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We managed to get in touch with Dr. Darwin and she was kind enough to speak to us about the origin of her tweet. We can sit and discuss numbers all we want, but it's often the human factor that allows us to grasp social dynamics, and Helena's story perfectly encapsulates it.
"I realized fairly quickly that I was in a bad situation at my job. I had been hired to perform a brand new role that my boss neither understood nor respected," Dr. Darwin told Bored Panda. "I assumed that as the expert on that specialty I would be treated with some measure of respect and have some autonomy, but that was not the case. He refused to give me instructions, but everything I did was somehow wrong, and by my third week he began publicly humiliating and berating me during company-wide zoom calls. I was shocked that he would treat an employee this way, especially one who had only been there for three weeks. I knew it was a bad sign."
"We had an hour-long check-in each morning and another hour-long check-in at the end of the day, amounting to 10/40 hours per week in check-ins that could have been completed so much more effectively through individual check-in emails to him," she continued. "Everyone complained about these meetings and how much time they wasted. But he liked them, so we had to sit through them. During my second meeting, I hopped on my treadmill, figuring that walking desks had become an established thing during the pandemic, but he complained that it made him dizzy. I then switched over to my exercise bike and tried to hold my head as still as possible and he called me after the meeting to tell me it was inappropriate. He was very clear that we had to have our cameras on and had to sit still."
This policy made Dr. Darwin a prisoner of her boss's venomous behavior. "While he yelled at me and talked to me like I was an idiot, the whole company could see my face," she said. "I had to fairly conspicuously break the rules to turn off my camera so I could cry."
When she found herself doing that for the third time in one week, she started looking for jobs again.
"He had blown up at me yet again during [one of our morning meetings] because I highlighted something wrong. When I apologized and mentioned that the task he had given me was a lot of work, more than he seemed to think, he said 'Yeah. That's why it's called work. It's work. This is work, Helana.' He repeated this over and over again, rocking back and forth in his chair, yelling at the camera, red in the face."
By this point, other staff members couldn't take it anymore too. "He was so disrespectful and egregious that a coworker actually spoke up in my defense, telling him that it was unacceptable to talk to me that way. (I had been slacking with my coworkers for months about how out of line he was with me). I considered rage-quitting on the spot, but decided to try to breathe through it and mute the rest of the meeting," Dr. Darwin said.
But after the meeting, she hated herself for staying. "I had promised myself that if he did this one more time, I'd walk out the door. Why had I stayed? Why did I take some sick pride in tolerating abuse? As a sociologist of gender, the parallels between this dynamic and domestic abuse were very clear to me. I stayed because I was financially dependent on him and he had been effective in his campaign of humiliation to the point that I had very little self-esteem left. I felt like I was betraying my past self who had made a promise to future me that the next time would be the last time."
Little did her boss know, Dr. Darwin had a job interview lined up for later that same day. "[It] paid way less, but would at least be equivalent to an unemployment check, so when they offered me the job, I decided to make a point and quit the same day he had crossed the line. I invited my 9-year-old to witness the moment since he had overheard me complaining about this man for months."
The whole thing took roughly 40 seconds. "When someone was about to log off early because they were sick, I said they might want to hear what I had to say first. I actually took a video of this and posted it to Facebook so people who had been trying to encourage me to quit could see me be brave. I said, 'Tomorrow will be my last day. I promised myself that if [boss] lashed out at me one last time, I would quit. And he did. I considered rage-quitting in the moment. It triggered my PTSD so badly, having this white man yelling at me, that I couldn't stop shaking for over an hour afterward. If any of you also feel abused by this man, I encourage you to quit too. I will come by the office tomorrow to clear out my office and return my work computer. Good luck with your company.' And I hung up. The coworker who had stood up for me that morning tried to talk over me to tell me I was out of line when I got to the part about encouraging other people to quit, but I kept going. It is no coincidence that he is also a white man. Power protects power."
Even though Dr. Darwin is an award-winning scholar, it took her three months of applying for jobs and interviewing for them before she received an offer.
Luckily, she had people who supported her throughout the whole ordeal. "My husband gave me his blessing to quit months earlier, when he saw what this man was doing to my mental health," Dr. Darwin said.
But that wasn't always the case. "I grew up with a father who regularly blew up at me and yelled at me, telling me not to defend myself, and that children are meant to be seen and not heard. I then found myself powerless in graduate school with an advisor who sexually abused me. I couldn’t say anything because if he got fired, my own career would suffer enormous consequences and I would lose my funding. And here I was, starting my career outside of academia, trying for a fresh start, only to find myself with a boss who felt entitled to berate me and belittle me, and expected me to silently take it."
Dr. Darwin couldn’t believe this was happening to her again, not after the price she had already paid. "I had made such strides in my mental health since graduate school and it was all unravelling. But I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t a quitter. I rationalized that there are a lot of shitty abusive bosses out there and I can’t just quit every time I have one. It felt like some sort of endurance test, some sort of learning opportunity. But it was so sadistic," she said.
You'd think that breaking such a vicious cycle calls for a celebration. But it's not that easy to simply forget all the emotions it has drained. "As soon as I quit, I went to a bar," Dr. Darwin recalled. "It seemed like the thing that people do when they quit their job. I wound up crying to the bartender and asking the other barflies to commiserate with me about any time they had quit a job. While I was sitting there, I tweeted my now-viral tweets."
"At the time, I had 10K followers, so I suspected I would get a good amount of commiseration and support from my virtual community. I did not expect it to become the most viral tweet I have ever made. It was amazing to feel so held and supported by others who have made tough decisions to walk away from abusive work situations. It’s the only time a viral tweet of mine hasn’t mutated into some sort of toxic attack on me. It was pure solidarity."
"I was so grateful and also so amused by the thought that my former boss would likely be notified that his company’s image was compromised by the amount of support that I got," Dr. Darwin added. "Although I didn’t say his name or his company's name, it’s not difficult to access my resume. I will say that I read everyone's replies and quote-tweets for comfort that night and the next morning, before getting overwhelmed with the scope of the data. It spoke to people in a deep way and I suspect the vulnerability I displayed in my original tweet attracted people to my account—my follower count rose from 10.4K to 12K in the span of 48 hours. My tweet also wound up on the anti-work Reddit page and is being covered by journalists. So it definitely made an impact and spoke to the moment of employees saying hell no to workplace abuse."
