Toxic Workplace - Was I set up to fail?
I want to ask you guys about your opinions on this. I recently left a hospitality job to start my first corporate job soon.
I had been working in hospitality since I was 19. I started as a waitress and later on became a bartender and then worked as a receptionist. I would say that I definitely have learned the right soft skills and obviously I also know the hard skills of working those jobs. I have got two degrees that have nothing to do with hospitality, as well.
Anyway, at my last job my manager said that I was doing everything wrong. She said she didn’t like the way I talked to guests, but I just did what I was always doing and the guest were happy with me. She also told me the guests “like” me but she said it was because of my looks (what the hell). And then my colleagues showed me how to do the job but in the first two weeks I was with two different female colleagues who showed me almost nothing and said “just wait a bit, it’s too soon, it’s easy you’ll learn it later”. Then my main managers complained that I would just stand around but my colleagues who were supposed to train me didn’t let me do anything.
Then the company’s policies constantly changed, our main manager made up ridiculous rules and they suddenly threw a lot of work at me. I tried to manage everything but as soon as I made a small mistake they would belittle me and everyone would target me and talk about it.
I had a pretty good relationship with my colleagues and managers at most of my hospitality jobs. I also always had good grades and was hard-working. But at this job they told me “I was a slow learner” and I would get super nervous and then started to make more mistakes. After 2 months my confidence was so down that I stopped losing interest in everything. I would also refuse to speak to people in my break.
Luckily I got a better paid office job. Maybe I didn’t perform as well as I usually do, but I was wondering if they set me up to fail? (I also didn’t get a training session with one of the head office people that every other new person got) . They also didn’t provide enough uniforms and bc I sometimes worked 6 or 7 days in a row, I had to wash it myself and then got yelled at bc I didn’t send it to dry cleaning? But dry cleaning takes 2-3 days and when you never have 2 days in a row off and only one uniform it doesn’t work. ;/
I was too embarrassed to tell my friends about it but since I got a new job I started speaking about it and they were all shocked.
Posted Mar 8, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC