Worker Says Her Trainer Kept Finding “Mistakes” in Her Work Every Day — Then Everything Changed the Second She Got Her Own Computer
In a Reddit post, a woman said she switched departments at her mid-size nonprofit and almost immediately started feeling like she was losing her mind. According to the post, the woman training her was a peer with the same title, not a supervisor, and was known for being very good at the customer-facing parts of the job. But during training, she kept finding mistake after mistake in the new employee’s work. The poster said the mistakes were not just frequent. They were bizarrely frequent, especially for a job she considered much easier than other administrative roles she had handled in the past.
She wrote that every day seemed to bring a new round of errors she did not believe she had made. The trainer would then sit her down and lecture her at length about how important it was to follow instructions exactly. Some instructions made sense, but others felt strangely inefficient, like taking notes by hand first and then transferring them later or keeping paper copies of things that were already stored electronically. The woman said she followed all of it anyway for the sake of harmony, but the constant stream of alleged mistakes was making her look incompetent and leaving her wondering if she was somehow making “a hundred little mistakes” without realizing it.
What made the whole thing feel even stranger was that the trainer had recently admitted feeling intimidated by her. According to the post, the trainer told her she could see her ending up in their supervisor’s role someday. The woman said she responded kindly and tried to reassure her, but afterward she started wondering whether that insecurity might have something to do with what was happening. She said she suspected the trainer might actually be changing details in shared databases or spreadsheets, but felt like even saying that out loud made her sound paranoid.
Then the training situation changed without much explanation. In her first update, the woman said another coworker named Bob, who had a similar but slightly more senior role, took over her training. Almost immediately, the daily chaos eased up. Bob still found some mistakes, but they were smaller, more believable, and handled calmly, sometimes with a sticky note instead of a long emotional conversation. After about a week, he told her she was not making mistakes anymore and cleared her to do the work on her own. She said that once Bob took over, everything started feeling normal again.
The biggest shift, though, came when she started working on her own computer instead of sharing the trainer’s. According to the update, much of the earlier training had been done on the trainer’s machine and under the trainer’s login, which made it impossible to cleanly separate who had entered what. But once the poster began doing the work on her own setup, the constant errors vanished. She said that was the part she could not stop thinking about. The mistakes had been daily when she was training under Jane’s system. Once she was working independently, they went away.
At that point, she still did not confront anyone. She wrote that by the time she might have raised concerns, the immediate problem was already over and she did not want to blow things up without proof. Her supervisor never even mentioned the earlier mistakes Jane had been finding, which made the whole thing feel even more unreal. Then, in one moment that seemed almost designed to soften the story, Jane caught a real mistake later on, handled it kindly, and the next day left flowers on the poster’s desk with a note praising how well she was doing and how happy she was that she had joined the team.
Years later, the woman came back with a final update, and the story took another turn. She said she and Jane had both left the organization by then and had actually become friendly over time, even providing references for each other in later job searches. She also said she eventually discovered a database glitch where certain client data would not save unless a user hit “save” twice. That exact glitch affected one of the areas Jane had repeatedly scolded her over, and it turned out Jane’s own entries in that area had not been saving properly either. The woman said the glitch did not explain all of the training weirdness, but it did make her feel less crazy.
By the end, she never got the clean answer she thought she needed at the start. She never proved sabotage, and she never got a full confession or explanation. Instead, she got something messier and more human: a trainer who may have had bad boundaries, a broken system that really was causing some errors, and a work relationship that somehow evolved from suspicion and stress into friendship. What started as a woman wondering if her trainer was quietly setting her up to fail ended with the unsettling possibility that some of it was personal, some of it was technical, and some of it was just two very different people learning how to work together badly before they learned how to do it well.
