My Lousy New Job and Horrible Boss

A couple of years ago, back when we were all “encouraged” to work from home, I was working at a university as an “assistant” academic. Perhaps academic “dogsbody” would be a more fitting name. Basically, it was my job to help the new teacher anyway I could for a particular course. His name was Cam and was from Vietnam, with a PhD in computing or whatever. I had only spoken to him via email, but he seemed nice enough. Boy, was I wrong (in more ways than one!). This is the ongoing nightmare that is my horrible boss and continues to this day.

“Hi, I’m Cam. I’ll be your new supervisor this semester. You’ll be helping me with marking and forum posts. Glad to have you on board!” Sounds innocuous enough, right? Wrong!

The First Meeting. I first met Cam online during a meeting. Nobody was allowed to meet anybody in person anymore. I connected to the meeting, and there was an IT lady there who was fixing something up. “Sorry, I’m just fixing up the connection.” “No worries.” I waited around a few minutes, but finally it looked like the lady had finished. “OK, the computer’s fixed.” “Uh, OK… Where’s Cam?” “I’m Cam!” For the more cluey of you out there, “Cam” is not a masculine name in Vietnamese, it is a girl’s name. It means orange fruit. Just in the name of openness, I’m not using her real name here, but the concept is exactly the same. Her real name is actually a Vietnamese feminine name, which I initially mistook as a masculine name, so it turns out he was a lady. I’m not trying to be offensive here. This is entirely due to my ignorance of Vietnamese names. Anyway, Cam is and always has been a lady. She speaks very softly. She’s very petite. She’s very pretty. Not that any of this matters, but I’m just giving my initial impression of her. Although first appearances were of that of an angel, the reality was much closer to the devil.

Assignment 1. My first duty was to mark Assignment 1. I got an email from HR telling me that my pay had been reduced. I logged in and saw that they had taken $96 from my pay. I was like, what the F? This has never happened before. I have often applied for extra hours, knowing that many universities around Australia have been sued in recent years for underpaying their casual staff. The HR lady told me that my supervisor (Cam) had contacted them and told them that I had applied for too many hours. I couldn’t believe this. I did her a favour and finished the marking as quickly as possible. She had only assigned 12 minutes to each assignment, which was clearly not enough. I’m not new to this. I’ve been doing this for like 10 years now. If I can’t mark it in the required time frame, then nobody can. And then she had the nerve to go and contact HR and tell them that I applied for too many hours. And then they garnished my salary! It’s not like I was stealing from the university. This had all been budgeted for. I had a meeting with HR about it telling them 12 minutes is simply not enough per assignment, and they just said that I had to take it up with the faculty, with the Computing School. But I knew it had nothing to do with them. It was all on Cam.

A couple of weeks went past, and I noticed that students were starting to complain that their assignments hadn’t been handed back yet, the ones that I had finished marking two weeks prior. It had been three-and-a-half weeks since they had handed their assignments in. I couldn’t believe this. Cam had asked me to finish these assignments early, garnished my salary in the process, and then delayed handing them back to the students. She actually didn’t hand them back until a few days later, the same day Assignment 2 was due. Understandably, the students were pissed off.

Sick Leave. Due to sickness and other reasons, out of the 10 online lectures Cam was meant to run, she only ran four. With assignment feedback often being returned late, lectures being cancelled, rudeness by the examiner in the forums, understandably, the students didn’t rate her very well at the end of the semester and left her a few choice comments in the forum. “This was the worst course I’ve ever studied!”, said one student.

The students hate her. She treats other workers like slaves. She treats me like a slave. She holds off paying people for some reason, when it’s not even her money and none of her business. I don’t know what’s she’s trying to achieve, but she’s surely going to lose her job again. She’s got a PhD, so she seems to be able to find these good jobs, but she’s hopeless. She’s by far the most horrible supervisor I’ve ever had to deal with. She’s a hopeless teacher and a hopeless colleague. Yes, it’s my fault, I admit that. I let her do this to me. But unfortunately, I don’t have many other opportunities for earning an income. Perhaps I’m just destined to work with this nightmare of a lady.

MUSIC
Allégro by Emmit Fenn