Toxic environment with a manager who undermines talent.
Pros
When you first walk in, everything - the perpetually dimmed light, the concrete walls and ceilings - begins to press down on you, until you feel very small and very weak. At first you can't place the feeling. Then you look up and see it bearing down on you: the enormous ego of a person who came to be called your manager not through competence, but through sheer appetite for the title. A person so afraid to admit her own insignificance that she arrives at the most efficient solution available - affirming herself through the humiliation of the people beneath her. And that, fundamentally, is all she is able to see in some of the most multi-skilled, sharp, and well-rounded people I have ever had the chance to work alongside. Perhaps an overly dramatic opening. But yes - as everyone there liked to remind me, I was once "lucky" enough to land at a property in the MGallery collection. On reception. From day one, it was made clear that nothing would be repeated to you a second time without a grimace and irritation on their face, and that to not merely be on the team but to belong to it, I would just have had to be born slightly differently. I'm normally fairly relaxed and open, but here I simply felt unable to speak to anyone - especially after the kind of moment where you sit down across from a colleague in the canteen and they rise and leave in silence the instant you try to ask them something. Or where, out of tension, you touch your hair a little too often and get your hand slapped for it, because there is a Guest in front of you.
Cons
Eventually, if you perform your duties correctly and don't make mistakes - or once the next new hire arrives - the treatment softens. But only gradually. In my sixth month, when a new young man started, my manager walked him over to me and instructed him not to listen to me at all and to avoid speaking with me. It was only when I kept rising into the ranks of the top performers regardless, and others began pointing my skills out to her, that she found herself unable to manage even the ordinary human gesture of praise. First she had to inform me that she'd been forced to set aside all her prejudices about certain of my shortcomings in order to make out my competence underneath. You might think: bad luck with the department. Except the HR manager describes the hiring philosophy in these exact terms - "we need soldiers, not people with all these nerves of theirs." Everyone around you is profoundly cold and insincere. Until the very end I never understood whether I would ever meet their expectations of me - and if it really was impossible, why they kept me there at all. I existed mostly in a state of apathy, constantly braced for the next humiliation: that at any moment I'd be told again how much they "restrain themselves" when they look at me, or that the new month's schedule would drop and I simply wouldn't be on it, because there are others, who have already earned their appreciation; or all of it at once - at the start of a shift.
