Never Meant to Be Sent: Angry Letter to My Old Boss

Dear -----,

It's been more than a year since I worked for you. I spent three years of my life under your nose. I'm still angry at you. I decided writing a letter that you'll never read might help me to get over you.

I think about you sitting in your chair. You'd come to work with your hair still wet. You were often late. You drove like a maniac in the parking lot. You bragged about speeding tickets.

You'd smack on chips and carrots. Anyone with misophonia would scowl. You'd change my work without telling me. You'd yell at me on the phone. You'd run to your boss to complain about me.

I believe for the greater portion of those three years you wanted me to either quit or get fired. I don't know why you hated me so much, but it caused me to look at you with very critical eyes. There came a point that I wished pain on you. I would daydream about some pretty sick things happening to you. Perhaps I should be asking for your forgiveness.

You and another boss put me on a Performance Improvement Plan. The date on it was listed five months before it was issued to me. I called HR on you and met with the boss above all of you. I told the HR manager that you didn't write out any measurable goals in your PIP. You yelled at me on the phone. You blamed me for scheduling errors that were out of my control. You would make me sound like a worse employee than I was to my bosses.

The letter you wrote me could have painted a room red. My husband was so angry when he read it. He wanted me to get a lawyer.

You were passive-aggressive. You'd act nice in front of my face and then do deceitful things behind my back. You changed your game when I called HR on you and talked to the head boss about you. Your tune very much changed.

You acted like you were so excited that I was acing your PIP. You didn't think I could achieve it. I got corporate to start looking at you instead of me. I was considering hiring a lawyer and pushing back on your fat-ass for conspiring to write a PIP against me for months and not for the supposed one-day event that you said was the last straw. I went from having a good employee evaluation at the beginning of the year to fighting for my chance to be employed.

Then there was a corporate takeover. Then we got a new boss. You started the game again. You kept running to the boss' office and complaining about me. You'd send messages in ALL CAPS. You'd rewrite what I wrote and rearrange it without telling me.

I would have missing graphics and requests for content that the engineers didn't know what to make of. You would intentionally tamper with my work. There was a term for you in the engineering department. They'd use your last name as a joke for something getting screwed up (like Britta from Community). You wouldn't tell the people on your team what you were doing. You got more than one of us on a PIP! You also didn't like the way another writer was working, so you had them moved to the night shift.

You were a narcissistic nightmare. It was hell working for you. I hated when I was on your shift. You were conceited, you wouldn't listen, and you were intimidating. You would mock me by calling me cute and young. You'd use this strange pandering voice with me.

I played your game until my contract was up. I wanted out of there because I was worried one day I was going to lose it with you. I was going to stand on a desk and scream about all the microaggressions you had done to mess with my head.

I had horrible anxiety attacks during that PIP. I thought I was a total failure. I would come to work and smile and fake my way through it. But when I got home, my resting heart rate was around 140bpm. I couldn't sleep at night. My hands were tingling. I would have visions of a courtroom where different colleagues would line up behind me and you. They would line up behind who they believed.

You acted sly. You didn't want me there. It didn't matter that my writing got picked up and awarded by another team. If I had decided to stay at that company, I would have tried to move to that team. I should have got as far away from you as possible. You wanted me to work from home during the pandemic, so I could see less of what you were doing and your pathetic plot.

You would act like I was some kind of scaredy-cat who didn't want to work in an office during the pandemic. You made sure I worked from home. No one else from your team worked from home. Just me.

Our original boss said I should be patient with you, that you were a new manager. She said I shouldn't let your bad PIP get to me. I should just get through it. Then you played the same game with the new boss, but he didn't have the sense to see through you. I told him about what you did, and he was shocked but it was too late to save me. He had already decided based on your evaluation of me, and your constant going back to his office, that I wasn't worth re-signing.

Then he went on about how the managers on your level were going to be treated differently. That he was going to get you in line.

I told him I wasn't going to be there to see it. And why should I care after I'm gone?

Even if they had wanted me to sign another contract, I would have left anyway. I was tired of you.

This letter is the tip of the iceberg. There were so many toxic things and turns and twists that I witnessed. If I really went into the details it would be spread across 40 pages. You yelled at me, you tampered with my work, you made me feel small and puny, you made up stories to my bosses, you wrote a PIP before getting it approved with HR, and you acted like all of my ideas were elementary. It was awful working for you. It was awful working for many of the bosses there.

P.S. I know you were having an affair with the guy across my desk. You two would go off to somewhere for long periods. You talked way too much about trips and drinking. Your crush on him was nauseating. I am happy to no longer hear about him dog-sitting your little tiny yappy dog.

Signed,

Person That Refuses to Work in a Hellish Job Ever Again