One of the places I work at right now is a really sketchy place, and I absolutely gotta look for a new job. The thing is, I consider the job hunt more stressful than a shitty job itself. Back in October, when I was desperately seeking employment--that was just awful! It's so hard to psych myself back into that mode. I'm going to have to though.
As I mentioned, it's one of the places I work at. I have two jobs. One of those two jobs is actually quite awesome, but unfortunately I only work there 4.5 hours a week. Sadly, the bad job--the sketchy one--is the one where I work most of the time. And I'll be talking about the sketchy one here.
What happens at the sketchy one? Well, I'm a receptionist at a "school" in Etobicoke, and the reason I put school in scare quotes is because it's....it's not much of a school. They have me doing several different things. I do reception but I also teach when they need me. It's pretty messed up, because they do things like tell me I have new students 20 minutes before class, or cancel one of my classes the day of. But that's not as bad as when they "take away" classes from teachers they're not impressed with, or tell me I'm getting a raise (when they're already being beyond insulting by barely paying me above minimum wage) and then decide to change their mind.
My manager is awful and talks bad about everyone. To say it's a toxic atmosphere is being kind. As the receptionist, I have access to a lot of files and all the emails (responding to emails is naturally one of my many jobs as receptionist) and I've read countless emails of her bitching about so many teachers. She's very negative and dramatic, and dealing with her daily is truly bizarre. I can only imagine what she says about me! She and my boss threaten not to pay people if they don't do things properly. Ummm, I'm preettyyy sure you can fire people if they don't do tasks the way you ask, but you can't withhold pay.
Not that they pay us that often to begin with. They only pay us once a month, and even on that one single pay day per month, we don't always get our paycheques. Sometimes we do, but sometimes we're asked not to deposit them right away. If someone quits or someone is fired, they might not get their last paycheque for months. Emails from them will be ignored while their paycheque just sits in the desk for no reason. Yeah, I'm thinking of a specific case here, but it still happened, and I saw it happen!
Also, they sometimes ask the teachers in for training seminars and such but don't pay us for it. They ask us in on weekends, or in a recent case, when some teachers were on their week off. Their week off! And not get paid for it! And this building is all the way in Etobicoke. It's not like it's in Toronto proper and easy to get to (not that that would justify not being paid). It's deep in Etobicoke too, in the middle of nowhere. And traveling there and back is beyond exhausting. Yeah, that has nothing to do with it being sketchy, but it makes everything worse when I show up already drained because it took me an hour and a half to get there, and I'm stressed in advance because I know I have another hour and a half to travel home. At night. Because I work in the evenings. But in the daytime too, when I'm teaching. (Or doing whatever.) Plus, it's in an industrial area along highway. So I have to walk along the damn highway to get to & from the bustop every night, and it's so windy and awful I can't quite find the words to describe it.
My boss barely speaks English and honestly needs an English teacher himself. It's impossible to understand him more than half the time and this adds to so much confusion and miscommunication it's ridiculous. It's like living a punchline to some kind of sitcom, except it's actually real life.
Recently they gave me a book to register for my students, and I had to take a code from the inside of the book and register it on the website to access the teacher's materials. To get the code, I had to scratch a silver sticker off the inside. But the whole sticker came off, making the code unreadable. Instead of simply ordering another book, my manager kept telling me I destroyed the book, the book was garbage, and emailed me repeatedly over the course of an entire week with really vague, confusing, and rather aggressively written suggestions of how to maybe attempt fix the situation...but no real solution in the end. She tends to send me commands and requests with absolutely no instructions and when asked for clarification, will either not respond or reply with equally confusing advice, usually followed by the words "I guess". She once told me to "make a student enrollment contract." I told her I didn't even know what that meant. She told me to read other contracts to get an idea of how to make a contract. Yeah, great directions.
She'll accuse me of not telling her things, and when I patiently resend the emails where I carefully explained the exact things she's accused me of not telling her, she'll just change the subject and never bring it up again. I'd never get an apology, that's too much to ask for!
All right, that's all I can think of for now. There's TONS more, but that's all I can think of off the top of my head, and all I have the energy to write down at the moment. I just wanted to at least start to write these things down, or else I'd never get around to it!
