almost literally to the day. I was:
- Called out in team meetings for things I "didn't do" and how that was "really stupid" even though I had followed her instructions to the letter, and could cite it.
- Was accused of not getting certain work done fast enough, despite being asked that day to do it at the drop of a pin.
- Was accused of letting other work get behind, because of having to drop everything to do the aforementioned.
- Accused of not doing specific tasks, despite doing them, and when called out on it received no apology.
- Accused of not working with my colleagues, despite regularly doing so in collaboration for mutual goals.
- Given blame for "poor performance" that couldn't be explicitly cited, including being blamed for lack of progress in areas that had literally nothing to do with my own job (eg: "not enough referrals from the career coaches", which is not my job to get, I literally can't get them! I can ask, I can pressure, but they have to refer to me!)
I would find out about her and the office that:
- She never wanted to be a manager. She was just one of the career coaches, and upper management pushed her into management after failing to find another manager on three separate occasions.
- One of my colleagues who I got along with exceptionally well, and was there when said manager was promoted, noted that she had been complaining for months about how she didn't want to manage.
- Was going through a messy separation from an on-and-off 8 year toxic relationship, while still living with the guy, and trying to sell the house they were sharing.
- Militant anti-vaxxer, anti-lockdown measures, anti-progressive/labour government in Australia.
- Once complained that she'd be "late to get home" when her train was stalled after someone committed suicide on the rail.
- Would bitch about me (and others) in some weird, gross cliquey thing she had going on with the aforementioned preppy chick, whom she was tasking with spying on myself and everyone else in the office. The two would often go for drinks afterwards to gossip.
- Above mentioned preppy chick "gossiped" to my manger about how I'd lost two people I knew to suicide over the last month, as I'd mentioned it to her casually in conversation when we were running a training session together. It wasn't a secret and I didn't mind people knowing, but the principle of her doing so and the way she framed it is demonstrative of her behaviour and ethics and the relationship she had with my manager.
- Lunatic micromanager. The colleague who I spoke to the most, and got along with extremely, basically covered my arse and prewarned me of a whole bunch of shit that was going to happen and was in the process of happening because of what she was hearing, observing, and already knew. She'd worked with my manager long enough to know said manager believes she isn't a micromanager, but is absolutely a micromanager who cannot stand the entire office not working exactly to her irrational order and standards.
- EG: of the above, manager was super anal about anybody leaving the office for any reason. Walking literally, literally next door to grab a coffee? Ducking out for a smoke (my colleague, not me)? Can't be doing that, I'm paying you to work.
- Aforementioned gaslighting and being called out in meetings; I didn't notice half of if because it happened so regularly in the short two months I was there that it was only when two of the colleagues I was closest to came up to me after some of our meetings to ask if I was okay that I realised it'd happened again. I had colleagues straight up telling me and highlighting how wrong I was being treated, how they would have been upset had it happened to them, in order for me to reflect and go "Oh, yeah, what the fuck?!".
It really ended as irrationally as it began. After ~2 months I had a performance review / career success planning meeting with her and it was glowing. "You've really found your feet, you're doing great in this role, I love what you're bringing across to the team", yadda yadda. Literally two weeks later I was called into a meeting that I knew was going to be the end (short version: a bunch of requests for my content made it clear it was to be handed over), and with red wine stains on her teeth she told me she was letting me go and had all the reasons in the world to do so. Namely: I don't do my job, I don't work, I don't contribute, bla bla. I had a huge argument with her, kept asking her to cite shit I hadn't done while citing the mountain of work I had, alongside the numerous contradictions and bullshit. She had no counter argument. It ended with me stating "I knew we'd have a problem from that first week, after you pulled me aside", and she said "Well yes, you're right, I thought so too", confirming my two month suspicion that she fucking hated me and had no reason not to.
Me being employed under a casual contract made "letting me go" easy. My rights were limited. I could have escalated it and put in a HR complaint, or gone to Fair Work, but I just wanted the whole shitshow to be over. I knew it was the right end to the two months as I walked out of there with an enormous feeling of relief despite stepping back into unemployment. No money in the world could have had me return to work there. I didn't really enjoy the job to start with, but the management was genuinely the worst management I've ever had in my entire life, and the only experience of direct, immediate bullying in a workplace that I've personally experienced.
I wish to say it didn't have an impact on me and, at the time, I thought it hadn't. I'm a pretty grounded person with this shit. I had my moments of "Maybe I was in the wrong, maybe I was a problem at the job", and reflected on the experience to see what I could do better and what I could learn, amidst the turmoil of it all. And while there's a couple of things I learned, by and large the evidence in my favour is enormous and I am 100% confident I was in the right, and she was 100% in the wrong, and it was workplace bullying. Nevertheless, despite being conscious of all of this it still impacted my perception of acceptance at the two jobs I've held since, where there is a lingering anxiety that I'm going to be called out for "doing the wrong thing", while wondering if I am doing the wrong thing without knowing it. I have to catch myself in these thoughts and work backwards from them, to remind myself I'm doing fine.
Especially since those two jobs in question were fine. The first was a quick bounce back from the aforementioned disaster. I was in it for 8 or so months and set to be promoted to management, and only left for the current opportunity that came out of nowhere. And the current job is an enormous career step for me, a job I really love that challenges and stimulates me in ways I haven't felt in a role for a long time, with colleagues and management that are phenomenal and 100% on my level and extremely supportive, earning more than I've ever earned in my life with good room to grow and continue my career.
I've no reason to be concerned. The feedback on the work I've done has been excellent. But I still occasionally have those moments, and I can source them back to that fucking job and experience. And that shit sucks.