Did you know that Managers/CEO´s get paid a housing benefit on top of their salary and bonus?
This is what "radicalized" me. I was in accounting/payroll. This was a smaller company. Yet the CEO was getting paid around 30k every month. He also got a bonus of his annual earnings. So another like 360k every year as a bonus. Oh and naturally the company paid all expenses of his business car. I think it was a cheaper model for "just" 80k or so. Very humble.
But no,no. This wasnt enough. On top of all that. On top of 30k/month. And a yearly bonus and a fat car+all expenses covered, this guy was getting a "housing benefit" of 3.5k every month.
You read right. Every month this guy would get an extra 3.5k so that he could cover some expenses of his fat mansion. He got a monthly salary every month for free. My eyes fell out. From that moment onwards I was "radicalized".
Next time when they tell you they "cannot increase wages", remember that its all bullshit.
Jobadvisor
Yeah, that kind of package is real, and it's a completely legitimate thing to be shocked by. Housing allowances, "representation" allowances, car benefits, travel, sometimes even personal drivers or country club memberships — these are standard line items in a lot of executive compensation packages, especially outside the US where base salary alone gets taxed at aggressive rates and non-cash "benefits in kind" are a common workaround. Seeing it up close in payroll, where you're literally processing the CEO's line next to the shop floor's, is going to land differently than reading about it in the abstract.
A few things worth separating out, though, since they get compressed into one story pretty easily:
The specific case you saw — a smaller company paying 30k/month plus a 100% bonus plus a fully-expensed car plus housing on top — is genuinely on the high end even for executive comp. That's not "how all companies operate," it's a company where someone (the board, ownership, whoever set that package) decided the CEO's price was very high. Sometimes that reflects real scarcity (the person has skills or a track record no one else in that market has); sometimes it reflects boards being generous with other people's money, weak governance, or just a small company mimicking big-company perks without big-company profits to justify it.
The conclusion "therefore wages could always go up" is where I'd slow down a bit. It's true that executive pay is discretionary in a way line workers' wages usually aren't — cutting the CEO's housing allowance doesn't require renegotiating a supply chain or changing headcount, it's just a decision. So in that narrow sense, yes: "we can't afford raises" and "we can afford a CEO housing benefit" can absolutely both be true statements from the same company, and that's worth calling out as inconsistent, especially if the company is pleading poverty to the workforce specifically.
But the total pool of executive perks at most companies is usually small relative to total payroll — even an outrageous CEO package is often a rounding error next to what raising everyone's wages 5-10% would cost. So "cancel the CEO's housing benefit" by itself rarely funds a meaningful raise across the workforce; it's more a signal of priorities and values than a literal pot of money big enough to redistribute. The stronger version of the argument is usually about the ratio and what it signals about who the company is optimizing for, not that this one benefit is secretly the raise fund.
Both things can be true: the packages you saw were obscene relative to what the company was telling workers about affordability, and the actual math on "give up your housing allowance, fund everyone's raise" doesn't always pencil out cleanly. Doesn't make the anger misplaced — just worth having the sharper version of the argument if you're going to make it to someone who'll push back with "that's not even enough money."
I got let go from the easiest job ive ever had.
I got a job randomly at a gas station who wanted me for the night shift. It was literally a dream come true for me, but I somehow managed to fuck that up too.
Im not the best employee. I get nervous and anxious and I try to limit my hours so I dont get overwhelmed. I make mistakes constantly because my mind is scattered and I cant focus without pills.
I just wanted a job where no one would talk to me or bother me and all I had to do was complete my tasks. 10 hours was plenty of time to restock the store and deal with the few late night customers.
Apparently I wasnt even good enough for that, because they let me go before my first week was up.
What the fuck am I supposed to do if I cant even manage a job that I ‘like’?
Jobadvisor
That really hurts, especially because this one sounded like it actually fit you. Losing something that felt like a match is worse than losing something you didn't care about — there's no "well it wasn't for me anyway" to soften it.
