BBs won’t do anything to a basketball…I…um…know a guy who told me about his experiences with BBs as a kid.
I’m so sorry!
Your boss sounded like twat.
S’okay, I can’t aim anyway…(so what WOULD pierce a basketball? )
As I said to a friend last month when he lost his crappy job:
“Oh, noes! You don’t get to go into hell every day, where a demon sucks out your soul and nibbles away at what’s left of your self-esteem…”
olives, in the words of Amaral…
la echaron del trabajo sin saber por qué,
no le dieron ni las gracias […]
aquella misma tarde fuimos a celebrarlo
they fired her and she didn’t even know why,
they didn’t even say thank you […]
that evening we went out to celebrate
That boss was so bad, the next one has a very high probability of being better 
(the part in I’ve cut out makes sense in Spain, it doesn’t make sense in the US)
What else can you liberate, Spazcat, to cover what your crappy roommate mooched?
Oh, she was definitely a twat. What happened…
My husband is defending his dissertation on Monday, so I put in a request several weeks ago for the day off. I had ten vacation days per year with this job. We decided we would like to go on vacation to celebrate ten years of being together, so I requested some other days off in June. She said it was fine as long as it didn’t interfere with a planned event we had the weekend prior, and I said it would not, and she signed off on the days.
Weeks later, after I booked the hotel for DC, she suddenly starts bitching me out and says she won’t give me the time off unless it’s deducted from my salary. Even though she said nothing about that when she originally approved the days, I thought that sounded reasonable. But then she said, “And I don’t even think you’re entitled to that.” She acted like I had demanded the time off or something, when in fact I had asked, and if she had told me no up front I would have found some other way to make it work. Instead she waited until I booked the goddamn hotel and after she had signed off on the days to spring this on me. So that pissed me off.
Then she starts badgering me: “Are you looking for another job? If you are, I need to know.”
I said no, I was not, which was 100% the truth. I’ve considered it but ultimately decided I would try to learn how to deal with this woman. After we were done very uncomfortably addressing the main points of our meeting, I realized it would probably be better to tell her… I dunno, I just felt guilty for not telling her that I had considered moving on. I didn’t want her to be caught unaware. She had made it sound like it would be okay if I was looking. So I shut the office door and I told her that I was not looking for another job prior to this, but that starting from this point on I would be.
I did not lose my temper or say anything rude or anything, but I was honest. When she asked me why I told her it was the constrictive management style. She claimed it was because I was new, but I replied that she was the same way with people who had been there years. I told her she treated the other social worker poorly, and I didn’t want to become that. She responded by taking a shot at the other social worker, essentially saying she didn’t think she was good enough to do things on her own either (which is absolute bullshit, that woman is gifted.) After being all defensive about that and taking zero responsibility for her behavior, she gave me a nice summary of why I’m such a shitty employee (I shit you not she said I don’t take enough initiative- this from the woman who forbade my coworker to answer my work-related questions because she needed me to come to her for everything.) Then she told me she thought I was lying about looking for work.
Since I had not in any way planned on having that discussion and certainly hadn’t expected it to result in losing my job, I wasn’t really sure what to do, and she wasn’t either. I did not actually want to quit (yet) and she did not actually want to explicitly tell me I was fired. However, that conversation and her idiotic responses to it made me actually hate her more, and I already hated her quite a lot.
I’m supposed to call her tonight about whether I’m going to work another two weeks. Spoiler alert: I’m not giving her another second of my goddamn time.
I have no idea what the hell is going to happen now. I’m not eligible for unemployment because I only worked there two months. We will go deeper into debt. I will have to go through the hell of looking for another job again. I will almost certainly become severely depressed, since that’s pretty much my baseline. On the other hand, I won’t have to work for an organization that IMO routinely causes active harm to its clients, or feel like I’m stuck in a job that is doing absolutely nothing for my future career, and generally feel constantly inadequate as a person. So there’s that.
Isn’t that always the way? The bosses who tell me this the most are always the ones micromanaging everything I do. A lot of times what they mean is “you don’t read my mind and proactively do what I want you to do, but if you slip up and do what I don’t want you to do you’ll get in trouble for it.”
A sufficiently powered air rifle pellet should, and certainly a .22. From what I hear.
olives, I know being unemployed is a hateful, depressing thing.
Count your lucky stars you are leaving this job.
