I hate my boss, part two
Jan. 19th, 2014 11:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
soc_puppetPart one of the reasons I hate my boss can be found here [Content Note: Trans*phobia, sexism, bullying, controlling behavior].
This one doesn't have quite as many, but there's a real doozy here.
[Content Note: Danger, fire, bullying, emotional auditing]
8) She thinks she knows better than I do how to deal with one of my anxiety attacks. She sent me into one yesterday. This is the second time she's been the trigger for one of my anxiety attacks. The first time, when I told her that I needed to take five minutes elsewhere to cool off, she didn't want to allow me to do so; she tried to deter me and insisted that I stay and calm down. When it became clear that she was only going to continue to tell me to "calm down" and variations on it nonstop, I announced my intentions to take five minutes elsewhere and left without letting her tell me to "wait" again.
This time, I realized somewhat earlier in the process that I was going to have an anxiety attack, and left promptly to attempt to calm down. Unfortunately, due to several different factors (PMS, upcoming event she was overworking us for, overcrowded lunch), this attack was much harder to come down from and I was still quite fragile when I returned to the bakery. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it hadn't entirely receded at that point? In any case, I had barely been back in the bakery for a minute when the attack came back and stronger than before. I stepped out into the hallway again to try and calm myself down enough to figure out what I needed to regain emotional stability.
Unfortunately, my boss came out almost immediately after me. She told me I could take the rest of the day off, and then told me that taking deep breaths was the key to calming down. When I responded (rather waspishly, I admit) that I'd known that since I was eight, she proceeded to go into full rant mode. She insisted that she was trying to do something nice for me (by pressuring me to take the rest of the day off), that I needed to take control of my emotions and not let them rule my life, and that I should go home and do something that I liked to cheer up/cool off/feel better.
Every time I opened my mouth to respond, she told me not to snap at her before I could even get a sound out. Towards the end of the rant she told me off for giving her "dirty looks" - my only communication option, since she would not allow me to respond verbally - and insisted that she was a human being too (the implication being that I should stop hurting her feelings by being angry at her - for telling me how to deal with my own emotions). She followed it up by telling me again that I could take the rest of the day off - not even asking if I wanted to take the rest of the day off, just telling me straight out that I could. Between that and how she'd been insisting that I should go home and do something I enjoyed throughout her rant, I basically got the idea that I didn't have a choice in whether I could stay or not. Still furious and not over my anxiety attack, I accepted that I was basically being forced to leave, and promptly collected my knife kit and signed out.
What I had wanted to do was take maybe an hour or so off of work to go somewhere there weren't a lot of people and do something solitary for a while. Recover as an overtaxed introvert. Then, because I wasn't scheduled to leave for another two-and-a-half hours, and because there was a big event coming up today and there was lots more work left to be done, I wanted to go back to work and help out for a few more hours. She didn't give me that option. Instead, she sent me home early, and kept my coworkers late. (She probably would have kept them late anyway, but they might have gotten out an hour earlier if I'd managed to get more work done. Geeky coworker was there for thirteen hours total yesterday.)
9) She started a kitchen fire. What's more, according to Geeky Coworker, she didn't take ownership of it. She basically told people that "someone" started a fire in the kitchen, leaving them to assume it was a student intern. I was the only intern working in the kitchen at the time, so she was basically backhandedly implying that I did it.
I arrived to serve my internship at the correct time. Because my favorite teacher from the previous semester was teaching International Breads in the same time period, because the hotel bakery shares space with the student baking lab, and because I figure that a refresher never hurts when it comes to learning things, I set up to shape dinner rolls facing the instructor. There are only two work surfaces that were set up to face that direction, and Teacher Coworker typically uses the one in the back, so I used the one that was closer to the class.
I was part way through shaping the rolls when Previous Teacher announced, cool as a cucumber, that there was a fire in the back of the kitchen. I turned my head, and sure enough, there it was: flames leaping up from a pan on the stove in the back of the kitchen, maybe three feet high.
My boss had left the kitchen a good while back to do who knows what. Teacher Coworker had stepped out on some errand or other five to ten minutes earlier. My mind raced: How did I stop a kitchen fire? The answer I came up with: By putting a lid over the pot or pan. I quickly searched for a lid to the pan. Not seeing one, I looked for something that roughly resembled the lid to a pan of that size. I found something that might almost work, and began psyching myself up to try and put it over the pan.
