Boss edited my hours and has a weird thing going on with coworker

Throwaway for obvious reasons. I’ve been at my job for several months now and I just got a new boss. I had a good relationship with my old boss and genuinely enjoyed talking to her, I was sad when she left. She brought in a close friend of hers to be the new boss.

So on Monday my new boss asked me to come into her office and she chews me out for having a few minutes of overtime last week. My old boss never cared when I had a few minutes of overtime and never said anything. She also said that she preferred it when my lunches were under 30 minutes, preferably in the 15 to 30 Minute range but my new boss scolded me over my lunch breaks being too short. Only one of my lunch breaks was over 30 minutes last week. Most of them were between 15 and 20 minutes. There was also a day where instead of taking a lunch break I left early. This is something that my old boss allowed whenever I wanted to leave early. I don’t live in a state that requires lunch breaks but according to my new boss the company does. So after getting scolded about that and being told that from now on, I need to take 30 minute lunch breaks every day even if I leave early, I thought that was the end of it but the next day I happened to take a look at my timesheet from last week and I saw that she added a 15 minute lunch break onto the day I left 30 minutes early. She never expressed that she would do this and I think it's because she knows that it's illegal and she's hoping that since I'm young I don't know that it's illegal and I won't say anything.

Another issue that I'm having is she is best friends with my coworker, they constantly leave their desk to take smoke breaks together and they literally live right next-door to each other. It honestly makes me feel really uncomfortable especially because I don't think that this coworker particularly cares for me. If I didn’t know she was best friends with his wife I would think they were in a relationship. I'm always friendly to everyone in the office, but I just don't have much in common with him since he's a middle-aged man and so we don't interact too much but when we do, I feel like he speaks down to me like I'm stupid or a child.

My thought is I wasn't going to bring it up originally but now I'm a bit concerned about what if he convinces her to fire me because he doesn't like me. I need this job for the health insurance. I'm getting married soon and my partner is chronically ill and unemployed currently. Their medication is too expensive to afford without insurance. One dose of their meds cost almost as much as my yearly salary. Should I bring this up even though it would make her dislike me so if she does fire me, I can easily prove that it was retaliation or should I put my head down and work for the next several months while I try to look for another job and hope she doesn’t fire me before then? I’m not sure I can get anything better since I don’t have much work experience and the job market is horrible.

Posted Mar 5, 2026, 7:52 PM UTC

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