You said you have problems with depression. Sooner or later this job was going to send you into the depths of dispair. You wrote you were going to learn to deal with that woman. If she still treated a long-term employee that way, the “dealing with her” would have either made you crazy or numb. You hated her after 2 months? Imagine 2 years!
When I got fired from my one and only retail job, I was not looking forward to telling my mother. She surprised me by telling me it was a good thing; I hated the job but it was a job so I was unlikely to quit. Now I HAD to look for something else and while I was looking I might as well look for something better.
I"m in Tennessee with Flutewiz. Nice drive up, made it in just over 5 hours.
{{{{{olivesmarch4th}}}}}
I quit a shitty job that was not a good fit for me a couple of years ago. It still made me depressed and made me question my competence to do any job, and my adequacy as a human being. I have managed to get through it, and find a better job. You will, too.
So I’m driving along in the left lane on a local city “expressway”. Why they call it that, I don’t know: it has periodic traffic lights and left turns. A guy in a VW comes screaming up behind me and tailgates. I glance down and see that I’m actually over the speed limit of 50, so continue along. He swerves over to the right lane, passes me, then cuts in front of me, sticks his arm out of his sun roof and points to the right lane. I flash my lights at him to tell him he’s a dick, and he shoots me the finger.
The road has stoplights, left turns and a center turn lane, asshole. Did it occur to you that you’re not on a freeway and the “stay right” rule doesn’t apply? Did it occur to you that sometimes those lights are red and that it’s generally a bad idea to give a stranger the finger when he may catch up to you at a red light and beat the living shit out of you? That’s my fondest hope, anyway. That, or a flaming death in a fiery crash.
Hey, now - someone else might die alongside him in that fiery crash. 
I came in here for a driving-related rant, too. I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before, but fuck all of it, I’m saying it again:
A hearty “fuck you” to everyone who:
- leaves enough space between them and the car in front of them at a red light so I could compfortable parallel park between them. You may be going straight, but you’re blocking the adjacent turn lane for no damn reason, and traffic is stacking up behind your oblivious ass.
and
- swerves hard to the left before making a right turn. Just … fuck you, that’s all.
Hang in there, olives. We’re pullin’ for you.
The repair guy is here to fix a leak in the drain so that i don’t have to keep towels under it as an improvised fridge diaper. This is the third time in less than a year that I’ve needed service on a Kenmore fridge.
In your identical situation, I assumed I’d get depressed, but I got a shock:
the “Woe is me, the future’s uncertain and I’m broke” depression was finite and manageable; as opposed to the “I’m going into a hellish job every day” ongoing depression.
Once the toxic job wasn’t a factor, the rest was suddenly cope-able. Hallelujah! Rejoice, my child!
I’m with ya. I call the latter folks “billy big-rig” drivers, who think they’re driving 18-wheelers. While we’re at it, people who throw the driver’s door open into oncoming traffic should hang. Portland has these narrow little streets that barely accommodate two lanes of traffic plus parked cars. Some streets are reduced to one lane because of both-side parking. When a door opens in front of you unexpectedly, it’s natural to swerve (or stomp the brakes) to miss it. Even at 25 mph, that’s a recipe for pain.
And another thing: a two-way stop is just that. Cross traffic doesn’t stop at a 2-way, you dumb motherfuckers, and I wait for the day one of you assholes gets T-boned at the corner near my house. I hear blaring horns all the time because of this, and have had near misses in my neighborhood. NONE of these 'hoods have 4-way stops, or at least they are rare, so you need to actually, you know, STOP THE FUCKING CAR AND MAKE SURE NOBODY IS COMING BEFORE PULLING FORWARD.
A two way stop near my home had so many accidents they turned it into a 4-way.
This right here. “I have no job; I was sorta-fired” isn’t as bad as “Holy shit, I am working for a psycho hosebeast who eats self-esteem for breakfast.” Hopefully you’ll see it that way and power on ahead.
This.
And the idiots that stop in the middle of the street so they can chat with the other idiot in the car next to them, thus blocking the entire road. Or chat with some guy standing there. Hey, Asshole! This is a ROAD. Park your damn car and go talk if you have to.
Olives, I have nothing to add, except good luck!
I found out recently that insurance companies now target specific intersections near where you live when they are figuring out how much to gouge you per year. If you live near an intersection with a history of accidents, your rates will be higher.