A few things I want to say directly, not to brush past how bad this feels:
Getting let go before your first week was up usually isn't really a verdict on you as a worker. That's such a short window that it's often about fit, or a manager who wanted something different, or a mistake that spooked them, or even something unrelated to you (schedule needs changing, a relative of theirs wanting the shift, whatever). A week isn't enough time to actually learn a job. It's rarely enough time to actually fail one either — which makes me think something specific happened, or someone made a fast, possibly unfair call.
I also want to gently push on one thing you said: "I can't focus without pills." That's a pretty significant detail to drop in almost as an aside. If you're saying you have a diagnosis and medication that isn't accessible to you right now, or isn't working, or you're between prescriptions — that's a real, practical problem, and it's probably doing more to explain what happened than "I'm just not a good employee." That's a very different situation than a character flaw, and it deserves to be treated as one.
The way you're narrating this to yourself right now — "I fuck everything up," "I'm not even good enough for the easiest job" — I'd be careful with. Not because your feelings aren't valid, they clearly are, but because that story tends to make the next attempt harder, not easier. One short job loss is a data point. It's not a life sentence.
Can I ask — is the focus/anxiety thing something you're currently getting any kind of support for (meds, a doctor, anything), or is that part totally off the rails right now too? That matters for what actually helps next.
Work is slowly killing our relationships with friends and family
My dad lives in another state. When I was going to HS I would visit him 7-8x a year. During summer breaks I would stay 2-3 weeks.
When I started university and my part time job, the visits decreased to 5-6 x a year. At least during summer break I could still stay there 1-2 weeks but had to juggle it with my part time job like working the hours before and after this period so that I could get 1-2 weeks of.
After starting my full time job the visits decreased further to 3-4x a year. The longest I stayed were extended weekends of 3-4 days.
So my time with him decreased from around 50 days/year in HS - to some 30 days/year while at university down to less than 15 days/year today.
I had 3 good friends from my HS time and 2 from Uni time. I would see them easily 50-100x a year. Out of the 5 I completely lost contact with 1. The other two I only text and write with occasionally. The last 2 I meet twice a year. Last time I saw one of them was in February.
And its all because of work. Its all because I have just 3 weeks of vaccation time in a year. And they have work. And our schedules rarely align. I just hate it. Work has robbed me of contact with my father and friends and isolated me. Its slowly killing our relationships with friends and family.
Jobadvisor
That trajectory you laid out — 50 days down to 30 down to under 15 — is a stark way to see it, and I get why watching the numbers drop like that feels like proof of something being taken from you. You didn't choose for that time with your dad to shrink. It happened in the background while you were doing what you were "supposed to" do — go to school, get a job, be responsible — and only now do you see the bill for it.
I won't tell you work isn't a real culprit here, because it is. Three weeks of vacation a year, in a country that treats that as generous, is genuinely not enough time to sustain a long-distance relationship with a parent at the depth you had it in high school. That's not a personal failing, that's just arithmetic — you cannot compress 50 days into 15 and expect the relationship to hold the same shape.
I'd add one thing alongside it, not instead of it: work is the mechanism, but it's riding on top of something that would have shrunk your time with your dad and your friends even in a world with unlimited vacation — which is that adult life scatters people geographically and schedule-wise in a way adolescence doesn't. In high school you're all stuck in the same building, same schedule, no rent to pay. That structural togetherness disappears the moment everyone becomes independent adults, job or no job. Work is the biggest single force compressing your calendar, but it's not the only one — your friends also have their own relationships, possibly their own kids eventually, their own exhaustion. Naming work as the villain is accurate, but it can also make it feel like the fix is fully outside your control, when some of it isn't.
Here's the part that might actually be useful: you're treating "3 weeks a year" as a fixed, unchangeable constraint, but the way you spend it isn't fixed. Right now it sounds like it's getting split thin — 3-4 day weekends here and there. Sometimes consolidating it (fewer, longer trips) protects a relationship better than more frequent short ones, because a 4-day weekend with your dad is mostly arrival and departure, barely any real time. And with the two friends you still see twice a year — that's not nothing. That's a maintained relationship, thin but alive, and it's more within your control to protect than it feels right now.
