That is my classic quote from today's check in with my supervisor. I needed to take 2 doses of anxiety medication (1/4 pill of mild stuff) to get through and did go to my car at the end and burst into tears for a moment.
Basically I had to have a conversation with a staff and they were not being offered summer hours because they were late to the interview. I asked him to actually have the conversation because I did not do the interview and I am not running a summer program. I offered 2 times she could meet. Meanwhile I still had the conversation with her because I did not want to leave her hanging, and I told him I had. Then I got a long email stating that I needed to talk to her, follow up by a certain date, etc. I had taken time off to move and so I did everything but was waiting on feedback on how to send a better email. We spent most of our hour long meeting on my responsibility for this. I asked at one point if he believed I even had the conversation because I didn't send the correct follow up, and his response was that trust does not matter. I asked again if he felt I had been lying, and again he said that did not matter. He did not have the date, time, personal invitation, follow up email, etc. delivered while I was taking some time off, therefore it is going to count against me. It wasn't that I was denying it, I simply had this as one task on a list of 20 that I had done correctly during a week when I took personal time off that could not be avoided due to personal emergency (moving became an emergency when I got sick the week before). What is notable is that in one case I pointed out that I had done several things on his list however he said it didn't count because I had done them BEFORE he sent the email (following best practices, duh) Still it was probably half of our meeting on this.
Then at the end he asked how we were doing on this plan. I was honest, I said we had a lot of conflict this year, I was concerned about summer and next year because our communication is so poor. I added that I was open to working on it and did not have my mind made up about what comes next. I mentioned my work outside of the department on conflict training. He said that he had not seen any of my training in practice, that I had not brought any of the skills to work or shown any impact. He was expecting me to practice mindfulness but I was not. Argh, I stopped several times in our meeting to repeat what he had said and ask if I understood him, asked if there was a specific way I could show that I was taking responsibility, etc. I do this in other phone calls and interactions. Unfortunately without a facilitator in the room sometimes conflict resolution is not that effective with power imbalances. It was really difficult, and next week I start looking for a job in earnest again.
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Originally Posted by Teacher Terry
