Artwork by Viv Le

Welcome to Anonymous Job Confessions where writers peel back the curtain from their day jobs. This is a space for talking about bad (or misguided) bosses, cringeworthy clients or customers, out of touch board members and more. We’re speaking on work crushes, failure, pettiness, success against all odds (and also redefining success because we’re queer and we can do that), doing something not because you are passionate about it but because groceries don’t buy themselves and all things surviving in late-stage capitalism. Honestly, if there’s a perfect thing to read when you’re on your break, this might be it.

Early in an election year, I took a job at a national political non-profit with a lot of influence in Democratic circles. For the first time, because of the organization’s stated progressive values, I was openly and proudly out during the entire application process and excited to feel supported. But by the end of the first day, I already felt something was off.

1. When I arrived, HR took me to my new office, which was about the size of a small walk-in closet. There were no windows, only fluorescent office lighting. It was crammed with two desks because I’d be sharing with someone else eventually. I didn’t get any sort of office tour or introductions to anyone and I was left alone in this tiny room with a pile of documents to read. This was just the beginning of a string of weird and frustrating things:
2. The legs on my desk collapsed on one side, turning the entire thing into a slope, and no one knew how to fix it,
   IT had trouble setting up access to my accounts, and when I finally got access, I wasn’t on any of the email listservs so I started missing things I didn’t even know I was missing,
3. My office was extremely hot even though it was summer and the AC was blasting.

I spent some time wandering around the office trying to figure out where basic things like the conference rooms and bathrooms were and I started to realize that despite all the claims the organization makes about valuing diversity, it was very white, largely male, and as far as I could tell, straight and cis.

After several hours spent by myself, my boss finally came and said “hi” to me for the first time. She was dressed like “Office Worker Barbie” and spoke in a rapid-fire way about how she was visiting from out of town for a few days so she had a lot of meetings and she won’t have much time for me. She sent me some long documents to read and left just as quickly as she came.

In the afternoon, the staff in my department told me we were all going to lunch to welcome me. We went to a restaurant that was so fancy it made me uncomfortable and self-conscious. I wound up seated next to my boss’s boss who bragged and laughed about a man he fired and went so far as to share this man’s full name and everything he thought the man did wrong.

On the bus on the way home I texted my friends and partner, seeking reassurance that a bad first day does not mean a bad job and that things could improve once I had time to adjust. But over the first week things started to unravel more and reveal that perhaps this organization’s values weren’t as progressive as it claimed. The hours were supposed to be 9 am to 6 pm with a one-hour lunch break, but I realized that in reality no one took that hour lunch break. They arrived early, ate lunch at their desk, and stayed late – making the job 12 hours a day. My boss asked to go to a conference all day Saturday and Sunday at the end of my first week with no mention of adjusting my schedule to make up for working all weekend. Thankfully, I already had plans I couldn’t change and had a reason to say no. My boss never took the time to train me, she just kept giving me more documents to read. Our only time together before she left town was 30 minutes where she read my job description aloud to me like it was a bedtime story. At the end of the week I cried on the bus home, confident that I had been sold on a job that didn’t really exist. Of course, I needed income and insurance and I was afraid that leaving a job so quickly would look bad and hurt my future opportunities.

I was supposed to be running the organization’s social media but I had received so little training and information on the priorities, messaging, and goals for the organization I felt utterly unequipped to be the public voice of the organization. I tried to take the initiative to get more information. Everytime my boss assigned me new work I asked her to tell me the goals of the project but her responses were condescending. What’s the goal of the tweets I’m supposed to be drafting? The goal is to tweet. So helpful.

I created a document listing various political issues and I asked my boss to fill in the organization’s stance on each of them to help me know what content fits the brand. Does the organization publicly support Planned Parenthood? Does it have a stance on immigration? Trans rights? What should I post during the inevitable next mass shooting, does the organization publicly support gun control? My boss completely ignored me everytime I asked her to answer these questions. Whenever I wanted to post something supporting Black Lives Matter, talking about racial justice, or supporting LGBTQ rights she asked me why it was relevant.

I constantly felt behind because of the lack of information and the hours she expected me to work. She regularly used passive aggressive insults to criticize me and my work and she made me doubt myself so much that I started to decorate my office with framed prints of news articles from every political or organizing win I had ever worked to remind myself that I knew what I was doing.

The longer I stayed, the more it became clear that my boss was like a combination of Miranda Priestly and a character in VEEP: wildly self-aggrandizing and low-key threatening, but also absurdly incompetent.

My boss criticized everything I did and didn’t do. She scolded me for being a few minutes late to a meeting because I needed to use the bathroom between back-to-back meetings. She didn’t like that I would not respond to emails on weekends or reply to her texts when I was out sick. She blamed me when IT issues with my work computer weren’t resolved quickly enough and kept me from working. She got angry when I had a doctor’s appointment that I thought would take one hour but that wound up taking two hours because they were backed up. She acted like I should immediately know the names of all of the other people in the office. When I asked a question or asked for help prioritizing competing projects, she said with a critical tone, “are you telling me you’re going to miss these deadlines?” When I got injured and needed to use my hour lunch breaks to go to physical therapy, she asked intrusive questions about why that was necessary. She said she expected me to make up for the time even though I was supposed to have had lunch hours off. I was anxious and on edge all the time, waiting for the next criticism to come and feeling like there was no way to keep up with the expectations that I be available to work at all hours without taking any personal time. I cried a lot and became physically sick on Sunday nights.

Even though I was charged with running social media, my boss actively fought all of my expertise about social media. I warned her before a big protest that posting live social media content would be near impossible. Anyone who has been to a Women’s March or even a big music festival knows it’s impossible to send a text when many people are trying to post or text simultaneously. When this turned out to be accurate, she told me it was my fault and that I should have been able to post anyway.

