Ok, I'm going to give a no-holds barred account of this company that I wasted two and a half years of my life on.

In Spring of 2008, I received a call from the temp agency I was with that they had a position open doing data entry for a company that specialized in vacation rentals. It sounded promising, plus I was desperate for a job so I accepted. Less than two weeks later, my supervisor, Ian Lynch, was impressed with my work so he asked if I wanted to work for LeisureLink permanently as a Content Loader, this was a slight bump from my current position as a number enterer, now I'd get to re-write written content and crop and post photos for vacation rentals. He offered me a generous raise from $14/hour to $15/hour. Woo...drinks on me! Again, I was in desperate need of a job so I accepted.

Oh, I also forgot to mention, the position I had accepted was taken from a guy they had just fired...sadly, a pattern I would see too much in the years to come at this company.

Four months after I started, the company went through mass lay-offs, letting about 20 people go, there were only about 50 employees there at the time, so you can do the math. A month a half later, they laid off 9 more people, the cubicles were looking sad and bare. The content team that I worked for went from four permanent employees and two full time temp workers to two permanent employees (one being myself) and no temps. Me and the other girl that worked there were now tasked with handling content that was normally done by six people. A month or so after that, they fired my fellow Content Loader. See a pattern forming here?

They did have the decency to hire a replacement quickly, but the reasons for firing the other girl were vague, added to that, up until the point of her termination, they had heaped praises upon her, telling her how valuable she was to the company. Ridiculous.

During this time, I was "promoted" to Distribution, this basically meant more work, but not more pay. In fact, my "promotion" went unnoticed by everyone in the office because it was never announced (as per their usual protocol) and co-workers were still coming up to me for months with content issues and concerns, even though I was no longer part of that department.

Did I also mention that the Distribution department comprised of two employees, one of which they canned shortly before I started, leaving one person, until I came aboard, making it two again? Oh, but this other employee really didn't work for distribution, she was transferred to marketing, leaving me as the sole member of Distribution. So, just like when I was in the Content department, doing the work of three people, I was now doing the work of two people, but had more responsibility and was much more difficult.

The woman helping me in distribution while she was transferred to marketing, got married and was to move to Toronto, she asked if she could work remotely. There were a few other employees working from San Diego, Florida and even Ireland remotely, so they agreed...but her current salary would be reduced to customer service rate, $9/hour, almost three times less than what she was currently making. So she quit...now making me the ONLY person knowledgeable on distribution in the entire company, this made me extremely uncomfortable because my training was still not complete.

At this point, I'd be working there for a year and a half and asked the director and my manager (my former supervisor, Ian) for a raise. They thought I was doing a wonderful job and that I deserved one, but they said they didn't have the funds to do it. Oddly enough, the same director that said that, promoted one of the customer service reps to Customer Service Supervisor, he became in charge of the entire customer service team, I highly doubt he was still getting the $9/hour rate that they were. A fact that was confirmed to me months later when this supervisor quit due to LeisureLink's poor management.

I did finally get a raise, just enough for me not to complain, but not enough to keep me from leaving. In fact, I later discovered that my pay was still considerably less than people in the same position (about $14, 000 less) and still less than those that were hired for content, the position I was "promoted" from (nearly $600 less).

Foolishly, I stayed with the company longer, and even trained new people for content and distribution. A co-worker I trained, revealed to me that after she was trained, she moved onto account management as an assistant to the revenue managers, a position that was lower than my current position as basically manager of distribution, yet she made $6, 000 more than me, at a position she'd worked less than a month in, while I had to beg my boss two separate times for a pay bump for a position I'd held for a year and a half!

My work became increasingly worse and worse I'll admit due to management's lack of care for me. I was "talked" to about two or three times but was never fired or even written up. I have two theories for this, 1. my pay was so low, they wouldn't want to hire someone new 2. I was the only one that knew what I was doing so they sort of needed me.

In May of last year (2010) I got married, but my husband lived in South Orange County, about 64 miles from Pasadena, but every day after work, he'd suffer through the treacherous traffic to be with me in Pasadena where I lived with my sister. This was a regular four hours of traffic for him, daily. Before I was married, I asked my manager, if I could start working remotely (from my Orange County home). He didn't hesitate to say no. He explained that the sort of work I did required me to be in the office every single day. Let me break down what I did at this company; I took Word documents sent from clients, edited them lightly and posted them online. I then took photos, cropped them to the appropriate size and posted those online. I also did a lot of availability searching for vacation rentals on our site partners; Travelocity and Orbitz. All of this could be done from my home computer, yet Ian insisted that is was absolutely imperative for me to be physically in the office to do this. Our own director worked from home 3-4 days a week, it seemed a huge double standard.

I stayed on till the end of August, and finally quit. No one seemed to care. One more thing that I forget to mention, is my boss, Ian, decided to write me a lovely email asking me what my intentions were for the company before my May wedding, as he knew the distance driving from OC to Pasadena would be too much for me. He knew I would eventually quit, but he didn't have the balls to actually fire me, so he thought he could coerce me into quitting so the company wouldn't need to pay taxes on my unemployment. Never in my professional life have I experienced anything as unprofessional as this!

The director, Jeff Farr, now the VP, is even worse. While I worked there, he was in charge of my department, revenue management and customer service. Whenever, he walked by my department, he ignored everyone in it (myself, another co-worker that was hired later on and my new supervisor) he verbally abused the customer service department, and the only ones he liked was the revenue managers. He often had them in his office to talk and constantly took them to lunch. He never once took me to lunch. This director was a salesperson when I started, so it was obvious where his attention was; revenue.

If my review has not made explicitly clear how badly run this company is, I will give yet another glaring reflection of this company. In my two and a half years there, five different people were hired and fired for the position of Human Resource Specialist/Office Manager. Even if you're hard up for a job as I was, trust me, working here will only make you regret it once you are unceremoniously fired as many have been or forced to quit as I was.