There are experiences that mark us for life, unfortunately not all of them do it for good, that was the case of my first "formal" job in Mexico. I was 22 years old when I started working in the systems area of "Edutecno", a company that is responsible for providing computer solutions to both private and public schools, on paper the job sounded great, it was something I liked to do, and the pay was good, what screwed up the whole situation was the work environment.
At the beginning everything was going normal, and I was very happy, I was preparing computers with the system that the company was developing, besides working on updating "our" website, but without realizing it things started to become a little uncomfortable between me and my boss, he began to invite me to go out to eat or drink something outside working hours.
This attitude spread to several coworkers, I was the only woman working in the company (who was not a secretary), so in all the meetings that took place I was the only female present and there were always misogynistic comments towards me, and they even started calling me in certain ways that made me feel really uncomfortable. But the straw that broke the camel's back was that they started talking to me with "double meaning" making horrible sexual comments for anything. They did it thinking that I, being a foreigner, would not understand the crap they were saying to me, but of course I understood them.
The worst thing happened two months after I started working there, I had to go to another state to update and maintain the equipment we had installed in a school. As it would be my first job outside the CDMX, my boss insisted on accompanying me to learn how was the "things were done" in schools, since I had only worked with the equipment within the company.
As it would be a two-day job, we had to stay overnight in that city, so the company booked us a hotel to stay. When I arrived to check in I got one of the most unpleasant surprises I have ever had in my life, my horrible boss had only rented a room and not even with separate beds, I thought that these things only happened in the movies, but unfortunately not.
His excuse was that since he usually went alone to do those tasks, he forgot to ask for two rooms, of course, and I was born yesterday. Besides, according to him, since the company had already authorized only one room, he couldn't ask for a second one, so I had to pay for my own room, so I wouldn't have to share a bed with that degenerate. The rest of the trip was just as horrible, and things changed quite a bit from there. When I returned to the office the following Monday I had an endless pile of work, he started pressuring me to do maintenance on all the computers in the company, which was not my job, but now apparently it was.
I started eating lunch in the office because I had absolutely no time for anything. Files that I had on the company computer about the page I was working on began to disappear, so I had to start taking my own computer from home, one day when I came back from the bathroom I found him going through my personal files and even my private email, he was taking me to the edge, sexual harassment had now been added to exploitation. I was fed up with the job, but I needed the experience and of course, the money, so I kept putting up with it.
December arrived, and I was relieved because I would have a little rest thanks to the Christmas holidays, I asked my boss which were the days off that the company gave me, and he told me that they were the last two weeks of the year and that I should return to work the first Monday of January, at that moment I felt a deep sense of relief, two weeks without having to return to the nightmare that my job had become.
My vacation was the break I needed to motivate me to continue working in that company, I arrived with a new attitude, I was not going to let my horrible boss continue to make my existence miserable, but the bastard had one more surprise in store for me. I hadn't even been in the office five minutes when I was told that I had to go immediately to see the director.
Do you remember those two weeks of vacation that according to he I had? Well that was a total and complete lie, as it was my first year in the company, I had no vacation, I was only given off on December 25 and January 1, so the assistant manager was waiting for me to inform me of my dismissal for abandonment of position, they gave me a check with my settlement and goodbye, I was completely played by my miserable boss. When I went back to the office I shared with him to pick up my things, he simply told me that he was sorry to see me go, that I was very good and that he "liked me a lot", at that moment I just ignored him, of course I didn't say a word to him. I left completely disillusioned, it was a crappy job, and it made me never want to work in something like that again, even if it was my area of knwoledge.
What did it teach me? That maybe if I had complained about what was happening to my boss and other colleagues, the director could have done something about it, but I was afraid to do so and that in the end I would be the one who would be left without a job, since I was new and foreign, while all of them had been working there for years. The worst thing is that I ended up fired anyway because of my boss's retaliation for not wanting to share a bed with him, but at least I can say that I didn't fall into that just to keep a job, which I think would have been even worse because who knows how far the situation would have escalated if I had agreed.
Thank you very much for reading, see you in the comments
Cover picture taken from here - Cover and banner edited in Canva - Cartoons made in bitmoji.