For this week’s #AskABoss column, Alison Green answers a letter from a desperately overworked employee who’s been covering for a coworker — for the last two months — at a short-staffed clinic with always-increasing clientele: “Conversations with my managers haven’t been productive. They say a bunch of stuff, but nothing happens — no help gets hired, and I’ve had no increase in pay. I’m over two months behind on my paperwork because I’m balancing doing four people’s jobs. The job I originally was hired to do has become my last priority. I feel like a failure because I’m crying every day, I’m not being paid enough to even function (my car is literally on its last leg), and I’m being overworked so much that I can’t look or interview anywhere else. I get in at 7 a.m. to try to get a head start, usually skip lunch, and don’t leave until 5:30 or 6. I even tried for a promotion to escape from the work and they thought I wasn’t qualified ... even though I’m nearly single-handedly running a clinic less than nine months since I started. I can’t just decide to go back to working eight hours a day because of the number of clients who are now being scheduled. I don’t have the option of electing to see only half of the people who are scheduled with us. I then have to enter in all the data from those visits or else it goes unprocessed and leaves an even bigger mess for me to crawl my way out of. Plus, if our paperwork isn’t done in a timely fashion, it could affect our future funding. So I feel stuck working all these hours, and my managers won’t help. How do I escape this situation?” Read Alison’s advice at the link in bio.