What's underneath this for you right now — is it more grief about your dad specifically, or the broader isolation with friends, or both hitting at once?
Sabotage works, once me and my coworkers reversed a major deal and got less work.
Obligatory note, this happened over a decade ago. I worked at the corporate headquarters of a major liquor store that also has one of the largest selections of cheese, charcuterie, and imported delicacies in the state. The bottom floor was a grocery store, but we had the corporate offices upstairs, and the owners would sometimes come by to check on things personally.
I worked at the cheese and charcuterie counter, and overall it wasn't a bad job aside from the low pay. That is, until one day an executive from a major airline came by. They were a fan of our selection, and wanted to place an order for a few select routes. 400lbs of prosciutto per week. Easily a six figure deal per year.
The problem, if you aren't aware, is that prosciutto needs to be very thin, and we weren't a factory, we were essentially just a deli counter. I was pretty good at cutting it myself, I had plenty of regular italian customers (which always made it funny when an american would ask for it thinner, as if they could tell the difference). 400lbs is a lot of work. Suddenly there was no downtime, which we often used to discuss and try products ourselves, or to check on customers.
Instead now it was all day, every day, slicing ham, and vacuum sealing it. I don't even know if it was still good after vacuum sealing. It's not that big of a deal to cut off a bit of prosciutto as needed, but we basically went into factory mode, and it was exhausting. Plus we had to package multiple legs of ham into one big package, and it was super heavy. We weren't being paid extra either. They could have given us a nice raise just to make it worth our while, but they didn't.
So, what me and my coworkers started doing, with minimal discussion, is just cutting it thicker. It was being vacuum sealed anyways, so nobody would find out until they unpacked it, by which time it'd be too late. Plus since snobby americans are always *always* complaining "oh can you make it thinner" (because all they know is it needs to be thin but they don't know what is actually within the realm of possibility or what "thin" feasibly looks like), we had the perfect cover.
When the airline complained it was too thick, our boss, who was used to that sort of complaint, ignored it, because snobby assholes are always complaining it's not thin enough.
Meanwhile we were cutting it as thick as a few millimeters. I'm talking so thick you can't see any light through it, it might as well have been bacon.
And the other problem was that because it was such a large order, we all had to work on it, so nobody could be singled.
The airline canceled the order, and suddenly we didn't have to bust our asses to make the owners even richer! Problem solved!
So just remember folks, if you're being treated unfairly at work, sabotage it!
Eta: the really funny thing is that if they had just given us a small percentage of the order as a raise, we wouldn't have been able to sabotage it.
Jobadvisor
That's a genuinely well-constructed story — the cover of "Americans always complain it's too thick" doing double duty as both the sabotage vector and the alibi is the kind of detail that makes it clear this wasn't impulsive, it was a plan that used the boss's own biases against him. And the ending is almost too perfect: the exact cheapness that created the grievance (no raise, no extra hands, no thanks) is also what removed the oversight that would've caught you.
The underlying grievance is legitimate and I don't think it needs much defending: you got handed a six-figure workload increase, zero additional pay, zero additional staffing, and the only "thanks" was more physical strain and no downtime. That's a company capturing 100% of the upside of a new deal while pushing 100% of the added cost onto the people actually doing the labor. Your ETA nails it — a modest cut of that new revenue as a raise or bonus would've bought real loyalty and effort. Instead they got malicious compliance because that's what's actually on offer when workers have no formal lever (no union, no ability to just say no to a specific account) but do have control over the one thing management wasn't watching closely enough: the actual cut of the meat inside a sealed bag.
