A little life story : Toxic working environment and Getting harrassed until Burnout Part 2

Photo by wes hicks on Unsplash

As I was still a little naive at that time and I was really hoping for a job, and it seemed that the bosses were really starting to get interested in what I was doing because I was providing at least "something" to their customers (I was also able to create custom logos by drawing with Illustrator and custom buttons / menus with photoshop ...) So, I was rather motivated throughout my experience and I learned, the secretary was relieved to have better communication with clients when we could at least provide something, and the accountant felt less his shoulders.

They offered to take a company phone, something my mother advised me to refuse because I was already working on websites 7 days a week until late at night, she wondered what I could still add more to my workload, my mother having an external view of the situation, more objective than me who was fully in and had nothing else as a perspective at that time, suspected that something was wrong, put as much responsibility on the back of a single trainee ...

Soon I was delegated responsibilities such as to set up the website on an ovh hosting, install each new site, create original templates for new customers, etc etc ... The workload and the pressure began to make sense, even though I was not supposed to be there to create websites at the beginning, but help make spelling changes on pre-purchased websites and pre-purchased solutions, make editorial and insertion of images. Unfortunately I showed a little too quickly what I was able to do, the funniest is, I built some nice sites and templates for customers of this box, which were for these, quite rare, very happy, but I never took the time to build myself a website and a portfolio worthy of the name ... I do not know if it comes from a self devaluation myself , where if I consider myself less than nothing ... But ... Strangely I'm not motivated to do things "correct" and nice for myself. At least, I have never made the effort to organize a nice portfolio of things nice enough yet that I am able to do that it is in coding, 3D, drawing etc ...

As some french expression says :

The shoemaker is always the worst shod ^^ But i am also a little bit disgusted of coding after this, i have a hard time even willing to write code now, in my burn out early stages i begun to not be able to read any code, and i had a panick attack when it happened, so it might have something to do with it...

In short, I was already doing too much.

On top of the market, I had to redo some infographic packagings for the box, put powerpoint presentation presentation for one of the manager / boss of the box, make video montages corresponding to the environment and atmosphere / personality of the company for which we built a website. The official version that the trade commissioners sold to the customers was that we were a great team of journalists, several webmasters and coders, while I was, so to speak, the only one wearing many hats.

When we started getting legal referrals for websites that had been created long before I was in the box (7/8 months before I arrived) it was a panic at the boss level, and well that I have nothing to do with these websites made in the past, I was taken apart in a room to tell me that if a contract is broken I will be responsible and that every time it happens, it will be a debt of 10,000 euros on my head. Even though these sites dating back to long before I arrived in this company were not hosted or set up or coded by my hand.

Hm ... it looked like a kind of threat all the same, something that quickly set the mood, and that began to make me doubt a lot of things.

As these new letters that I was transferred to my professional box office, I was sent all the virulent language couriers who circulated between the accountant and customers, those who circulated between the secretary and customers, and many of these letters had threatening language, sometimes offensive, insulting, propelling me to levels of stress and anxiety that I had never experienced in my life.

And behind all that now, very serious threats from one of the two bosses (a young man from Mauritius 27 years old) and the co boss, a woman over 50 years old, she was playing good cops looking to reassure me every other week when there was one, and the other was absent.

I did not understand their game of the bad cop, good cop, after it was repeated several weeks in a row, and something had "tilt" when I remembered how the boss, a delegate Broken commercial sales and neuromarketting and one-shot contracts, psychologically analyzed the behavior and the way everyone to stand in the small room, offices ...

The boss and the boss knew how to position themselves differently depending on the customers they approached, and according to any individual in fact, I had already noticed that she never spoke twice the same way to a sales representative, as to another, as to the secretary where, the way of expressing and observing the accountant, it was subtle but for everyone there were changes. And sometimes she could not help boasting of this psychological repositioning.

Basically they were playing with me, one scared me and made me angry by imposing results now, and the other, reassured me and told me that everything was fine, that the boss was happy to my job even if he was stressed, a little virulent and sometimes notchy.

But one day ... I started to receive strange e-mails in my professional box ... Which would make me understand that if this little box operates in this way in front of the European laws, bigger companies of the same kind have to rub their hands by ripping off a lot of their customers ...