Colleen

"Colleen" - When Your Manager's Name Becomes Evidence This is a documented prosecution set to music. October 22, 2019. My Store Leader Colleen Burns pulled me aside for "feedback" after I exercised my legal right to vote in the Canadian federal election. I'd given a week's notice. Management said they'd "take care of it." They didn't. So Sunday evening, I reminded my supervisor I needed the time—as guaranteed by the Canada Elections Act. The next day, Colleen told me I wasn't being "reprimanded," then spent four minutes explaining how my choice to vote might be "perceived" by the team. How I should have "managed myself to be the best possible version" by not needing my legal rights. How "no one else on the team exercised their right this way." That conversation violated Section 134 of the Canada Elections Act: "No employer shall, by intimidation, undue influence or by any other means, interfere with the granting to an elector in their employ of the three consecutive hours for voting." That was just the beginning. Fast forward: September 2021. I'm forced on medical leave after Apple censors my Pride event and workplace trauma spirals into crisis. Sedgwick/Apple doesn't pay me for four months despite full disability benefits and documentation. I resort to survival sex work to pay rent. I call Colleen begging for help. She sends me the same copy-pasted resource list I've tried a dozen times. Resources that don't work. Links to services with waitlists. Phone numbers that go nowhere. January 2022. My benefits expire. I'm forced to return to work. I'm not scheduled. I have no income. I email Colleen asking for my guaranteed 30 hours per week. Her response? A threat. She accuses me of being "concerning, hostile and disrespectful" for asking to work. She demands a doctor's note by January 26, 2024 or I'll face "constructive resignation and abandonment" or "just cause dismissal." I don't have a family doctor. Walk-ins won't provide the extensive documentation she demands. The physician statement costs $250—which I don't have because I'm not being paid. She set conditions for escape that were impossible to meet due to the poverty she helped create. "Colleen" is what happens when you keep every transcript. Every line in this song is supported by documentation: Audio recordings of her "feedback" sessions Email threads showing her delay tactics Transcripts of phone calls where she apologized but did nothing Her January 18, 2024 termination threat email Human Rights complaint proceedings My 20-page response letter with academic citations on workplace violence, normative harm, and discursive abuse I didn't write a revenge song. I wrote an indictment with a beat. Why I Use Her Real Name: Because she used her real power. Because accountability requires names. Because the next person who works under her deserves to Google her name and find this. Because anonymizing abusers protects them. Because she hid behind titles and policies while I starved—and when you face consequences for institutional violence, you don't get to be anonymous either. This isn't defamation. It's documentation. Every claim is provable. Every accusation is supported. Every verse is testimony to a pattern of weaponized bureaucracy that she either participated in or failed to stop despite having the power to do so. This song is your warning system. This is what it looks like when someone has power over your livelihood and uses it carelessly, cruelly, or with complete indifference to your humanity. "The day you face your god you fear he will ask you my name, and you won't have a title to protect you from his judgment." I'm not religious. But I know Colleen is. And I know that beneath every institutional excuse, she knows what she did. The policies, the procedures, the "my hands are tied"—those are shields she carries in this life. This song is a reminder: those shields are temporary. Artist's Note: I survived Apple. I survived Colleen Burns' management. I survived four months without pay, systemic gaslighting, and a return-to-work process designed to force me out. Now her name is in a song that documents exactly how institutional violence works when delivered through "caring" corporate language. She'll never escape it. And that's the point. Justice through art when systems fail.