It was a very (good/odd) year …

I never worked with a team of people I have enjoyed working with more. I find the work physically invigorating, mentally stimulating, emotionally satisfying and socially beneficial.

Me

We know you are deeply dissatisfied with your job and have serious issues with several of your coworkers.

HR Person

I worked there from mid-February 2019 to early March 2020. During that year I was twice assaulted in the workplace (on the same night). During that time someone residing at my residence with my family assaulted me: Tore the shirt I was wearing and threatened me with a crowbar waved in front of my face (the crowbar never went into my face because of my own nimble footwork.). After being kicked out that person later broke into my house and held two people at gun point (not my family) for several hours, and later made calls threatening to burn the house down. We left and stayed in a hotel for a couple of nights until we determined that the threat was (most likely) only a bluff.

I was at work when I received some of those threats, and had no clue how to handle them.

One night at work I went to my first break with a pain in my right arm and noticed a swelling at the wrist. By the time I finished my shift the infection had grown so quickly it went from my wrist to my elbow, and the stabbing pain was so intense that on the drive home I used my left arm to shift gears with the stick shift car we then drove.

It was six weeks after this night that I was assaulted twice at work. I had been on antibiotics for 6 weeks and the infection was under control but not eliminated. I was working through pain, as I had been for 6 weeks, and was to go the next morning into the hospital on a work approved medical leave to have 48 hours of Intravenous antibiotics to eliminate the infection. I reported both assaults to managers (not my own) upon leaving work before the hospital stay, and returned from the hospital to having to sign a “verbal warning” that I had been sleeping at work my last night at work. When I asked about my having been assaulted, I was brushed off by the HR person. I guess that never happened, because they decided it never happened.

This is just part of the things that occurred during my year there. I don’t think anyone took what was happening to me seriously. As I write this I wonder if even my wife and son, who lived through the crowbar incident and the threats to have our house burned down, really believed everything that happened happened. These real events doubtless led people who didn’t have to experience such things to not believe them and probably think that I was crazy. Part of the reason, at least, for the mandatory counselling work put me through.

I mean, when you enjoy something, yet other people know you really don’t like it, they obviously will translate any reactions of yours differently than you expect them to. “I have never enjoyed working with a team of people more than the people I am working with now” becomes “You have serious issues with several of your coworkers.” Then what sort of hell-holes must I have worked in before if this is the best workplace I have ever known?

This “through the looking glass” year was followed by the years of COVID response, which did not make any more sense than the year before it did for me. And I have not found my footing since. People will not believe, really, viscerally believe, that the things that I have experienced really happened. When I freely share of my experiences, they think me insane, or at least in some manner mentally off balance. Enough to make pastoral staff lie, deceive and coerce me and my wife, and to tell my wife that she has to call 911 if she wants to receive pastoral care. (no, literally true, a pastor said he couldn’t help her as a pastor if she didn’t call 911 for something that happened 9 months before!)

You don’t think these types of things actually happen? Now I am questioning which one of us is really mentally unbalanced, and can’t face the world as it actually is.

That did it. All but a couple of minds reading this just shuttered themselves and refuse to look at reality anymore. Reality is only the dream inside their own heads. But nobody will let me do that. I can’t let myself do it. I face the looking-glass world day after day, and try to believe 6 impossible things before breakfast, but it doesn’t help.