I work for an art dealer and my boss is insane. She treats everyone like her personal assistant and is constantly playing mind games. You never know when she will blow up about the slightest issue. Recently she tried to pressure me into attending a New Year’s Day party at her house by suggested that my career “might” depend on it and then guilt tripped me hard for spending NYE with my family.
It has gotten to the point where I feel stupid all the time and am making silly mistakes because my stress level is so high. I’m actively looking for another job but until then I need to survive as best I can. For those of you who are/have been where I am, how do you cope?
For me, it wasn't a boss so much, but the corporation I worked for was the worst. The best example I can give is you have to accrue vacation time. Everyone starts the new year with zero vacation time, no matter how long you've worked there. You have to accrue your time as you work. The number of vacation hours you accrue each week varies depending on how long you worked there.
So if you had planned to take a two-week vacation, starting on Jan. 1, and you got laid off on Jan. 10, you would owe the company all the vacation pay you got because you hadn't accrued two weeks of vacation time yet. You also can't roll over your vacation time to the next year. You have to use it all in the same year it was accrued.
What ends up happening is that no one ever uses all their vacation time. It would be foolish to use it all up in the first six months of the year and not have anything to fall back on if you got sick. So at the end of the year, there's this mad rush in November and December to use up your vacation time before you lose it. Obviously, everyone can't take vacation at the same time, so you have to work your vacation time out with coworkers. *you take these three days and I'll take these two days and two days a week later and you can have the 2 more days here." You can't take whole weeks off at the end of the year, because there's always several other people who need to take time off too. It's nuts. A lot of people lose vacation days because they couldn't get it all taken. Of course, that's exactly why the company has that policy.
This corporation is also known for acquiring new properties and then coming in and stripping staffs down to the bone, sometimes leaving no one to do certain jobs, and we have to scramble to fill the void on jobs no one else was trained to do. It was a mess. One of my coworkers quit because the company was run by idiots and then they laid off the only other person who could do my job right after that. Rather than keep working there and doing it all by myself, I gave my 2 weeks notice the same day they laid off that person and let them know what a piece of **** company they were. They were in panic mode after that and wound up having to hire two people to replace me and even offered me a month's stipend to answer the phone if they had questions on how to do the job, so the net gain was nothing and they actually wound up paying more than they would have had they not laid off that person. Stupid, stupid company.