Friend, Wake Up: You’re Not Inheriting the Company
This happened to a neighbor’s daughter, all because she didn’t check the contract’s fine print in time, although it would have been of little use to her.
I ran into her on the bus one day, on my way home. She had a face like thunder, so I worked up the nerve, said hi, and asked if she was okay. My mistake, being friendly turned me into her trauma therapist for a while (kidding).
She told me she’d been having a rough few months. She’d started a new job almost a year earlier. At her previous one she had an internship contract with terrible conditions, so she’d gone looking, and the moment she found something that fit, she made the jump.
The interview for this new job had two rounds. The first was an HR screening that barely told her anything, just the number she’d be paid, which matched her expected range. The rest of her questions were left hanging, the HR person apologized, saying she didn’t have all the details, but that the next interview, with the project manager, would clear everything up.
The second interview came around. She felt genuinely happy to be moving forward and not getting cut after the first call. She’d been job hunting for a while, sitting in that low, desperate place, thinking she just wasn’t cut out for the working world, so making it this far gave her a real boost. This interview was just her and the manager, who, as she found out later, didn’t actually work for the company hiring her, but for the client. Nobody from HR being there struck her as odd, but in the interview she was the one asking questions and the manager the one answering them.
She remembers clearly making a point of telling both HR and the manager that there were certain tasks she didn’t want to do. She wasn’t chasing one specific role, she was open to something else entirely. Both of them assured her not to worry, that wasn’t the position they had in mind.
A week later they called to tell her the job was hers, with a start date, first she’d have to go to the hiring company’s office to sign the contract, then head to the client’s office to start. The day arrived. She was nervous, but excited too, this meant a real step up, more responsibility than before.
She went straight in to sign the contract, and that’s where the surprise landed. Right after she signed, the HR person pulled out another sheet for her to sign. It was a clause requiring her to be on call. Nobody, at any point, had mentioned mandatory on-call duty, and on-call duty was exactly what she’d said, clearly, she didn’t want. She said as much to HR, somewhere between angry and scared. The answer was that it was just a formality the client required, that everyone signed it, but that didn’t actually mean she’d have to do it. She almost refused to sign. But she needed the paycheck. She could sign and start looking again, though it bothered her deeply that, from minute zero, there were already big lies sitting on the table.
Everything was fine for three months. Then they moved her to a different project and dropped her straight into the role she’d explicitly said she didn’t want. Nobody asked her, nobody gave her time to react. She went home one day like any other, and the next found an email from her new manager waiting for her. Not even a face-to-face conversation to break the news. From then on, she was on call every other week. She worked Monday to Monday, 24 hours a day, because on top of everything, the workload was so heavy she started putting in overtime.
So much overtime that her manager at the company that had hired her sat her down one day and explained, very kindly, that HR had flagged the whole team for logging too much overtime, and that legally there was a cap. So, from that day on, those hours stopped being called overtime, and since they technically weren’t overtime anymore, they’d be compensated with time off instead, only the hours within the legal limit would actually get paid.
The extra hours, of course, were still there. When she’d reviewed the terms on her way in, the HR person had told her the company gave employees 30 working days of vacation. On paper, that sounded great. In practice, those 30 days, plus every day banked from the “not overtime,” turned into a problem, if she didn’t use them within the year, they threatened to take them away, but there was never time to actually take them, and it was always the wrong moment to ask.
She was sick of that job, felt completely deceived, and had almost no energy left. She was searching everywhere, desperate to switch to any place, any industry, doing anything else. All she wanted was out.
Here’s what she took from that experience:
- Get everything in writing in the pre-contract, so you have something to point to if it’s ever broken.
- Read the contract’s fine print days before you sign, not the same day you’re about to sign it, almost nobody does this, but you’re allowed to ask for the time and get a lawyer to look it over.
- Report it when the issue is serious enough, like disguising overtime so it doesn’t have to be paid.
- Being deceived doesn’t mean you failed, don’t let it wreck your ambitions or your spirit.
There will always be people and companies with bad practices. Running into one is nearly unavoidable. What matters is getting out in time, before it wears you down or turns you into someone you don’t recognize, someone who’s lost what actually makes them who they are.
If you’ve got your own workplace story to share, write to me at jenniffer@guaduastudio.com and I’ll publish it anonymously in upcoming posts. Just make sure to close your story with what you learned from it, whatever good came out of it. Thanks.
