Friend, Wake Up: You’re Not Inheriting the Company
This happened to a friend who told me about it as she was living through it, week by week.
She found this internship through the university’s job placement office, tied to a training program: evening classes on top of university classes and an eight-hour workday, eight to three. She was young, with energy to spare for all three at once. The job: filling out spreadsheets and copying technical documentation into Word. She stayed eight months and never really understood how her own job was supposed to be done, because nobody bothered to explain it. There was no university advisor watching over this internship, just the program itself, which kept insisting that if they asked for overtime, interns could say no. In practice, nobody ever said anything. It already smelled like a toxic work environment from week one.
The office sat inside a building that was actually a parking garage. No windows to the outside. Walking out meant walking straight into the garage. The bathrooms were out there too, with windows that wouldn’t close and that could be seen straight into from the floors above. In winter, going to the bathroom meant getting cold and feeling watched. She found one bathroom on the floor below with a window that actually closed. Farther away, colder walk, but at least some privacy.
Her assigned mentor inside the company was in a different department and never gave her a single instruction, she only saw him the day she started. The person who ended up teaching her the job was a coworker who was very comfortable there because he was the boss’s son-in-law, which made him untouchable during the layoffs that started soon after. For months, someone left every Friday. Nobody was hired to replace them, so the same workload kept landing on fewer and fewer people. Mondays became an exercise in holding your breath.
One day that coworker went on vacation and left her his task: talk to the technical team, get the information, document it. She’d spent weeks watching him do exactly that. She walked up to the technical lead, a man who’d always been friendly, cracked jokes, and asked for the information she needed. No smile, a sour look on his face, and a flat “I’m not doing your job for you.” She froze. He was a big man, she felt tiny, and she walked away with no idea what to do. She did nothing, literally nothing, for a week. When her coworker came back from vacation and found the task undone, he got angry with her. Nobody needed to make her feel worse, she already felt bad enough on her own. But from then on, that sentence kept looping in her head, next to another one she started building herself: “and I’m not doing yours either, I’m just an intern they treat like garbage.”
The layoffs kept coming, the workload didn’t shrink, the people did. One day her coworker told her he had a request, “the boss’s idea,” and that she could say no, but it wouldn’t look good if she did, just so she’d keep that in mind. He asked her to work a full shift. She did. A whole week on a regular employee’s schedule, without a regular employee’s contract. She didn’t have the experience yet to recognize that this wasn’t a normal ask, so she let herself be talked into it, thinking it might also earn her points toward a permanent contract.
The cold, distant bathroom caught up with her. One day she woke up with sharp back pain and told her coworker she needed to see a doctor. He looked at her, dead serious: “You don’t look sick enough, they won’t let you leave, around here they need to see you collapsed on the floor before they let you go home sick.” She toughed out the whole shift and went straight to the ER afterward with a high fever. A week off work: a kidney infection, from holding it in for too long. Everything has consequences.
After eight months of anxiety and what she now describes as depression, she gathered the courage to walk into her boss’s office and ask if there was any chance of a contract once the internship ended. He told her they were very happy with her work and her commitment, but a full-time contract was out of the question, they weren’t hiring anyone. Then he added that she should ask the university about extending her internship, because it would really help them if she stayed, they needed the hands. She was speechless. She felt like she’d been played for a fool. She left a few days later.
What she took from it:
- Health comes first. No job is worth losing it, because to a company you’re a replaceable resource, not a person.
- Coworkers aren’t friends, they’re people doing their job, and if helping you isn’t required, they won’t.
- Crying, feeling overwhelmed or sad isn’t weakness, it’s a sign that something’s wrong and it’s time to stop so you can spot a toxic work environment before it costs you.
Sometime later that company filed for bankruptcy and shut down. When all you know how to produce is garbage, sooner or later you end up in the garbage too.
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.