(It was a really bad thing to have picked. It was about the same surface area, but it was square to the pan's round, and I was stuck on treating it like a pan lid, with the concave surface towards the flames, rather than something to put out the fire. What can I say? There was a fire. My brain doesn't always make the most logical leaps at the best of times.)
Luckily, other people found out what was going on, and someone with a much better idea of what to put over the pan acted. (He used a sheet tray. Such good thinking, Different Department Lead!) The fire was out, we got the kitchen roughly back in order, class went back in session, I finished up the dinner rolls, and the day basically went on.
Towards the end of my shift, my boss insisted on teaching me how to fry the banana encrouts on the stove in the back, despite the fact that only hours earlier I had been witness to a significant fire in that very place. A consultant for our kitchen's Ultra Emergency Fire Dousing System showed up to explain why the mega fire extinguisher (AKA the Ruin The Entire Week As Far As Food Is Concerned machine) hadn't gone off - right in the middle of my frying lesson. My boss had me work vaguely around him, and then on my own while she talked about what was up with the system and why it hadn't gone off earlier.
Prior to that? She'd been the only one to use the stove. She'd specifically been frying banana encroutes in a pan of oil. She'd basically left a pan of oil on a running gas stove unattended, while a student she was partially responsible for was on her own (in terms of actual bakery staff). She endangered my life, endangered the lives of those around me, and, to the best of my knowledge, never actually took responsibility for it. If that's not a good enough reason to hate her, I don't know what is.
I've been letting that one go for months, brushing it off as less serious than it actually is. It's time and past I treated it with the gravity it deserves.
I've started typing up a letter to send to HR (and/or the executive chef, and/or whoever else is appropriate in this situation)I've got rough estimates for dates for a couple of incidents I'm going to include, and am going to check with Geeky Coworker tomorrow or the day after to find out some number stuff and possibly also get a definite date for that last incident I've got listed up there. I might even have enough material to send off the letter within the week.
Hugs and pictures of cute things are both welcome, though I'm feeling much better today than I was yesterday.
This one doesn't have quite as many, but there's a real doozy here.
[Content Note: Danger, fire, bullying, emotional auditing]
8) She thinks she knows better than I do how to deal with one of my anxiety attacks. She sent me into one yesterday. This is the second time she's been the trigger for one of my anxiety attacks. The first time, when I told her that I needed to take five minutes elsewhere to cool off, she didn't want to allow me to do so; she tried to deter me and insisted that I stay and calm down. When it became clear that she was only going to continue to tell me to "calm down" and variations on it nonstop, I announced my intentions to take five minutes elsewhere and left without letting her tell me to "wait" again.
This time, I realized somewhat earlier in the process that I was going to have an anxiety attack, and left promptly to attempt to calm down. Unfortunately, due to several different factors (PMS, upcoming event she was overworking us for, overcrowded lunch), this attack was much harder to come down from and I was still quite fragile when I returned to the bakery. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it hadn't entirely receded at that point? In any case, I had barely been back in the bakery for a minute when the attack came back and stronger than before. I stepped out into the hallway again to try and calm myself down enough to figure out what I needed to regain emotional stability.
Unfortunately, my boss came out almost immediately after me. She told me I could take the rest of the day off, and then told me that taking deep breaths was the key to calming down. When I responded (rather waspishly, I admit) that I'd known that since I was eight, she proceeded to go into full rant mode. She insisted that she was trying to do something nice for me (by pressuring me to take the rest of the day off), that I needed to take control of my emotions and not let them rule my life, and that I should go home and do something that I liked to cheer up/cool off/feel better.
Every time I opened my mouth to respond, she told me not to snap at her before I could even get a sound out. Towards the end of the rant she told me off for giving her "dirty looks" - my only communication option, since she would not allow me to respond verbally - and insisted that she was a human being too (the implication being that I should stop hurting her feelings by being angry at her - for telling me how to deal with my own emotions). She followed it up by telling me again that I could take the rest of the day off - not even asking if I wanted to take the rest of the day off, just telling me straight out that I could. Between that and how she'd been insisting that I should go home and do something I enjoyed throughout her rant, I basically got the idea that I didn't have a choice in whether I could stay or not. Still furious and not over my anxiety attack, I accepted that I was basically being forced to leave, and promptly collected my knife kit and signed out.