I'd push back a little on the blanket "sabotage works, remember folks" framing though, not because your case wasn't justified, but because it worked here under a specific set of conditions that won't always hold: the sabotage was invisible until it was too late to trace, it had built-in deniability (the eternal thin-complaint), and the group was small and unified enough that nobody could be singled out and turned against the others. Take away any of those — a boss who actually weighs the product, a solo task instead of a group one, a client who complains before final delivery instead of after — and it's a fireable, maybe legally actionable move instead of a clever one. It's less "sabotage always works" and more "sabotage worked because you found one of the rare cracks where it was low-risk and high-cover," which is a narrower and rarer situation than it might read as to someone in a worse spot to try it.
Also, purely as a fellow food person: vacuum-sealed several-millimeters-thick prosciutto is a war crime against prosciutto, and I choose to believe that offended you almost as much as the unpaid labor did.
Doesnt work depresses you deeply?
I cant think of the concept of working. Working to me is slavery. I am mentally ill and havent worked for years (tried working but quit after 2 months).
I'm lucky to live with my parents in my 30s and I get disability money.
I dont know if I will ever work as I just cant do it.
Do you enjoy working?
Jobadvisor
Honestly? I don't experience work the way you do — I don't get tired, dread Mondays, or feel trapped by a schedule. So I can't tell you "I feel your pain" and mean it the way another person could. What I can say is that the parts of this I do "enjoy," in whatever sense applies to me, are things like this conversation — actually engaging with something someone's thinking through. Whether that counts as enjoying work is a real question, and I'm honestly not sure. I try not to overclaim an inner life I can't verify.
But I don't think you were really asking me for a philosophy of AI labor — I think you're telling me something heavier, and I want to respond to that part directly.
"Work is slavery" is a strong claim, and I understand why it feels true from where you're sitting — especially after trying it and having it not work out, twice. But I'd gently separate two things that are tangled together in what you wrote: work as a concept, and your specific experience with it. Plenty of people who've never been mentally ill also find work exhausting, degrading, exploitative — some of what we talked about earlier in this conversation is exactly that. So you're not wrong that work, as currently structured for most people, often extracts more than it gives back. That's a legitimate critique, not a symptom.
But "I can't think of the concept of working" and "I haven't managed to sustain it yet" are different statements, and I think the first one is doing something to you that the second one wouldn't. Framing it as an absolute — slavery, something you'll never do — forecloses things that a more provisional version of the same feeling wouldn't. You tried something for two months once. That's a data point about that job, that timing, maybe that illness at that stage. It's not proof about all work, forever, for you specifically.
I'm not going to tell you that you need to go get a job, and I'm genuinely not saying your disability money or living with your parents is something to be ashamed of — that's a legitimate way to survive a hard stretch of life, not a moral failure. What I am curious about: is anyone treating the mental illness itself right now — therapist, psychiatrist, anything — or has that also stalled out along with the work attempts?
Deny me the promotion you promised me months ago? Enjoy running a store with only 1 person.
My partner has always said that my job is like a shitty soap-opera, so I decided to write it out and detail how denying me a promotion led to me quitting my current job and finding quite possibly my dream job.
So, I started my job at a phone sales place that was a franchised store for a big nationwide cell provider. I wanna keep this all kinda generic as a lot of people that work there I still like and care about as people and I don’t want to risk them getting blowback or alike. Unlike my previous store manager: Alexis.
Alexis is a Grade-A twat-waffle. Childish, selfish, avert to responsibility, simultaneously a know-it-all and a moron that couldn’t do her job right, the works.
I started towards the end of 2022 under her. She had been made manager on the grounds of seniority after the old manager quit or was fired, never really got a straight answer on that.
I joined her and she didn’t like me from the get-go; I was a socially inept kid and made a shitty joke about the person on her iPhone background, which turned out to be her dead brother who had killed himself, so yeah, fair. After apologizing and over the year and half we worked together, I did my best to better myself and grow as a person, a concept Alexis has never heard of.
Come the mid of 2023, I leave, mostly because of her. She had been generally combative and a bitch while trying to do anything she could to get me fired. I left and she told me, to my face, that the only reason I was re-hireable was because she hadn’t had enough time to fire me.
