The sexist jerk I work with
Ok, a little backstory.
I’ve been working for the same company for 7 years. I started at the bottom as a secretary and earned several promotions until I eventually found myself in the purchasing department. It happened kind of by accident when the purchasing agent was fired and a replacement was not easy to find.
I literally got thrown into the position just to make due until a replacement could be found, but it turned out I had a natural talent for it. I love haggling prices and I know the companies products and suppliers just from fielding sales calls handling paperwork, and I have an eye for numbers.
They ended up finding a replacement for my old position instead and I was made into the full time purchasing agent for the company. 5 years later and I handle everything in that department from purchasing to inventory to vendor invoices. I earned the position purely on merit and hard work and I am damn good at my job. I actually enjoy going to work every day because I love what I do.
Well last year the company opened a second branch. They hired on a man to be the manager down there, we’ll call him Jack(short for jackass) for the purpose of this rant.
Well Jack does not like to play by the rules and he hates being questioned. He constantly breaks company policy, is incredibly rude, and makes it well known he resents that he has to go through me to place orders for his branch.
I have caught him multiple times trying to go around me to place orders with our vendors. I had to call all of our vendors and put in a block for verbal orders. Now if there isn’t a purchase order from me, the order cannot be placed. I am the only person in the entire company besides the general manager and the owners authorized to issue a purchase order.
He also typically does not send me packing slips, which are required for me to receive inventory in our system. I am lucky if I can get some in the mail from him once every 3 or 4 months. This means that whenever he sells something, it usually puts inventory for his branch in the negatives.
After it started causing problems with our vendors, since I cannot enter in an invoice if I have no proof we received the order, the general manager for the company created a new policy where all packing slips had to be turned in no less than once a week. In the case for the second branch, Jack has to email them to me once a week instead of snail mail.
Well I emailed him every day last week asking if he had any packing slips to scan and send to me since I hadn’t got any from him before the new policy in over 2 months. No answer. He answers my questions on his inventory requests, but ignores the emails about the packing slips.
So on Friday I call him and put on my friendliest voice, because Jack will complain to HR immediately if he decides you are not being nice. We all have to walk on egg shells to not hurt his fragile ego.
I politely ask if he had any packing slips to email me since I wasn’t sure if he was receiving my emails.
Immediately he becomes audibly angry with me and informs me that he snail mailed them. He claimed his scanner wasn’t working.
Which is odd because it was working just fine when he scanned a copy of a parts list to ask me to order some hardware for him. I pointed that out as gently as possible and he didn’t have much to say to that. I then reminded him it was now a policy for him to email them to me once a week and to please do so next week.
He is being very snappy and rude to me, but I choose not to engage with him and keep my voice and wording as friendly but firm as possible.
I then let the GM know what happened so that she can closely monitor the situation next week. Because I literally can’t do a good portion of my job without this paperwork that takes 5 minutes for him to scan and email.
Well I get into work today and sure enough he has filed a complaint against me. He actually used the words immature and suggested that I was too young to be competent at my job. I’m 26 and I’ve been with the company since I was 19. I’ve been doing this specific job in the company for 5 years without any help from anyone. All of my yearly reviews are glowing. He is the only person in the company that has any complaints about my ability to do my job.
Plus it speaks volumes about him that he copied me on the email he sent to HR to complain about me. So he purposefully made it so that I could read every word of his 5 paragraph complaint about me.
He was scathing and the email was oozing with thinly veiled ageist and sexist remarks. The complaint was passed from HR directly to the owners of the company who called me back for a meeting.
I came prepared with copies of emails and replies along with my detailed notes that I take every day regarding any phone conversations I have regarding my job. They didn’t reprimand me, but they did tell me to make sure I was more polite in the future as he has apparently been complaining directly to them about my “attitude problem” for months.
I am furious. I was just doing my job and this jackass took offense to me asking him simple questions. I have to walk on eggshells for his ego, meanwhile he gets no reprimands at all for all the policies he regularly ignores.
I may be young, but I earned my place here. I work hard every day. I have 5 years of experience in this industry doing my job. He has been here a year and his experience prior was a completely different industry. So technically speaking, he has less industry experience than I do. I regularly and promptly answer questions from him regarding our products and what they can and cannot be used for because he can’t be bothered to learn this stuff himself and just keeps asking me the same questions over and over.
I’m not the only one he does this too. It’s everyone woman in the company, including the general manager who is over him. On one hand it makes me feel a little less angry to know that it isn’t just me, but at the same time I don’t understand why he gets away with it. The GM is fed up with him, but the owners have her hands tied because it would be costly and time consuming to replace him. Which I think he knows. Which just means he has no consequences for being a jackass to his female coworkers.
Sorry if that was a bit of a rambling mess, but I feel a little better just getting it out somewhere.
Let's Glow!
Achieve your health goals from period to parenting.