Hello,

Some of this may sound a bit trivial, but I need help.

I work for an advertising agency, I started 1st Sept. I was employed to work only with the commercial director.

About 6 weeks after I started I was asked by the CEO (who has her own PA) to source and somethings relating to an upcoming business trip. I went ahead and got all the information, two / three other people were involved in helping me with this as there were somethings I needed help with. Anyway, about a week before she is due to leave she came ansd asked me where her stuff was, but it was completely different to wat she had orginally asked for. Just to emtnion that everytime i had tried to speak about it with her I was brushed off. On the day she told me she was looking for other stuff, she did not tell me what she actually wanted nor did she give me a chance to correct it. Instead she walked around the office saying she was obviously obtuse as I didn’t as I wasn’t getting what she was saying – this was not said to me but to other people. At one point she slammed her hand onto the fridge. This continued all day, with comments being said in the office by her. It was also brought up in a meeting on the day after with her saying, that the reason she thinks I didn’t cope with it was that I had nt worked in a team to find the items / solution. This totally rocked my confidence and I felt shattered – I ended up in pieces at home. It has left me feelin totalt unconfident to work with her and i find her extremely intimidating and does not communicate well at all. Her PA has said to me that how she handled this was wrong and as she was one of the people involved she knows what I was asked for and done it correctly. I recieved no support during the incident from my boss or anyone else.

There has been ne other incident similar to the above and anytime I get an email from her I feel sick to my stomach. She returns from the business trip on Thursday and I am scared.

I have also now taken on the operations director and seem to do adhoc work for other teams. I don’t mind working with the operations director, however I did say in my interview that I only wanted to work with ne person. This was quite important to me.

This past week I had my probation review with the operations director who was generally positive, however my probation was extended by 1 month, the reason being that the commercial director has been away for 3 weeks holiday and then a 3.5 week business trip. I did mention the above incident, however I was told that this now put him in a difficult place.

This is my first time in this industry, i have not received any training nor have I received any advice as to how the company has actually worked – my thinking being that if this was in fect what I had got wrong then this would have been exlained further.

I am a string confident person and a strong PA but this company has left me feeling depressed, stressed and unconfident or second guessing myself at every turn.

I want very much to resign as i don’t believe in working somewhere where you are unhappy, but I can’t afford to do this at the moment. A friend told me that essentially her behaviour is bullying, I hae not been to HR as I don’t believe them to be impartial.

Any advice / help guidence would be much appreciated.

Thank you