Previous position I worked, was in a college program for students with an intellectual disability.

We were a small team, but had worked together for years, has been very invested in the program. We used to have a very supportive manager (Associate Dean) who understood the program and valued the team.

We ended up getting a new boss, who didn’t get it, pushed for several changes at a fast rate, didn’t have a student centred approach, devalued us as a team, the foundation of the program started to crumble, we lost morale. We would have secret meetings to talk about what to do. We realized the manager was stripping away parts of our position (she deleted tons of things in the position description file, and made it seem like we were EA’s when in fact, our role was multifaceted and even included us teaching - we were more like faculty and did a lot of program development as well)...

We consulted with the union regarding grievance and started working on a new position description and wanted to propose some changes...

While all this was going on, my coworker decided to click on a file in the shared drive, that said “program bad” (the name of our program, with the word bad next to it)... many of us had seen it but assumed it was something to do with the students... but no...

It was records from many years ago, including letters and union grievance records, and basically, the history of our program... funny enough, the original team of facilitators went through very similar challenges at the college regarding program changes and wanting their position title/description changed to match what they were doing.... and one of the facilitators’ address was there because she had written a letter.... turns out she lived just 3 doors down from one of our current facilitators

History was repeating itself.

Except, thankfully for us, we settled for more money and oh, the nightmare manager ended up getting fired.

I ended up moving on to a different position at the college, after working 10+ years at the program, because even though we made a bit more money, there was no opportunity for growth in the position.

TLDR - a team working at a college program was going through hell with a new manager, was looking at filing union grievance... one person on the team opened an old computer file that many of us overlooked, ended up being the history of the program (early years), included records from grievances filed back them... history was repeating itself and even one of the former team member lived 3 doors down from a current team member... thankfully evil manager ended up getting fired.