Anonymous

/ At work, Age

The restaurant that I started working in was full of young adults & teenagers (ages between 17 -22), I was 30 years old. Later I discovered that the restaurant manager has been saying to everyone before I started that I am 24 years old.. I knew that when I started meeting coworkers and getting to know each other the subject come to age and I say how old I am they are surprised and say well “……” she said that you’re 24…
I didn’t like it, but just corrected them and moved on.. later, a new restaurant manager came to work and he was hired by the old restaurant manager (the same one I was taking about).. when we asked about who is the new manager she told us about his background and experience and said he was 24 years old…. a month and a half after he started working, a conversation led to age and turned out that he was 30 as well! And that old restaurant manager did the same with him by telling everyone that he was younger than he really is… as if ut was a shame that we 30 years old people and we need to hide that!!
I don’t know why she chose the age 24 specifically in both cases, but it sure says a lot about her and her inner self worth. Cuz I never thought that I would at all be ashamed of how old I am, I love life and I think the 30 are the times when people make big accomplishments after spending their 20 trying out stuff and figuring themselves out. I was excited for my 30 since I was in the beginning of my 20s. But people like her believe that their self worth decline over time and when they reach a certain age they’ll be filled with self hate and insecurities.

Anonymous

/ Gender, At work, Age

I (a woman) started working on the same position with another colleague (a man) on the same day. We went together for the onboarding session and had the same starting day. We also had similar work experience (I would even say I was a bit more senior than him in terms of the number of work years, but not too much necessarily + I had 3 years of experience in another, yet relevant field).

From the day one, that man has been talking to me like I don’t know anything and he knows everything. He was ignoring what I was saying, grabbing work tools straight out of my hands while I was working with them, because he felt like “he knew better how to use them and I needed guidance and immediate demonstration from him”. He presumed I don’t know anything about the work I was doing and couldn’t believe I have same years of experience as him.

When I sent some customer service emails responding to customer complaints (I had 3 years of experience in customer communications back then), he would run to the laptop and check that “I didn’t write anything wrong” or ask me “to consult with him before writing”. He wasn’t a manager.

At some point he started to control my actions even during remote work, even unrelated to work. For example, once I bought something urgent for the office with my own money and needed the company to pay me back. It was not a problem, I knew whom to contact. However, when he learned the company “owes me money”, he sent me a dm: “Hi! Please, you must send the receipt to X!”

Interrogating him wasn’t helping — he would pretend he doesn’t understand what I am talking about. When I shared my stories with male colleagues, they were shocked — he was unpleasant with them as well, but not to that extent.

He got fired and I was promoted to a manager position.

Anonymous

/ Gender, At work, Immigrant, Age, Language

I, a 25 year old girl, was hired by Etteplan as an embedded software engineer. It is a consulting company. Knowledge of Finnish language was not required for this position. I was assigned to a project where there were only mid-age Finnish men. At our first daily meeting they hardly spoke English, and since I was someone who did not yet know the project and could not contribute to the discussion, they switched to Finnish at some point. At the next daily meeting they started speaking Finnish immediately. After that I complained to my team lead and he replied something like, “They are not used to speaking English.” At that point I checked the job description again to make sure that Finnish was not required. It wasn’t. I started looking for a new job less than a week after being employed there. I found a decent option after only two months and was more than happy to quit my probationary period in one day.