A woman on TikTok says she left her job as an executive assistant and office manager after only 14 days because she had a horrible experience and multiple panic attacks.
TikTok user Eve (@adminandeve) says she was laid off from her “dream job” in August but got hired for a new job at a new company. There were “a few red flags” with the new company, but the TikToker decided to take the job anyway.
Those red flags included a $20,000 pay cut from her previous job and being forced to work in the office despite the rest of the staff working remotely or semi-remotely. Plus, Eve says the person who previously held her role was told that she was being replaced in a “disrespectful” way for someone who had worked at the company for three years.
@adminandeve Replying to @kt_ruby #worktok #hrtok #corporate #careertiktok #layoffs #careeradvice ♬ original sound – Admin & Eve | Career Wiz
During the interview process, the TikToker met other employees who were nice but seemed like they were “smiling through the pain,” she says.
“I just thought, you know what, every company has its pains. Let’s just give this a shot,” Eve says in her video.
For context, the TikToker adds that she has never received severely negative feedback about her performance at any of her previous jobs. Any negative feedback has been about minor issues that she has been able to fix.
On her first day at the new job, Eve says she had a 7:30am breakfast with the executive she would be an assistant to. For the video, she named the CEO Sean.
At their breakfast, Sean informed Eve she was going to attend a U.S. leadership meeting with him and take notes.
“This almost felt like hazing in a way because nobody can take good notes if they don’t have context on things, and you usually don’t throw an executive assistant into a leadership meeting if they are not equipped to take notes on these things,” Eve says.
Regardless, she says she did a great job and got amazing feedback on her performance from the first day. When she got home, however, she cried.
Eve explains that her first week at the company was an “absolute disaster.” She adds that she had multiple panic attacks and was crying on her kitchen floor by the middle of the week.
Part of the problem with her job was Sean, she says. He would send her 10 to 30 Slack messages after she got off work and just as many in the morning before she got to work, plus the same amount of emails to sift through. Eve says Sean’s calendar was also impossibly full, which led her to have a list of action items every day.
In a second video, Eve says she was “crazy busy” and barely had time to eat lunch sometimes. On some days, she worked 11-hour shifts.
@adminandeve Replying to @adminandeve #worktok #hrtok #corporate #careertiktok #layoffs #careeradvice ♬ original sound – Admin & Eve | Career Wiz
By day two, she went to the human resources department to complain about the unrealistic expectations of the job. “John,” her manager and head of HR, assured her he would speak to Sean, who told her the job wouldn’t be that hectic long term. Yet when the second week on the job rolled around, it was not any better even though Sean was on vacation, which did not deter him from working. Throughout the experience, the TikToker says she was vocal and honest with her managers about her heavy workload and how she was feeling.
By week three at her new job, Eve was at her breaking point and told her manager, John, she was not happy at the company. She says the expectations of the job were too much for one person. Her manager told her they would have 15-minute check-ins every day for the rest of the week. Then, the job “mysteriously” got easier overnight. She says she suspects two of her managers had a conversation about lightening her workload.
In a third video, Eve says she told John during their weekly check-in how much more manageable the job had become. Until that point, she had only received positive feedback from her managers, Eve says. But during that meeting, John told her he had been getting negative feedback from other employees and managers about her and that it seemed like she just wasn’t doing a good job.
@adminandeve Replying to @adminandeve #worktok #hrtok #corporate #careertiktok #layoffs #careeradvice ♬ original sound – Admin & Eve | Career Wiz
“And this is when I knew they were trying to build a case to fire me because this feedback was so severely different than the feedback I had been receiving for literally two weeks,” Eve explains.
By Wednesday of the third week, their daily check-ins were canceled completely, and her boss told her she could work from home for the rest of the week. She says she had multiple meetings scheduled for Thursday morning, but they were all canceled except for her 15-minute check-in.
During the meeting, Eve claims both John and Sean bombarded her with criticism and “half-truths.” She adds that her managers never explicitly said the words “you’re fired,” but she got the message pretty clearly. But ultimately, she’s happy now, she says.
Viewers had suspicions of why the TikToker’s former managers didn’t explicitly fire her.
“If they said it was “mutual” then they’re trying to keep you from getting unemployment. You should probably email and ask if you still need to come in,” one viewer commented.
Some viewers said they expect the company will keep “burning through” more executive assistants before they fix the role’s expectations.
“So they’ll keep burning thru replacements rather than deal with the exec,” one viewer commented.
“You dodged a bullet. They will have the same issue with the next person they hire for that position,
a second user wrote.
The Daily Dot reached out to the creator via TikTok comment.
