Congrats on escaping that place! It sounds absolutely toxic.
Six years ago I quit a decent-paying full-time job with benefits because the owner was just a terrible person. Among a lot of other things, he had instituted work quotas that were physically impossible to meet while doing our jobs properly, yet people were constantly threatened with being fired when they failed their quotas. (Part of my job was making sure that bills we were sending the government were accurate and that if we were ever audited that we had the paperwork to justify the bills. By turning our jobs into rapid-speed data entry, no one had time to double-check anything and we still couldn't meet his insane quotas.) That doesn't even scratch the surface of all the problems, but it was the one I thought about a lot later on. He also did a lot of things where he deliberately pit departments against each other because "competition is good for efficiency".
So many people tried to tell me that I shouldn't quit without another full-time job lined up. I got a lot of that "no job is perfect" and "everybody hates their boss" stuff. I hate that so many people's responses to "this is awful and soul-sucking and I hate every moment of my day" is just some form of "tough; deal with it."
About six months after I quit, my boss was arrested for defrauding the government. Yeah, those data-entry quotas? Deliberately stirring up interdepartmental feuds? In hindsight, he knew exactly what he was doing. The whole point was to work people so hard that no one had a chance to double-check what he was doing and to keep people mad at each other so no one caught on that he was telling different departments different things.
It's so rare to get that kind of vindication, but even the people who had tried to talk me out of quitting agreed that I was smart to get out of there when I did.
Nothing is perfect, but there's a huge difference between "not perfect" and being psychologically abused at work. And "it was your fault for making me angry" is just classic abuser bullshit.
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life isn't supposed to suck
Date: 2019-07-23 04:54 am (UTC)Six years ago I quit a decent-paying full-time job with benefits because the owner was just a terrible person. Among a lot of other things, he had instituted work quotas that were physically impossible to meet while doing our jobs properly, yet people were constantly threatened with being fired when they failed their quotas. (Part of my job was making sure that bills we were sending the government were accurate and that if we were ever audited that we had the paperwork to justify the bills. By turning our jobs into rapid-speed data entry, no one had time to double-check anything and we still couldn't meet his insane quotas.) That doesn't even scratch the surface of all the problems, but it was the one I thought about a lot later on. He also did a lot of things where he deliberately pit departments against each other because "competition is good for efficiency".
So many people tried to tell me that I shouldn't quit without another full-time job lined up. I got a lot of that "no job is perfect" and "everybody hates their boss" stuff. I hate that so many people's responses to "this is awful and soul-sucking and I hate every moment of my day" is just some form of "tough; deal with it."
About six months after I quit, my boss was arrested for defrauding the government. Yeah, those data-entry quotas? Deliberately stirring up interdepartmental feuds? In hindsight, he knew exactly what he was doing. The whole point was to work people so hard that no one had a chance to double-check what he was doing and to keep people mad at each other so no one caught on that he was telling different departments different things.
It's so rare to get that kind of vindication, but even the people who had tried to talk me out of quitting agreed that I was smart to get out of there when I did.
Nothing is perfect, but there's a huge difference between "not perfect" and being psychologically abused at work. And "it was your fault for making me angry" is just classic abuser bullshit.