The Big Scary You - Part 1

 

The Big Scary You – Part 1

 

Have you ever worked for someone for quite a while, and then left – either you quit or you got terminated (putting it nicely), and afterward you looked back at your time there and thought, “how did I do it?”

Well I was in that position. Almost 2 years ago to this day, I started work for someone who I thought I had a bit of a future with. I really thought things would work out with this person, as a friend who I had previously worked with had recommended me to her.  She was looking to take on someone else to work with her cleaning the sites that she had contracts for.

Now before I start with my story I will make one thing clear – as a person this lady was great. She was the kind that would do anything for you and would help you in any way she could if she could. But as a boss? Well that was another thing entirely. Not that she was a “bad” boss. However, her way of doing things was a certain way. In the end it became apparent that she just could not understand my way of thinking or my way of doing things – which was vastly different from hers.

At the beginning it was great. We worked together for the first 4 months doing jobs together and it worked well. We got along quite well and could have a laugh and a joke together. For the sake of this blog I will call her Sandra

So Sandra was pretty happy most of the time and could laugh about most things, and she swore like a sailor (haha). You never had to watch your p’s and q’s around her – for the most part I enjoyed working for her.

Just for clarification’s sake, before I get into the rest of my story, The title of this blog is (as you may have noticed,) “The Big Scary You”. You might even recognize it from somewhere….

The title was used in an episode for “The Walking Dead”. The episode focused on Negan and the Savior’s, a group who, ran by Negan, terrorized other communities, and became a sort of “tax man” to them. Negan and the Savior’s, would supposedly “save” people, by making them part of their “community”, which exercised control over them, and took a percentage of everything they collected from around the place to survive, and everything they grew.

My story here doesn’t have a real lot in common with that particular episode, but the title really does this story justice…The reason is quite simple, this boss of mine scared me! Lol. As I was thinking of a title for this blog, it popped into my head, and I thought immediately, “perfect”!

 Sandra was my boss, and in the end, after a while of working for her, it became apparent that things were not working out. I tried to ignore this fact for a long time, but it started out as a gut feeling, that something just wasn’t right. It was a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach whenever I saw her car there early when I got to work at the first site I cleaned. It was there when I saw that she had called me for some reason. It’s the little things..

I was constantly being reminded that the work I did was not up to standard. Now just for a bit of context, we worked in a factory environment – all the sites we cleaned were industrial. Suffice to say, it was very hard to keep them perfectly clean, and there was not any way it could or even should be kept to the same standard of let’s say, commercial cleaning – offices, schools, etc. Just not possible in places where for example, the floor was black at the end of the shift. If there was an end of shift. One of the sites worked 24 hours (3 shifts), so there was always someone making a mess after you cleaned. The dust in one particular site was there almost immediately after cleaning. The office area of one place literally became dusty the minute the air conditioner/heating was turned on of a Monday morning. So, if you cleaned thoroughly (the desks etc) of a Friday night, well….

These were the facts. Along with other things, the amount of work I was expected to do and the care I was having to take so I didn’t get criticized in the amount of time I was given, was just not enough. I had started to second guess myself, and go over work that I had already done, just to make sure that I wasn’t told off when Sandra came in to inpsect.   In the end I was working long hours and only getting paid for half the amount of the work I was doing. Still my work was not appreciated, and I was constantly being told that I hadn’t cleaned properly, so as already stated,  I was taking longer and going over things more often to try and make sure it was done. Never good enough. Always something I had missed. I could not win, no matter how hard I tried. I knew it was a losing battle somehow, but I still managed to have the strength to go to work, day in, day out. I started to feel overwhelmed most of the time.

The main problem was Sandra could work a lot faster than me. I worked slower, and therefore took longer. But the other smaller issues all added up over time. She knew what she was getting when she got me, in the speed regard, as I had worked for her friend previously. And just to mention, I never had a problem with the other lady. She was great, both she and her husband, and her boys also used to work with me, they would come in at inspection time and go over my work. They loved me, and they were great to work for! So, she recommended me when we lost that contract, and she had no more work for me. She helped me out, and I was grateful for that!

About 5-6 months in, it became obvious to me, that Sandra had slowly gone back on certain things she had said to me at the beginning, when I was first employed by her. I was supposed to be getting more hours. One of my sites was taken off me immediately after Sandra got back from overseas (she was gone for a month where I did all sites).

So, one day when nothing in particular was happening, I was working away, and out of the blue I heard a voice say to me: “you will get more work”. At the time I was surprised, and I tried to make sense of it. At that time, I was still hoping to stay working with Sandy, I really didn’t have any intentions of leaving. We were even looking at going to some of the surrounding workplaces, factories, etc to see if they needed cleaners, to get more business. Sandy was going to drop off some business cards, as she was trying to grow the business. In a way she obviously expected me to stay on, even though her son was out of work and asking for my job.

It’s a funny thing when your self-esteem doesn’t completely crumble when you would actually expect it to. When you seem to have the strength to keep going when in hindsight, with all the pressure and long hours you are doing, with not much appreciation, you still manage to keep going.

I am actually quite amazed at my optimistic and calm outlook and attitude at the time. Where I could have been complaining and getting angry, I was taking it all in my stride. For those that know me, know that I can have a sassy attitude and can very often have a short fuse. But during this time and working for Sandra, I managed to keep cool, calm and collected.

She once told me, not long before I finished up with her, that my work wasn’t even half the standard that she expected from me. I couldn’t work anywhere near as good as her. (I found myself thinking, well, do it then! Lol). But never once did I talk back to her. She told me the thing that she liked most about me was I never once told her to f*ck off, that I took everything that she said to me with a good attitude.

So, she obviously knew that she could be a bit harsh on me, maybe border-lining on unfair. I mean, I can see in part where she was coming from. She was used to working at a certain speed and at a certain standard and the people who we worked for had come to expect that of her. She had taken on extra work for them (for example we were even doing their dishes), which wasn’t on the contract. She was cleaning out their fridges when they got full, perhaps every 6 moths of so, and we were also cleaning out their microwaves, which also as far as I know, wasn’t part of the contract. Their floors got really dirty very quickly, as tradies were always on site and with white tiles they got grimy and black in the grout very easily. They weren’t willing to pay for them to be cleaned (floor stripped back etc), and so the mopping just got more difficult until Sandra gave in and did them for free.

It was things like this that made it hard for her, I know, along with the fact that she had not received a pay rise for the whole 12 years she had been working for [one] of them. Lots of issues with the contract were causing her frustration and there were different issues with different sites. I understand all of that. That is why I guess I tried to stay on for as long as I could.

I am a loyal person at heart, and I don’t like to give up on people.

 

End Part 1