Hey Lumen Technologies: Are you okay with abusing your employees to the point where their entire lives revolve around agonizing over your company? Is that your “business model”?

To carve out your employees’ sense of wellbeing and identity until they basically get Stockholm’s Syndrome for your company and they’re too exhausted to look for a way out?

I understand now why so many people loathe CenturyLink.

What’s wrong with you?

Unlike your management “team,” I actually see the people in my life as people and not just employee ID numbers—especially when discrimination, retaliation, and complete disrespect are involved.

What kinds of company values are these supposed to be?

“We bumble around and can’t even give our employees job descriptions”?

“We retaliate in response to any and all questions—let alone requests for raises or a better work environment in another department—with disrespect, a hostile work environment, and discrimination”?

“We block people’s advancement to other roles while simultaneously setting them up for failure in their current one”?

“We claim to support marginalized groups and ambitious minds, and then block their career progress at every turn”?

Garbage. GARBAGE. Your fake “values” are GARBAGE.

Your hypocrisy and failure to open your blind eye to your scum-gutter of middle management is DISGUSTING.

I’ll go ahead and lay out the actual “values” that I’ve witnessed and experienced from your company as ripples through the lives of not only one person, but many:

• Retaliation
• Spite
• Favoritism
• Discrimination
• Hypocrisy
• Dehumanization
• Disrespect
• Indifference
• Gross negligence
• Passive and active psychological harm

No wonder any of your stakeholders with self-respect are pulling out. No wonder you’re tanking.

Your money is garbage. Your “value” is garbage. I’m not surprised that your stocks have plummeted.

I wouldn’t want any if they were free.

No thanks, NYSE: LUMN

I see your employees, including my partner, as a person. Not just any person, but the dearest one in my life. I watch them work hard every day, only to be met with dismissal, adversity, hostility, favoritism, and apathy in a workplace that’s supposed to promote inclusivity, inspiration, and advancement.

I’ve watched you stomp on someone who’s a thousand times the person any of you people who witnessed or got involved in the dumpster fire of a retaliatory situation at this dumpster fire of a company will ever be.

I watched them repeatedly typing past 02:00—several mornings in a row—sacrificing sleep and sanity to make sure that every blog they wrote was top-tier . . . only to then witness their content get pushed aside and made a mockery of while other blogs that sound like they were written by AI were promoted and praised instead. (Don’t worry: I’m an editor and I’ve joked about sounding like an AI myself since long before it was cool. I can say it.)

I watched this company spit all over the efforts of someone who took the personal initiative to earn an (ISC)² certification. Someone who was then invited to write questions for an (ISC)² test.

Someone who had the self-starting energy to pay out-of-pocket for Network+ study materials that should have been paid for, and the determination to study them for hours upon hours after full days of underappreciated work. You couldn’t pay 400 bucks for the wealth of knowledge that would make your blogs posts actually sound good?

Someone who repeatedly asked for help and guidance on how to do even better work, only to have more and more and more work piled on. Where’s the proportional pay raise? Bonus? Compensation? Title change? Something? Anything?

Someone who told me they’d repeatedly been made to feel like a failure even though they’d never even been given a job description to measure their performance against. I still don’t know what their job requirements are supposed to be.

Someone who raised concerns about a new “work plan” that sounded more like a trip-up plan carefully designed to make them fail. They completed all the unreasonable requests anyway.

Your actions affected more than one person.

Haven’t you heard of the butterfly effect?

You don’t just affect the employees you abuse: You affect their families and the people who love them and care about the mental effects of the putrescence you’re dragging them through.

I lost countless hours that could have been spent holding this person—my dearest friend—through some of their most painful moments (many of which were caused by you!). I lost countless spare minutes that I could have spent going on walks with them and trying to enjoy the bits of life that were left in between the full-time work hours . . . and the unpaid hours spent going the extra mile . . . and the after-hours spent uncertain and depressed . . . the days, weeks, and monthsspent feeling directionless and paralyzed thanks to this company’s false promises.

For as many things as I’ve written, I’m grasping at straws for the adequate verbiage to describe how much I hate this company.

Would you like to see your loved one so frustrated and disappointed at the lack of recognition in their workplace that they lose hope and see no point in continuing to study something they once loved?

Would you be okay with seeing your partner cry every night? With seeing them run ragged until there are no tears left and they tell you with a dry face and a drier voice that their employer has sucked away the last of their joy in life?

Would you be okay with hearing your partner look around the house and say that they can’t stand to see what used to be their favorite objects, now the ghosts of things they once loved . . . because their work laptop has diffused so much negativity into their home life that they can’t even stand to be there anymore?

Are you okay with abusing your employees to the point where their entire lives revolve around agonizing over your company?

Is that your “business model”? To carve out your employees’ sense of wellbeing and identity until they basically get Stockholm’s Syndrome for your company and they’re too exhausted to look for a way out?

If so, you’re less than garbage.

“If so.”

See, it’s gotten to the point where even I still hesitate to speak my mind wholly and completely about your organization, and I’m neither employee nor customer! Isn’t that incredible?!

I know that an organization is just a group of individuals, each with their own problems—but still each with their own level of personal responsibility.

A responsibility to not mistreat other people . . . to not stand around twiddling their thumbs while a fellow employee or so-called “underling” is dragged and stomped into the ground. The kind of responsibility you have to not walk on by if you see a flaming car crash with no one around to help.

A responsibility to not contribute to the steaming heap of garbage.

By the way: The only reason I haven’t ripped you a new cavern with my usual rainbow of pirate-level profanity is because I don’t want to worsen my ~*SEO*~

I feel worse than disappointed in you. Once, your name inspired hope of a better life for someone I love. Now I can’t read the specs on a lightbulb without my lip twisting via pure reflex.

STAY AWAY FROM $NYSE: LUMN. Hey @lumentechco , are you going to continue perpetuating a company culture that’s as doomed as your shares are?

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