The organization held a big fundraising gala, and all staff were expected to work it. My boss, as usual, gave me no instructions or information, but I tried my best to create content around the event. The event included dinner, and most staff had been assigned somewhere to sit to eat, but not me. I was getting hangry and was struggling to keep up when I hadn’t eaten in about 8 hours after working all day. I had to find one of the staff running the event and beg for food. The next day my boss told me this was unprofessional and complained that I missed tweeting photos of a couple of senators while trying to revive my blood sugar.

Before I accepted the job, I had an agreement to take some vacation time. The HR person had lost my paperwork and asked me to come to her office to redo the papers before I left. We made small talk, and she asked me where I was going. I told her I was traveling to meet my girlfriend’s family for the first time. She said, very sincerely, “well, Jesus loves you regardless of your lifestyle choices.” I was shocked to find that the person who was supposed to intervene if I was targeted with homophobia had proven to be untrustworthy

I told my boss about it the next day, figuring that she might be a horrible boss, but this was a liberal organization. Surely she wouldn’t support homophobia. All she said was “do you want to go home for the afternoon?” There was no promise to help or look into it. Despite that, I followed up the next week with my boss and her boss and asked what the next steps would be. My boss’s boss said he had referred it to the organization’s lawyer, who was “investigating.” The lawyer’s job was to protect the organization from legal threats, so I knew that wasn’t a good sign. After this, my therapist advised me to start documenting every interaction with my boss, HR, or the lawyer. I started using my phone to screenshot every single email and Slack chat as far back as I could. I BCC’d my personal email on every email. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with all of these receipts of the harassment and toxic work environment, but I did feel a little more powerful knowing I had them. I also started searching for another job.

Eventually, the organization’s lawyer emailed me and told me to come to his office. I was still new and didn’t know my way around. I told him I didn’t know where his office was and asked for more information. He showed up at my office, opened the door without knocking, and literally said, “don’t you know who I am?”

Then in a firm and threatening tone, he told me that I had misunderstood and that this HR person is the person who “makes the organization welcoming and supportive.” I pointed out that Fox News and conversion therapy preachers used terms like “lifestyle choices” — and that, on top of that, there was the fact that an HR person shouldn’t be talking to me about Jesus. He raised his voice and told me that she was a kind, Christian woman and I was the person in the wrong who had upset her.

About a week later, my boss and my boss’s boss (the guy who had bragged about firing people) invited me to come to a conference to “check in.” I had never had a meeting that included this man before so I was immediately suspicious. They told me I was doing a lousy job even though this was objectively false. All of the organization’s top social media posts were now posts that I created. All of their accounts had grown since I started. It was obvious they were setting the stage to be able to fire me. Still, I had nowhere to go to tell my side of the story because HR was part of the problem. I doubled down on my efforts to screenshot everything.

A few weeks later, my boss’s boss (the one who bragged about firing people) opened my office door without knocking. This man had always had an intimidating vibe somewhere between House of Cards and The Sopranos – like he definitely had “a guy” that did sketchy things for him. He was tall with a heavy build and his shadow loomed over me. He always sat at his desk like he was in the middle of kicking his feet up on the desk and walked like he was running out of time. His booming voice demanded that I come with him to a conference room immediately. He told me that I wasn’t a “leader” and that I needed to go pack my desk and leave immediately. He gave me a non-disclosure agreement and told me I needed to sign it, but I said I needed to think about it. I knew that if I didn’t sign it this man would surely brag, in detail about firing me too, but I also knew that they wanted me to sign it so they could keep me quiet about the harassment and discrimination I had experienced.

Ironically, I asked to speak to the HR person privately. I wasn’t leaving without a fight. I unleashed every complaint and screenshot of how my boss failed to actually be a boss or allow me to do my job. I gave her all the data I had been tracking, showing how their social media was performing better than ever under my leadership. Her eyes widened, and her jaw dropped a little, but despite looking surprised, she said she had heard some similar complaints about my manager before. She asked why I didn’t come to her for support. I told her I didn’t feel safe and explained why phrases like “lifestyle choices” were so triggering. She softened a little, perhaps considering this lesson, but she still didn’t apologize or admit any wrongdoing. She said she couldn’t do anything more to help me, that employment was “at will,” and they could fire me for any reason. She took me to my office, where they had already blocked access to my computer. She put my few belongings and my framed articles that were supposed to demonstrate my expertise in a box and walked me downstairs. I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye to the few friends I had made.

I spent about a week crying in bed, struggling to sleep, and questioning whether attempting to work in organizing and politics was worth it at all. This was not the revolution I signed up for or the one we needed. This was an Insider Old Boys Club that lorded “the cause” over workers to force them to comply with a toxic, abusive culture. They were protecting the ideals of the white Christian hetero-patriarchy at all costs, and they were funding politicians who would likely do the same. The non-disclosure agreement offered me only 2 weeks of payment and one month of healthcare, and for that, I would have to agree to keep all of my experiences confidential and absolve them from any claims I might have against them. I took all of my screenshots and BCC’d emails to a lawyer before making any decisions. I was advised that I could have a case for discrimination, but that fighting would take longer than the time I spent working there. Still, I was glad I had kept good records that let me make a decision about what I wanted to do.

When the HR person put me in an Uber home, she told me that “the best revenge is success.” I decided that the best revenge was refusing to sign the NDA. So I enrolled myself in Medicaid and signed up for unemployment, and rejected the request for my silence. Stories like this deserve to be told because the organizations we rely on and donate to in the name of progress must be held accountable to the principles they claim to uphold.

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