What I had wanted to do was take maybe an hour or so off of work to go somewhere there weren't a lot of people and do something solitary for a while. Recover as an overtaxed introvert. Then, because I wasn't scheduled to leave for another two-and-a-half hours, and because there was a big event coming up today and there was lots more work left to be done, I wanted to go back to work and help out for a few more hours. She didn't give me that option. Instead, she sent me home early, and kept my coworkers late. (She probably would have kept them late anyway, but they might have gotten out an hour earlier if I'd managed to get more work done. Geeky coworker was there for thirteen hours total yesterday.)
9) She started a kitchen fire. What's more, according to Geeky Coworker, she didn't take ownership of it. She basically told people that "someone" started a fire in the kitchen, leaving them to assume it was a student intern. I was the only intern working in the kitchen at the time, so she was basically backhandedly implying that I did it.
I arrived to serve my internship at the correct time. Because my favorite teacher from the previous semester was teaching International Breads in the same time period, because the hotel bakery shares space with the student baking lab, and because I figure that a refresher never hurts when it comes to learning things, I set up to shape dinner rolls facing the instructor. There are only two work surfaces that were set up to face that direction, and Teacher Coworker typically uses the one in the back, so I used the one that was closer to the class.
I was part way through shaping the rolls when Previous Teacher announced, cool as a cucumber, that there was a fire in the back of the kitchen. I turned my head, and sure enough, there it was: flames leaping up from a pan on the stove in the back of the kitchen, maybe three feet high.
My boss had left the kitchen a good while back to do who knows what. Teacher Coworker had stepped out on some errand or other five to ten minutes earlier. My mind raced: How did I stop a kitchen fire? The answer I came up with: By putting a lid over the pot or pan. I quickly searched for a lid to the pan. Not seeing one, I looked for something that roughly resembled the lid to a pan of that size. I found something that might almost work, and began psyching myself up to try and put it over the pan.
(It was a really bad thing to have picked. It was about the same surface area, but it was square to the pan's round, and I was stuck on treating it like a pan lid, with the concave surface towards the flames, rather than something to put out the fire. What can I say? There was a fire. My brain doesn't always make the most logical leaps at the best of times.)
Luckily, other people found out what was going on, and someone with a much better idea of what to put over the pan acted. (He used a sheet tray. Such good thinking, Different Department Lead!) The fire was out, we got the kitchen roughly back in order, class went back in session, I finished up the dinner rolls, and the day basically went on.
Towards the end of my shift, my boss insisted on teaching me how to fry the banana encrouts on the stove in the back, despite the fact that only hours earlier I had been witness to a significant fire in that very place. A consultant for our kitchen's Ultra Emergency Fire Dousing System showed up to explain why the mega fire extinguisher (AKA the Ruin The Entire Week As Far As Food Is Concerned machine) hadn't gone off - right in the middle of my frying lesson. My boss had me work vaguely around him, and then on my own while she talked about what was up with the system and why it hadn't gone off earlier.
Prior to that? She'd been the only one to use the stove. She'd specifically been frying banana encroutes in a pan of oil. She'd basically left a pan of oil on a running gas stove unattended, while a student she was partially responsible for was on her own (in terms of actual bakery staff). She endangered my life, endangered the lives of those around me, and, to the best of my knowledge, never actually took responsibility for it. If that's not a good enough reason to hate her, I don't know what is.
I've been letting that one go for months, brushing it off as less serious than it actually is. It's time and past I treated it with the gravity it deserves.
I've started typing up a letter to send to HR (and/or the executive chef, and/or whoever else is appropriate in this situation)I've got rough estimates for dates for a couple of incidents I'm going to include, and am going to check with Geeky Coworker tomorrow or the day after to find out some number stuff and possibly also get a definite date for that last incident I've got listed up there. I might even have enough material to send off the letter within the week.
Hugs and pictures of cute things are both welcome, though I'm feeling much better today than I was yesterday.
