What is it about people in authority? Do they like throwing their weight around?

And I apologize to all the guys on fluther, but so many times these people are men.

I only work part-time, at 18 hours a week. If I work even a few more hours I will lose my health insurance which is based on my income. Of course my job is not offering to make me full-time and provide health insurance, but once again a new person in an administrative role is expecting me to just stay later.

And this is how the typical boss plays games. Email the employee at 9:00 at night, thinking they won’t read their email until the next morning and they won’t have to continue the conversation until then. So I already have about 3 hours work ahead of me tomorrow and I only work a 4-hour day. And even if I was willing to jeopardize my health insurance, they are calling for very heavy rain all day with the potential for flooding, so no, I don’t want to wait until later in the day to be driving home when all the nut jobs will be coming out in force.

So he emails me and tells me that they want to send two letters out to everyone in the congregation and they want to send them out tomorrow. That’s about 100 letters or so, even assuming that they can be sent out together. Now, keep in mind we haven’t done mass mailings in years. We normally print whatever it is, put one in each envelope, and hand them out on Sunday morning. There may be three or four left for people we aren’t able to catch, and we mail those, but that takes a lot less time because we only have to put the name on each envelope. The way the mail is nowadays, I wouldn’t even rely on things being delivered accurately or on time. And we no longer maintain a database of mailing labels because we just haven’t used that method for years.

But what really gets me is that he doesn’t say to me, any chance you’ll be able to get this done tomorrow? Do you think you can do this tomorrow? He just basically says we have such and such to be done and I know it’s last minute but it’s really important.

Do people in authority think that they can just tell somebody they have to stay later and they’re automatically going to? I went through this with the last guy who was administratively over me and he wasn’t able to bully me either and I’m not going to let this guy do so. Getting the letters ready, even if we’re not mailing them but just handing them out, is going to take more than an hour most likely

How would you handle it? I’m pretty mad right now so forgive me if it sounds like I’m venting.