At my very first job, I was queried two times in a day. Hold on, hold on. I’ll tell you what happened. I had an immediate supervisor I was supposed to report to, and there was this other guy there who wanted me to report to him as well. I did it for about 2 days but I read my responsibilities again and realized I wasn’t supposed to do that so I stopped.
He confronted me openly and I told him according to my responsibilities, I wasn’t supposed to be doing that, so if he wants any information he should find out from my supervisor. He got angry and then said really harsh words. Of course, you don’t expect me to stand there smiling at him. I walked out on him without saying a word because I didnt want talk back.
I later received a query letter for disrespecting a senior colleague, so I walked right to the HR to ask if she saw exactly what happened. She said she didn’t, but then she heard everything. I told her she wasn’t serious ,and by the end of the day I saw another query letter in my email.
To be honest, I was already getting fed up so I planned on quitting the following day but, I decided to tell my mom first. She asked what happened and I explained everything to her. She then said I was at fault for everything. It was bitter pill to swallow but even before I could open my mouth to ask why, she made me realize there were professional approaches I could have used to deal with the situation.
For me, something I’ve realized that school doesn’t teach us is how to deal with humans in the real world. When we are in school, we fight with colleagues and can decide never to speak with them. We express our opinions freely no matter how disorganized they are. We openly disagree with our lecturers and they even challenge us to justify why we think so. But in the real world, it’s so different. Dealing with people is so different.
In the real world and especially at work, you can’t say I don’t like this colleague of mine so I won’t talk to him/her ever again. You can’t just openly say exactly what you think, especially in meetings. You have to be professional about it. I even got to learn that instead of telling someone at work, “I can’t do this for you” you’d have to say something like “I’m currently at capacity and can’t accommodate this task”.
Left to me alone, there should be one subject or course that is all about life after school. My lecturers used to spend about 20 minutes of their time to advise us during our final year and I’ll forever be grateful because that’s when I got to learn a lot about life after school. But even with that, look at the mistakes I still made. Now imagine people who never had anyone to tell them anything. Sigh.
Images are mine
