Almost all office drama can be blamed on posting written notes for co-workers

I used to work at a church, and my supervisor basically ruled the office and the whole parish in terms of administration. And she was the queen of writing passive-aggressive signs to post everywhere. And you could always tell it was one of her signs, because it used sentence fragments and it was very insistent about things.

So I not only worked there, but I also volunteered in several capacities. So her signs were often directed at volunteer groups to tell us what to do with the room and stuff. There were a ton of signs in the kitchen, of course, a point of contention at all times. And there were more in every meeting room. And being quite scrupulous as I am, I strove to obey every single command represented in those signs because I knew the person behind them, and I knew she was serious about it and she'd have our hides if we didn't comply. Most other people didn't care and just ignored the signs and just went about their business.

Another thing about our office was that there were no written policies and procedures. It's kind of ironic since we had a massive corpus of signs posted, but there was no employee handbook that I could consult to find out how to process a certain form, or how to use the software we depended on, or anything. Now the diocese definitely had a respectable body of P&P, but that wasn't made available to us directly. But every time I ran afoul of some unwritten rule, I would hear about it from my supervisor. And her updates were always verbal too: if she wanted to change the way we did something, she'd phone me up and tell me about it. There were no memos sent or notes put on my desk about anything.

So you can imagine how crazy-making this would be for a normal person; well I have a disability and several things just set me off. Eventually I realized how toxic it all was, and I quit. I left on good terms, but I told them I never wanted to work in the office again, not even as a volunteer, because a lot of trauma was coming up for me, and I could not abide that.

$LASTJOB had one & only one note - checker as far as I can remember - and it was about wringing out sponges. It was delightfully amazing & over the top. I wish I had a copy of that amazing note. We loved it.

Have a roommate now who I need to start talking to. I've been putting it off for months. It's hard. I've had many roommate conversations & there seems to be such a real chance that it makes things worse. Shitty people tend to get shittier.