So I return to work today after yesterday, a day from hell.

My boss has been telling me month after month, “You are the senior trainer on that site. You need to take AUTHORITY. You need to take RESPONSIBILITY. You need to tell the management there that you are the sr. trainer and should be treated as such. You need to tell the other trainers you are the sr. trainer and they have to listen to you.”

So after 9 months of dealing with the crap of another trainer who has been bossing me around since I started there, I finally came out and said it. “I’m the Sr. Trainer and sometimes I have to make decisions and I hope that you all (both trainers) can start to trust that.” Then the bossy trainer said, “I’ve had meetings with my boss about EXACTLY what your job is. Your job means nothing. Your job description is the same as mine. I had my boss send me a copy of your job description and you have no say in what goes on here.” (In other words, the job description that says I have no extra authority or responsibility is the same one she has - she claims - yet SHE has been the “boss” and called the shots for the 1 year and 10 months I’ve worked there… she gathers her authority from the fact she started 5 months before me.)

So I asked what part of my job performance led bossy trainer(BT) to have secret meetings with her boss about MY JOB DESCRIPTION (we have different bosses). BT stammered around and never answered. Truth is, she has had so many complaints filed against her but has kept her job over and over because she deflects those complaints and tries to focus the attention elsewhere by complaining about me.

So I called MY boss and told her what’s going on and she was pissed off and said, “Yes you DO have authority, they have to listen to you, get the other trainers on the phone NOW.” I said I would but if she was going to backpedal and not support me, after I finally did what she had been badgering me to do for months on end, that it would not be forgotten. She promised to support me.

She didn’t. She got on the phone and basically said that any decision would be made by the training “team” (which in BT’s mind meant “made by BT” as it always had) and if no agreement could be reached it would be escalated to the two managers out of state. So she basically threw me under the bus.

BT is 40 percent of the reason I’m miserable at my job. You can’t reason with her, logic with her or deal with her. Any word out of her mouth, she’ll deny two seconds later. I’ve never once seen her take responsibility for her inappropriate behavior. If I have a bad day or get upset about something, she’ll throw it in my face every chance I get as an example of how I “can’t handle this job”.

I’ve tried every way I can to deal with her. I’ve tried every tactic I could. I’ve tried talking to my boss, her boss… nothing works. I’m at my wits end.

To top it off, we have training coming up and I created the invite for the staff SIX DAYS AGO. I put a sign up sheet in the mail room SIX DAYS AGO. But the staff manager has refused to send out the invite for six days. She says there’s nothing wrong with it, she just hasn’t “had time” to click on “forward” and mail to one distribution list. (Takes all of four seconds.) This manager has been retaliating against me since last fall for declining a particularly unreasonable training request, and her sitting on these invites has caused mass confusion to the staff. But she’s doing it on purpose - to make training look disorganized. She has all the power in the local office and there’s nothing I can do about it.

This is typical shit I’ve been dealing with for over a year and I just can’t stand it. Yet I’m trapped because most trainer jobs require travel and I can’t travel because of my dog.

My stress levels are through the roof.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 5:24 am and is filed under Personal.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.