So, you wonder why people don’t communicate effectively. I have a policy of leaving my door open and that’s a symbol that people can come and talk to me.

I was asked back in August to provide my availability for September to a place that I help out at. I submitted it. I was not given a courtesy email or phone call about scheduling. Long story short, I just happened to be logged into my Zoom one evening and a student came on. I had not been notified beforehand but I took the lesson on. Anyway, no further communication came for subsequent weeks for the rest of the month.

Now, let’s get serious here. When I run my classes, I actually plan out lessons, which is not something that everybody does. In fact, I was asked a few times to pass on my lesson plans to unprepared instructors at the facility.

For several months in the past, I negotiated with the students in my morning school to end classes half an hour early (with the agreement that those students receive 30 minutes’ worth of homework for the early dismissals) — so that I could commute via a Lyft/Uber to the evening school in time to help out there.

I did not truly receive any praise or recognition for doing that.

In fact, it feels like I’m being talked to only when people want something from me. I’ve communicated this before to the people in charge — I expected to be treated like a Patrick Roy or an Ed Belfour… people who were deemed to be egotistical and who, as the perception was, expected to be pampered and treated like a superstar. And why not? I plan out lessons. I take a Lyft/Uber after ending class early in morning school just to make it in time for the evening facility. What? Am I stupid for making the effort?

I’ve even communicated the fact that I would like to be talked to. I even showed a video clip of the final episode of “Unhappily Ever After” where Floppy Bunny “dies” after he is ignored. The male instructors there don’t say hi. You’d say hello to them and they just glare at you and go about their own business. (So, I just stopped saying hello because fellow instructors don’t want to talk.) The leaders there would rather chitchat and laugh at jokes and joke around instead of updating me on scheduling. There were times where literally every week there was miscommunication and/or errors on my schedule. Wrong times. Showing up when there were no classes. One winter later afternoon (January) I showed up because I was scheduled, only to find out there actually was not any class. So, I left, but the number of mistakes with scheduling happened so frequently.

I would arrive early and sit in my assigned classroom and be there with the door open for quite a bit of time. Nobody would come in and talk. They were always busy chitchatting and joking around. Then when the class started, one of them came in to ask me what teams I was “betting” on that day. I was annoyed but I said Boston. I was told to “put 200 bucks down on that” and it distracted me from what I was doing.

When I requested time off, I was told it was impossible. Yet I later found out that another instructor was allowed to leave for Guatemala for 10 days on a missionary trip. Another one was given permission to travel to San Diego. I was not allowed the time off that I had requested. (And, as mentioned, I wasn’t given the courtesy of any notice/update for the current month of September.)

And one day I was literally sitting in the room when one of the leaders was talking to a student, and the two of them were saying that one instructor had a habit of not responding to texts or calls until the next day. So, I saw that as something that we were all allowed to do. After all, again, am I stupid for always responding promptly? Another time I was told that when I mark people’s essays, I do a thorough job that others don’t do…which doesn’t make me feel good since I do what an instructor is expected to do while others (apparently) cut corners and are preferred over me.

One of the worst things is that since COVID19 happened, I had been afraid of Asian hate crimes. That’s a legitimate concern. Yet whenever I’ve raised that concern, I’m laughed at and told not to worry about that. In my opinion, when one goes about not thinking about something like that, that’s when you let your guard down and something *might* happen. It’s a legitimate concern….so much so that I’d virtually stopped taking public transit. I take Uber/Lyft to get there.

Okay, you could make the case that that’s my problem. However, what if I raise concerns about matters related to the business? For instance, when I specifically said that whoever had posted on the social media site that the person had made a bunch of typos and grammatical errors (which looks bad for a school and the posts themselves were “teaching” grammatical/writing points), nothing was done about it.

I mean, what’s going on here?