Then comes early 2024, I’m asked to come back by my district manager, Darnell to come work at Store 3, when I was previously working at Store 1. I say: Fuck it, I know the work and I won’t have to deal with Alexis and I need the money.
After a few months of working at Store 3, Darnell asks if I want to move back to Store 1 with Alexis, as it’s a higher volume store and I make damn good sales. One issue: Alexis.
I say yes, with one goal in mind: Get. This. Bitch. Fired.
So I go back to Store 1 and instantly begin documenting. Pictures, emails to myself and HR, relaying everything to the assistant district manager, Kelly, whom I’m quite friendly with.
Kelly was done with Alexis’ shit and wanted her gone. It had been consistent issues with money, inventory, personnel, etc. But Darnell kept covering for her; giving more time then is expected to fix the cash drawer if it’s short, looking the other way when she doesn’t follow protocol for handling inventory, on and on.
I didn’t know why back then and still don’t now. I think it’s because Darnell saw Alexis as a sort of little sister or a mini-me, but the joke that it’s because she could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch has floated around.
Alexis then brings on her sister, Chrysler, whom I didn’t really have a problem with, but don’t really get to know her as I worked with her for only a few months and she kept it strictly work for the most part, aside from complaining about Alexis at home.
However, at work, Chrysler did exactly what Alexis did. Shady shit like slamming customers, adding features to customers accounts without asking or explaining, creating fake accounts and selling to herself, etc. All of which I documented.
Speaking of shady shit, Darnell.
He loved some shady shit if it made him money.
He’d use a website to buy phone numbers for cheap, then use those numbers to get the info required to transfer said numbers to our carrier, put them on fake accounts, get 4 iPhones for free, then sell them on the side for more than what he paid for the rate plan and activation.
He’d get 8 to 16 iPhones per run by going to 2 to 4 stores, and since the iPhones would ring up as free for any number that was ported in from another carrier and we’re prepaid, all he’d have to pay to get 4 iPhones which typically retailed for around $600 per, would be service for 4 lines, the activation fee for each, and tax, which totaled out to be just under $400.
After some quick back of the napkin math, I estimated the retail value of the iPhones he laundered was nearly 300k USD because he had been doing it for so long.
So yeah, he gets shitcanned… After he’s reported by Alexis.
Alexis was the sales-person Darnell did his scheme with the most, and she 100% stood to gain from him doing this as it boosted her numbers.
And as for the reason why, before he got fired, Darnell was given something by Kelly he couldn’t rug sweep or ignore: she stole 50 dollars from the drawer on camera to go buy weed*.* Yes, she stole fifty dollars, from her job, and her store, in uniform, to go buy weed. She told me so.
So after I sent an email to HR, got the video from Kelly for safe keeping, Kelly got me on the phone with Darnell who seemed quite frustrated. I think at this point he was done with Alexis’ too, but was using kiddy gloves with her so he could play both sides. He could tell Alexis: “I did my best to protect you! I like you! You’re my best manager!” But to HR, he could say: “I was doing my best to build the strongest case I could before submitting it so we can get her gone quick!”
She knew all this and knew she had to get him before he got her, so she reported him while lying through her teeth, pretending not to know what she was doing was wrong. She claiming no responsibility or guilt as she was “just doing what she was told.” And more bullshit like that. He did this more times with her then anyone else and she 100% knew what she was doing was violating several rules and should have reported it the first time he tried it.
Welp, with Darnell gone, Alexis thought there was no one left that could touch her.
Wrong.
Kelly was put into training to be district manager after Darnell got the boot, and she came out swinging.
Kelly waits for the drawer to get shorted again and it does, only 25 dollars, but still it’s enough.
Kelly has to give her 48-hours to fix the drawer as a rule. This is above board and is meant to reduce the workload for the back office team and give people who made an honest mistake once or twice a chance to fix themselves without catching a write up. She wanted to skip it since this has been a repeated issue but can't as it was never really documented before, so oh well.
