I'm coming up on 14 years of experience in my field, and I feel like because I like to have fun at work and joke around while we work, I don't get treated like an adult. I'm 37. I work circles around some people and I feel like I leave it all on the field every day. I help everyone, I do just about anything they ask, I help get new people up to speed, I come in early often, I don't come in high.. you get the picture.
So my manager has like a year of on the job experience and is just about the worst manager I've ever had. Nothing is ever good enough and I'm always "wrong". I've tried standing up for myself, and I've tried letting it roll off my back. Neither approach solves any of my problems.
Today, my manager waylaid my team member on a break and asked her what I do back there. I'm never not doing stuff and everyone but my manager sees it and knows it. I'm the type of worker that you don't have to worry about.
So I text the manager after she left and asked if she had a problem with my work. Of course not! I'm gods gift to bread! Blah blah blah...
She calls my teammate after hours and discusses why I have a problem.. doesn't ask me why I am upset. Instead I'm the asshole for standing up for myself.
There's a guy I work with that is basically checked out and refuses to make decisions or small talk. He's a good worker though. He told me one day that I should just turn off my brain and do what management says no matter how stupid and just let the pieces fall where they may. I'm trying. I really am. But the leftist in me is screaming at me to stand up and try to fix it. It's against my nature to prostrate myself to people like this. My new strategy is to turn my brain off and just be a soulless husk of a man at work who just keeps his head down and isn't friendly toward anyone. I'm only going to talk about work and work related stuff.
It's hard to do and it's so lonely! I have to listen to the same garbage music every day hear the same "working hard or hardly working" jokes every day and eat the same bowl of shit every day because the management doesn't pay any attention to the yahoos they pull off the street to do this job that should realistically have some training. It's a daily shit show and me and a couple of people have to "deep state" fix everything behind managements back while they chortle at the wine bar and take credit for all the fires we put out.
I should just quit, right?
My job is recession proof, it pays pretty well and on a good day, I enjoy it. I'm also hitting that age where I'm slowing down a bit and I don't know how to do anything else. I live at least 25 minutes from towns where jobs are, and they all would be a significant pay cut. I'm scared of the trump economy and rolling the dice on a different job.
I think you're selling yourself short in a few ways, in terms of being afraid of jumping ship.
With your kind of experience, you could absolutely swap to a nicer job that will treat you at least as good as where you are now, while likely paying better. That's the way things work now after all - staying in one spot just isn't as beneficial as jumping around, generally.
In addition, people really don't slow down as much as we're led to believe we do, in terms of being able to learn and do new things. You can learn a whole new language in your 60s and beyond, so what does learning the handful of ins and outs a new job confronts you with compare to that, when you're not even 40?
That said I understand not wanting to jump ship and being concerned about the potential drawbacks and risks of trying to move somewhere different... I just know that the people who I have talked to about their desire to quit their jobs and then actually did it are much happier where they are now.
I'm in a position where I'm at the highest paying bakery in town. I've worked for a couple of others and had similar problems on a smaller scale. Mostly you just get abandoned by management and don't have any co workers to lean on. Me and the co worker I mentioned above trauma bonded at a smaller bakery because the bosses just left us to run everything while they fucked off to Florida for two years. It went ok for a while but then they tried to micromanage us from Florida. They kept being like "we will be on the next plane home if you need us"
Well, one of our delivery drivers almost died in a car crash on the job and totalled the vehicle. They didn't come back to help so I had to deal with the police and go to their house to get their personal vehicle. They even asked us to go to the junk yard to get any bread or bins we could out of the totalled car. Like we were supposed to re sell this bread?
All that is to say it looks like the only way out of this job is to jump to a different industry entirely because other bakeries are paying $7 less an hour than what I'm making. I could afford a little pay cut, but I would probably have to become the Walter white of shrooms to make ends meet.