The manager, posting under the username u/FridaMercury, shared the story in Reddit’s “Antiwork” forum, where it has received over 42,000 upvotes and thousands of comments from Redditors venting about middle management.
At the beginning of her post, u/FridaMercury, a middle manager, explained that she leads a team of eight people, one being a 20-something-year-old trying to finish her college degree.
“She asked me this week if I’d allow her to adjust her schedule for approximately four months while she takes a class that she can’t otherwise take online. She’d leave mid-day one day a week and make it up on Saturdays,” u/FridaMercury wrote.
The Redditor said she had “no issue” with this; however, she couldn’t authorize the schedule change without first running it by her boss, Sarah. So, she sent the employee’s request to Sarah along with her seal of approval. Unfortunately, Sarah wasn’t so thrilled with the request.
“This b**ch’s response [was], ‘Wow isn’t that awfully presumptuous and entitled of her to think we’d allow her to do that? What is she going to do if we say no—quit??’” u/FridaMercury recalled.
“I reminded [Sarah] that this woman is fully entitled to resign…[but] that I would hate for her to resign because…this change in schedule is just temporary. It would be so shortsighted to lose a great employee over something so petty on our part,” u/FridaMercury continued.
However, Sarah’s opinion wasn’t swayed. She denied the request and scheduled a meeting with u/FridaMercury and her employee to let them know of her decision, during which the employee “called [Sarah’s] bluff.”
“Without skipping a beat, my employee said, ‘OK, I thought that may be the answer you gave me, Sarah. I prepared my resignation letter already and just hit send on the email to you and HR. This is my two-week notice,’” u/FridaMercury said.
Sarah was “stunned” and u/FridaMercury, though “psed” at her boss, was “so fking proud.”
Redditor u/FridaMercury concluded her post by saying that “if [she] could take it all back,” she’d never become a manager.
“You have to deal with all the bullst, you have such little influence over anything, and yet you’re the face of all the corporate bullst,” she said.
Middle management serves an “important function in a company’s organizational structure,” Indeed explained. These managers often “serve as a buffer” between top-level management and lower-level employees.
Though their responsibilities change from company to company, Indeed said that those in middle management are typically tasked with creating and implementing routines, monitoring employee performance and recruiting and retaining employees, among other things.
Though middle management is important, Harvard Business Review (HBR) also said these roles are often, as u/FridaMercury intimated, “exhausting.”
“Middle managers…are expected to play very different roles when moving from one interaction to the next,” HBR explained.
“By virtue of their structural positions, they are simultaneously the ‘victims and the carriers of change’ within an organization, receiving strategy prescriptions from their bosses above and having to implement those strategies with the people who work beneath them,” HBR continued. “As a result, middle managers often find themselves stuck in between various stakeholder groups, which can produce ‘relentless and conflicting demands.’”
Redditors commenting on u/FridaMercury’s post said her story perfectly illustrated why they hate working in middle management.
“I hated being a middle manager. I could only make decisions everyone agreed with. I’ve never felt less human,” u/Angel_Madison.
“There’s an old saying that’s stuck with me from a former middle manager I used to report to years ago: ‘Never let them promote you to middle management,’” u/wgGMDwOx. “This is one of those reasons why.”
“Middle Manager = tons of responsibility + zero authority,” added u/jippyzippylippy.
Newsweek reached out to u/FridaMercury for comment.
Other “Antiwork” posters to go viral in recent months include a mother whose daughter receives a $0 paycheck each week, an employee who recently confronted their “exploitative” boss and a worker accused by his boss of only doing his job “for the money.”