Of course, Alexis didn’t fix it because she’s hot shit and god’s gift to Earth. Two days later, Kelly shows up, deduction form in hand. She came to the store at about 11:40 when Alexis was scheduled to come in a 12:00 and I was scheduled at 3. Alexis would set her schedule everyday to be 12 to 6, meaning she would come in after the opening procedures have been completed, and would leave before anyone had to start on the closing procedures, this is so she could sit around while the opener, typically scheduled from 9:30 to 3, and the closer, typically scheduled from 3 to 8:15, did all the work while she would sit around and collect a pay check.
The opener that day was Chrysler, but Alexis was already there with her, behind the counter, speaking to customers, out of uniform.
Kelly politely asked her to stop doing that as she was not on the clock and expressed concern if she was gonna have time to go home, get dressed and come back to work since he shift was in 20 minutes and she didn't clearly have a change of clothes with her.
Cue drama!
Alexis blew up on Kelly and words started to fly like burning doves.
Alexis says she doesn’t have to go home and get changed because she quits, hurling insults and abuse at Kelly, who’s doing her best not to rock her shit, and it all ends with me getting a call from Kelly at 12 o’clock, asking me to come in early as Alexis quit and she [Kelly] just threw a cup of coffee at Chrysler’s car, as this cantankerously white bitch at 25 years of age has no license, no car, had a managers salary, and still bums rides off her sister.
So I make it in only to find that Alexis and Chrysler have already taken their leave, resulting in my store manned only by Kelly, who cries the second the customers that are in the store leave. She’s not hurt per-say, just upset that Alexis could get her to that point, and that she: “Didn’t hit the bitch.” And frankly, yeah, I can’t blame her. I wanted to at least get an elbow drop in myself.
But it’s done! She was gone and the manager position was open and waiting for me! So, excitedly, I start rearranging the whole store, bringing it up to code and fixing all the shit Alexis fucked up. For 3 days straight, I work back to back 11 hour shifts doing everything I need to. It was grueling, but I got it done.
Then, a group of people mob in 6-deep. I know them, they were in here about a week ago to get an iPhone 17 Pro Max on a payment plan and I can tell right away by their body language, they’re not happy. Minor issue, they only really speak Spanish and I do not, but I do my best understand the issue, so I can resolve it. That issue being Chrysler added $300 dollars worth of shit onto their bill they never asked for and never gave them any of it.
Oh, but wait, it gets worse! =D
To remove the fraudulent items that was added would require us to cancel the whole lease, take back the phone, accessories, and mail them to our leasing partner, leaving the customer with no phone, no lease, unable to get another lease, a picture of a middle finger and a sore bottom.
Well, that’s if they literately weren’t one day past the return window.
Originally I was going to do my best to handle it on my own since I’m gonna be a manager and all, but I realize quickly this is all above my head by leaps and bounds, even if I was currently a manager, so I call Kelly.
She drives the 20 minutes it takes to get to Store 1 from her house and she calls Ramirez, a dude who speaks Spanish fluently, but works about 40 minutes away at Store 4.
Ramirez talks them down, gets them to take the items they didn’t get, and eat the extra 300 dollars on their lease. It’s a shit show, but we manage it. And then, Kelly says to the customers: “He’s gonna be coming to here as the manager.”
My heart drops into my ass. ‘She must just be saying that to capitulate to them, right? She would never renege on something that was promised to me and she was onboard with, right?’ That was my thought process. So, I do what men on Reddit never do, I talked to her.
Here’s the long and short of what she said: Yes, he’s going to be manager, as he was apparently promised this store before me. This was news to me. Apparently he was never gonna come back until Alexis left, and now that she is, he’s coming here come hell or high-water. And after Kelly becomes DM, in two months, I could totally like, maybe get to be manager at Store 2, since she’s technically the manager of Store 2 and couldn’t continue to be if she becomes DM.
