If You Can Leave A Toxic Environment, DO IT

This was a job I shouldn’t have taken, but I was desperate. It started showing red flags when I was told to come in and interview when the girl I was replacing was off so she wouldn’t know. Normally, I would just say no and move on, but the job I was currently at was absolutely toxic, so I was desperate.

This new job was with a small company that had about eight employees. After I had been there for about two months, I noticed that my paycheck was wrong. It turns out that the owner’s wife did the paychecks and she miscalculated. Thankfully, they got it fixed, but then I started seeing other problems.

They offered paid holidays, which sounds great, except for the fact that they were also closed around those holidays but wouldn’t pay you for them, so you had to use four of your five Paid Time Off days so you weren’t out so much money. And speaking of payday, they only paid us once a month, and the boss would conveniently “forget” to pay us — no direct deposit — until after five, so our check wouldn’t go in until the next day, or sometimes until Monday.

The boss’s wife would come in several times per week and tell me that I should be exceedingly grateful that they even thought of hiring me.

After I was there a year, the supervisor decided she was going to move back to Texas, and I thought that they were going to offer me her position. No. Instead, they expected me to do her job without any extra pay. I started looking for another job, right before 2020 became what 2020 did.

Then, in March of 2020, I was working seventy-plus hours a week, at least till the boss’s wife decided we shouldn’t be paid overtime. That is when I conveniently decided that I wasn’t going to work over my forty hours if they were going to pull that.

The boss’s son — who was a piece of work and treated me like I was stupid — was getting ready to take over the business but his dad wasn’t ready to let go. So, I would get told different things each time I spoke to one of them and then get yelled at for not doing what the other wanted first.

During this time, we hired a friend of the son’s to help out, and while I was trying to help train him, the boss’s son screamed at me for trying to take his position of training. The boss stood idly by and let him scream at me.

After they left for the day, I went into the bathroom and cried for forty-five minutes and decided I was getting out of this job. I also found out that day that the guy who had just been hired was making $2 more than I was an hour.

I ended up finding a much better job and I gave a short notice because they were notorious for not letting people work out their notices. They had me train the new guy for my last three days, but he kept telling me, “I already know this,” and didn’t look at so many of the training examples that I printed out and made special for him.

So, on my last day, after I tried to train him and he went back to his desk, I shredded all of that and all of the pertinent information that I had obtained during that time.

I’ve been at my current job for nine months, making almost triple what I was making there, and I just got a promotion. My former employers called me last week to see if I would be interested in coming back because the guy they hired just wasn’t working out. I took great pleasure in hanging up on them after telling them I was very happy in my current position.