What'd your boss do, if you don't mind?
oh dear. trap card activated
ok. ok. There is a lot more behind me reaching the end of my rope. But the final straw was this:
I have next week off (my first week off in 3 years). She said she needed a report. She explicitly told me the reason she needed the report was so she could cover my shifts while i am off, citing problems covering when one of our clients gave me covid a month ago.
She said she needed to know what order I was doing pick ups and drop offs, and she needed to know procedures for the new clients (about half of our clients are new enough that she has never worked directly with them).
She gave the specific example of not knowing to go to the side door of one client's house instead of the front door. She said she also needed to know who had timing expectations, saying when she covered for me clients were "blowing up her phone" because she didn't know when clients expected me and which clients i typically texted an arrival time, again giving a specific example of "like the way you text [client she is familiar with] from the bottom of the hill on your way to her house"
I clarified by using two more examples "oh like how I always let [client's dog] stop to pee right before putting him back in the house, and how I always text [other client] when i am 15 minutes from her house?" and she confirmed that was the information she was asking for. She said to just write it down at each house along my route as i worked each day of the week.
At the end of Monday I told her writing all that down was making me late to client's houses, so i was just going to write it all up on the weekend. I also pointed out that since i was writing so much of it down anyway, i might as well write it not just good enough for her, but complete enough that any other employee could cover a shift of mine if needed. She agreed.
Since i was volunteering to do more than was strictly asked, and since i have been trying to showcase how i go above and beyond because she promised to make me a manager but hasn't, i wrote up this report in my own time, unpaid, over the weekend.
Now I only wrote a short paragraph for each client. But I service about 20 clients each day. Many of those clients are repeat clients throughout the week, so there was a fair amount of copy/pasting, but it was still a hell of a report to write up.
Because it was so long, I spent extra time making it super organized and easy to read, formatted so it's not just a wall of text, easy to skip over parts and find specific information as needed.
I turned in to her a 26 page 14,000 word document, which contains the necessary information for any employee to cover my specific client routes. It took me 7 hours.
Her response?
"This isn't what i asked for"
BUT IT IS EXACTLY WHAT SHE ASKED FOR.
I confirmed that it was what she asked for. It IS a little more detailed than she strictly asked for, but I TOLD her I would be doing that and she spent four days knowing I was preparing to do that and she didn't say a thing about not doing that.
So I'm like "well, what do you need that's not in there?"
And she says "i need to know the exact order you are doing your route, not just pick ups, but slotting the drop offs in-between the pickups too"
So i'm like "that is exactly how that report is written"
And she says "I need to know the times clients expect you to be picking up and dropping off, and when you are doing the walks and when you are taking breaks"
And i go "every client that has a timing expectation is noted in that report, my break times and the walk times are also included."
And she says "it's more information than i need, I need just the stuff i personally need, like the cliffs notes version of your report"
And i'm like "the cliffs notes version, the lines containing the specific information you personally need, are done in bold so you can easily skim through and find it."
and after going around and around like this, it finally comes out that what she ACTUALLY wants is a minute to minute log of how i am spending my day because she's paying me about 6 hours a week of overtime and she's mad about it.
Which i'm happy to provide a log of my time on shift, but if she wants to know why there's overtime, i can tell her in 2 minutes instead of wasting my time on this logging project, IN FACT I DID TELL HER WHY THERE WAS OVERTIME, ONCE WHEN CHANGES TO THE SCHEDULE MADE IT SEEM LIKELY, AND AGAIN TWO WEEKS LATER CONFIRMING THAT WAS WHAT HAD HAPPENED
But really it boils down to me bending over backwards to help her grow her business while she has failed to make good on every single promise she's made me.
Like, I was her only employee for two years and she promised she would make me a manager (i'm interested in a promotion for both the monetary compensation and the job title for résumé reasons) and i worked my ass off to build up the client base so we could hire two more employees and make that happen...
but she did not have me sit in on the interviews, she did not have me shadow her doing the intake process, nothing. She clearly either does not intend on making me a manager or doesn't know how.
i tend to gravitate to small, owner operated businesses, partially because i have a real soft spot for being truly needed, and partially because it's a way to study the dos and don'ts of how to open and run my own business one day.
I understand she is a small business with small business problems, and i have been very patient because she's a single mom with a lot going on in her personal life.
But the thing about me is, while I am very very patient and very very loyal... i need a bare minimum of return on that to replenish it. Tell me what a great job i'm doing every now and then, show appreciation for what i do, listen to me when i say things, etc, and if you NEVER do any of that, my vast reserves of patience and loyalty will dry up.
And once you use up my patience and loyalty? That's it. It's gone.
And I, well, i have been all used up.
also she pays me like half what she should, which i was letting slide because i was going to get a big raise with my promotion to manager, but that is looking like it will never happen, so ... fuuuuuuck this shit i'm out
"so i can open and run my own business one day" has arrived