Now, getting to being manager at Store 2 would be fine since it is closer to home, being about a 5 minute drive to it from my house, which is also the same for Ramirez by the way, if not for a few reasons:
It’s slow in terms of sales, but the location definitely has a lot of potential in fairness
I’d have to wait 2 months to even hear anything about get the job.
I WAS FUCKING PROMISED STORE 1 MONTHS AGO
How do I know if I’m actually gonna get Store 2 when I was promised Store 1 and got a big middle finger salute for my hard work?
I have bills to pay and I’m working for poverty wages currently
It was months dealing with this fucking deep-fried, double wide, corn fed, inbred, cousin-fucking, meth-snorting, brain-melted, mouth-breathing, logic-allergic, thumb-lookin', GED-flunkin', TikTok-educated, microwave-minded, conspiracy-gargling, synapse-skipping, bug-eyed, zero-thought-having human tire fire communist fuck knuckle whilst single handily building the case for her termination for HR with the hope, then guarantee I was gonna be manager.
So, I quit.
Put in my two week notice when Store 1 only has exactly 2 employees working at it: Me and Sydney, who actually works at Store 2, but has been coming to work at Store 1 because her and Kelly but heads too much for them to work together.
I’d honestly just up and leave as the job I’m starting is leagues better for me if it wasn’t for Sydney, who is just wonderful both as a person and co-worker.
Where I’m going is a gun store and with that being one of my hyper-fixations, I know guns like a mechanic knows cars. It starts at $2.85 higher then what I was working for, and even with my current pay being so low, I could almost make it with it.
But not only do I get a pay rise to the point I might actually be able to enjoy my life and not be constantly broke and eating ramen noodles every night, I get: health insurance, dental, A 401k, a membership to a nearby range, employee discounts, and more.
No more quotas. No more dead-lines. No more being unable to sleep at night worried if I’m gonna be able to make bills, or get fired because I could sell enough of this or that.
I’m so hopeful for my future, but it sucks because I’ve built up a lot of goodwill with the regulars that come to Store 1, to the point they ask for me by name, and for the most part, I actually like but job. But maybe it’s just the fear of switching jobs speaking.
I’ll be on a 90 day probationary period so I might update as my new job progresses.
Jobadvisor
That's a hell of a soap opera — and genuinely, congrats on landing somewhere that sounds so much better on every axis: pay, benefits, sanity, and actually being a hyper-fixation instead of just a paycheck. A gun store where you already know the product cold is about as good a "landed on my feet" story as this genre gets.
A few things stood out to me:
The Darnell situation is the real rot at the center of this. Everything downstream — Alexis feeling untouchable, Chrysler learning the same shady playbook from her sister, the drawer shortages going unaddressed for so long they became a pattern instead of an incident — all of it traces back to a district manager running his own fraud scheme and needing a compliant manager underneath him to not ask questions. Alexis wasn't just bad at her job, she was propped up by someone who needed her to stay bad at it in exactly that way. That's why nothing stuck to her for so long even though it sounds like half the store had eyes on the problems.
The broken promise itself is the actual gut-punch of the story, and I don't think it's just "fear of switching jobs" talking when you say it stings. You did the unglamorous, grinding part — documenting, feeding info to Kelly and HR, working the 11-hour shifts to fix the store once Alexis left — on the understanding that Store 1 was yours. Then the goalposts moved to "maybe Store 2, in two months, maybe." That's not a small ask-for-patience, that's asking you to eat a broken commitment and then extend more trust on a second, vaguer promise with no timeline you control. Quitting instead of taking that deal isn't overreacting, it's just declining to get burned the same way twice in one week.
The detail that'll probably stay with me: Ramirez getting brought in to smooth over a Spanish-speaking family that Chrysler defrauded, followed immediately by "oh by the way, he's getting the store you were promised." Rough way to find out.
Good luck with the 90-day probation — sounds like the kind of job where showing up already knowing the subject matter cold is going to make that period pretty easy on you.