Yesterday was the last day at work. Made it through the exit interview, sent out the goodbye emails, got the emails and phone numbers of folks I want to keep up with. Handed off my key fob, loaded my light-up unicorn into the car.
Everything's been handed off, wrapped up, and shut down. I spent the weeks before I handed in my resignation writing SOPs for every duty I could think of, to help my team and any future person settling into the job. They have resumes for some good people to fill the position. It feels done at the same time it doesn't feel completely real and I keep forgetting that I'm done.
So now that I'm done, here's the abbreviated version.
I'm leaving partly because of the way they handled COVID, but mostly because of the toxic asshole they hired to replace my previous, retired director. In just over six months, he systematically destroyed my creative team and made a job I loved into an anxiety-ridden misery. Endlessly negative, about anything and everything. Behaves as if he's the only competent person in the room, no matter how little skill he has in the subject. I have had my job explained to me almost daily since he arrived in a part time capacity to work alongside our outgoing director in September. Questions about how we do our jobs are framed as insults. Bullshitting answers to questions that wasted my time as I made a project based on incorrect information. Throwing his creative team under the bus when he made a mistake, until his behavior started taking a toll on my preexisting working relationships with managers and employees at my workplace whom I've known for years. We didn't work enough unpaid OT. We weren't working far enough ahead. Nothing was done right, nothing was enough. For someone who 'didn't like to micromanage his designers,' he micromanaged tf out of almost every project. Disrespect, diminishing our competence, disbelieving us when we offered feedback - and feedback of any kind would prompt a long diatribe about how he was right. Body comments about our male coworkers. Weird personal criticism. Like I can't make this up - I got criticized for having a higher temperature when we had to record our temps after reopening. On top of that, LOUD political diatribes with people from other departments that frequently centered my age group as The Problem With the Country Today. My values and my age meant he called me evil, stupid, malicious, out of touch and incompetent by associstion. I'd hear him ramp up and put my headphones on so I didn't have to hear it after it became clear it was going to happen on a regular basis.
I WARNED top brass back in October that things were getting rough in my department, and wasn't believed.
Well, they believe me now.
He's solely responsible for 3 members of the creative team quitting, including myself. Coming back to work after shutdown brought back all the bullshit I'd escaped for 2 1/2 months and made it clear this job wouldn't be sustainable for me. And I can, without hyperbole, lay ALL of that at his feet. Coming back reminded me that if I stayed, even if this asshole fucked back off to wherever he came from in a year, I'd be subjected to whatever new asshole they hired based on his claims of improving the bottom line, and his job description is so vastly outside my experience that I didn't have a hope of getting above him in the chain of command without a complete retrain. Even if the management at my new job turns out to be frustrating, at least it's something I chose.
I didn't pull any punches about him in the exit interview with the VP of internal operations, and I talked to our GM yesterday about him too. I've been in this job long enough to have credit banked with leadership, and damned if I'm going to let the dude who signs this asshole's checks get a filtered HR version of what happened. There are still people I care about there, and I might as well blow that banked credit trying to make things better. He heard me. He also made it clear that other team members from other departments have voiced issues, they're going to deal with it, he's sorry they didn't see it in time for me and he's glad I've found a better opportunity.
I took some vicious, petty satisfaction in unfriending the toxic director's ass on social media accounts IMMEDIATELY after I walked out. I maintained my professionalism everywhere else because I know that it's important not to burn your bridges in case you end up interviewing with former coworkers or managers at some other job. But man, if I found out he worked at another job I wouldn't want it anyway. He made a wreckage of a team I loved, and he's so incapable of taking a shred of personal responsibility that he'll make a wreckage of any other place he works.
