Sacked!
KeithHandy posted in Business, Your Soul on April 24th, 2007
So you heard it here first, boys and girls: I have officially entered a new phase of my life. Things had gone from “difficult” to “not humanly possible” in my department at Big Company, and what with the ever-increasing cognitive dissonance of clinging to my “get things done” ethic while knowing I was suddenly expected not only to do twice as much work, but also to use entirely new and counter-intuitive procedures, all the while trying to organize twice as much information in a cubicle smaller than a portajohn… all I knew was I had to get the hell out. Period.
In all honesty, when the district manager asked me to leave early on monday and escorted me out the door, I didn’t know why. Sure, I was showing signs of frustration, but all things considered, I thought I’d been keeping it together pretty well. He said he “wasn’t comfortable” with some things I had said, and I wasn’t sure what he meant.
When I got the call from human resources this morning, it finally made sense. It was something I’d done the previous week. Ohhhhh, yeaaaah, that. See, since this “change” first took place, all of my coworkers have been as miserable as me. We’d been taking a real beating, and we felt that we had been lied to about the call volume, and that there was no substantial reason to believe that things would improve. I envisioned us all as pigs in those tiny factory farm crates. I felt like I couldn’t physically stand up without apologizing for it and referring to it as “breaking rank”. When our supervisor sent us a word document on day two, thanking us for the great job we’d been doing, I changed “THANK YOU” to something phonetically similar and sent it to only three people who desperately needed a therapeutic laugh, including one woman who prior to that had been in tears. Only… as I now find out… apparently more than three people saw it.
I was calm, soft-spoken, and direct when I spoke to human resources. I answered her questions neither defiantly nor evasively. The good news is that they are not going to put anything negative on my record or block my unemployment benefits, and I can still use them as a reference. (Actually I think the whole situation is good, but of course the absence of this income does raise a new challenge.)
What it all boils down to is — you can only take so much.
April 24th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
GOod for you. You’ll find something better.
Did you know worker bees have been disappearing in alarming numbers? Symbolic? I think so.
April 24th, 2007 at 7:08 pm
And it seems perfect timing that this should be posted, just for you, just today:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2007/04/24/the-grand-ritual-mass-custom-conspiracy-performance/
Start with the end:
“And now that you know, it’s easy enough to solve. Write yourself a better part. Write your friends better parts. Put on a good show and let’s all enjoy that instead of the silly bullshit handed to us every day by people whose creative wells dried up long ago.”
April 24th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Actually the third-to-last paragraph hit it home for me, his example that even being a “Bush hater” is casting yourself in one of the pre-defined roles they expected you to fill. The parallel for me being that playing the guy who is constantly bitching that the company does everything wrong has grown as stale and predictable as the behavior of the company itself.
Your comment on that thread was not too shabby either. Way cool how you tie it in with the Law of Attraction (or at least what I knew of it before I *knew* of it, i.e. “use what you have and you will get more”) without being an overpaid soundbyte-regurgitating talking head. ;)
So… do you read my replies to your comments here, or are you one of those drive-by love ‘em and leave ‘em commenters?