As far as I know, it's a bureaucratic shithole in that place. The people were great, my Head of HR was good, but my HR manager defied the very meaning of a class A bitch. Then you had the senior and junior executives. One senior girl who was the HRBP, one girl was the junior recruiter, and I was the HR supporting admin.

What happens is, our HR Manager tortures us and really instills fear. My senior colleague is so scared of her that she cried in front of me on the second day I started work, my recruitment colleague was on a one year contract handled by Manpower. At one point my HR manager purposely signed her timesheet late so that she wouldn't receive her payment in a timely manner.

I on the other hand, was treated nicely because she knew I was the only one who gave two cents about her. So she dragged me in to all her dirty work and made me do work that wasn't under my jobscope, like going out to a mall to source for gifts and stuffs. At one point, she gave me a poster to design at 3pm and expected it by 4pm when I had meetings to attend at 3:30pm. I had no designing experience and she wanted it quick so I designed on MS word for her, and she made my life difficult by saying stuffs like "Why this font looks so big" or "Why this name so weird" etc. Mofo. I typed everything as she requested and she really dug out problems and piss people off. When basic errors like typing were corrected, she then started picking on color schemes and the quality of word file, insisted the picture must be visible in the email and not as an attachment. I finished work at 5:30pm, promised to go find my boyfriend to bring him to the clinic because he was sick, and holy shit, she only let me go at 8pm. There were a few other similar incidents that happened but I figured since I was just a 2 months contractor, I can afford to be feisty with her nearing the end of my second month.

About the 3rd/4th week of my second month, that's when I started defying all her orders. She asked for changes to be made for the work that I've done. Like... super simple MS PowerPoint presentation for Employee Awards also she wanted to have a say in how people's name should be long/short. And she was desperate to prove her point that she sent me 1MB worth of emails to the point where all my work-relevant emails were stalled in the outbox section. I actually had to backtrack all my emails to find out the root cause.
And yes, I was only given a 100MB outlook storage, pathetic.

By my last day during the handover, she treated me like she treated the rest of my colleagues. She stopped looking at me when she talked to me, that means she no longer gives a shit about you. But with no one else to bodek anymore, she turned back to the junior recruiter who also hates her. It's a well known fact that no one likes her. Some department even mentioned she deliberately tried to mess up some managers' promotion even though most of those promotions were driven by measurable performance and was insisted by the regional directors.

She made things so difficult that one regional director flew down from Singapore to have a word with my Head of HR and her. Only then she gave in. My Head of HR knows about her evil deeds but he can't do jackshit about her because he's an expat and his success in work is tied in to hers. So they both use one another, and when shit gets out of control, they throw it to us.

Sometimes, things really show for themselves. At the end of the day, its the junior executives doing the work the higher ups. My ex-colleague tried to leave, but they basically stopped her from leaving because they knew they needed her. So, they compromised. The head of hr promised my colleague that she doesn't have to deal with the manager, so she stayed. The junior recruiter left and a new recruiter got employed. I heard that even the new girl couldn't stand my manager just after a month of work.

Anyway back to the intern, I wouldn't say it's much of a leeway, but they let it flow the way it is so that my head and manager can say something horrible behind her back after she leaves. It's basically stabbing from the back lah. The higher ups are too busy maintaining stakeholders' interest that things like disciplinary issues from Interns don't bother them.

Edit: yes, purposely left certain details in 'cept the company's name. It was intended.