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Things have been pretty shaky for the past couple of months working at my current job and I think things are going to get worse. I need to protect myself from harassment, false accusations, conflicts with my superiors, and the tricks they play on new guys where I work. I need to find out how to use human resources to my advantage without making myself a target for future retribution. I work for a small city at a water treatment plant. I've been there for a little over six months and after some initial training the other employees refuse to show me other tasks or to allow me to work with them. There are a lot of very expensive equipment and dangerous chemicals we use there that I don't know how to use or maintenance properly and no one is showing me. The head operator is a real creep. I go to him when I have questions about how to do stuff be he usually just give me an impatient explanation, without getting out of his chair, on how to do something I've never done with controls I've never seen. Its not the same a showing me how to do it properly. He always explains how he never got more than a few minutes training and had to figure everything out himself, like that's the way its supposed to be. He constantly harasses me. When I first started there he told me how they like to "let people hang themselves" there, meaning let them get themselves fired because of their own incompetence, and told me a bunch of stories about previous employees who had been fired for various reasons to show he knew how to get rid of people he wanted fired. He constantly tries to intimidate me. He used to be a master sergent in the military and knows a lot of hazing tactics. Today he was telling another coworker that I "was full of shit" while I stood by his desk 15 minutes early waiting for my shift to start. I've heard him talk to other coworkers about a plan to keep me as incompetent in my duties for as long as possible and I've walked by the Department Director's office while he told her I wasn't trying to learn anything. The Plant Supervisor who is above the Head Operator is a bully. He scheduled me to run the plant by myself during a heavy rainstorm and when the Department Director made him come in to help he told me to go outside to do something then went through my notebook and replaced my paper work with blank forms so that it looked like I hadn't done my paperwork. This has happened a few times before but now I can confirm it is him doing it. As I looked of my blank paperwork he sat behind me and told me how went way back with the Department Director and there was nothing I could say or do about it. A month ago I was being trained to handle a chemical call sodium hypochlorite. I did as I was told and turned on a pump that immediately began spraying me with the chemical. Someone had loosened a clamp on the hose connected to the pump. The employee I was with insisted the clamp was broken. I went to tell the Plant Supervisor but he ignored me. My face began to burn and my clothes were bleached eaten up with tiny holes. I took a shower and changed clothes at the plant. But the Supervisor never filled out an accident report. He just joked that I was now disinfected. I also had a chlorine gas leak during one of my shifts I informed the Head Operator and he tried to fix it but i got exposed to the gas while I observing/helping. Someone likes to hide the log books we keep with some of the equipment after I've used them. I feel I am being hazed in such a way as to make me seem incompetent, forgetful, and accident prone while I am not being shown proper safety and protocol. As a small government employee I should have protection against harassment. How do I use my rights?