It’s not uncommon for layoffs to happen this way. Something very similar happened at my friends workplace, complete with an assembly. The only difference was that my friend’s name was called along with about about 1/4 of the company, and they were led to another conference room. Expecting the worst, they were told that they were being kept and the rest of the company was getting sacked as they spoke. They were then told to stay in the conference room for a while until security had a chance to clean up the mess of hundreds of people getting sacked at once.
I was laid off, it was pretty horrible.
It was June of 99. I had been involved in the training effort for a large SAP implementation at a pretty big defense contractor about 45 minutes outside of Dallas.
The SAP job market was HOT HOT HOT and I was anxious to leave the “good old boys” workplace at the defense contractor and had thrown out a ton of resumes.
I had three job offers in one week. I accepted a gushingly enthusiastic job offer with DA Consulting, an SAP Training Org head quartered in Houston. It was perfect, an exact match to my skills and they wanted me for their Dallas office and to work on a huge CompUSA SAP training effort.
My boyfriend and I jumped at the opportunity to move out of sticksville and we found a gorgeous loft in downtown Dallas, nearly twice as much as we had been paying in the sticks. (http://www.thekirby.net/). Since I was making more money, we decided to go for it and moved in shortly before I was due to start at my new job on June 28th.
Like an optimistic dumbass, I ignored all the warning signs. The other trainers at DA had told me that when they got hired, they had a two week training session (all expenses paid) in Houston. Instead, I received 3 days of training in the Dallas office.
After my training ended, they immediately put me to work training on an SAP financial functionality I had never experienced. There was a co-trainer with me, and I did a pretty good job.
10 days after I was hired, one of the supervisors approached me at the CompUSA site and told me to head back to the main office for a meeting. As I was gathering my purse to go, the supervisor asked me if some of the other stuff at the workstation was mine and that I should probably take it all with me. (><)
Long story short (well, too late) they laid me off. I was completely stunned and in shock. I (supremely unprofessionally) burst into tears, there was no way I could go back to my old job, we had moved to Dallas and lived in a loft we could definitely no longer afford.
In hindsight, I think they hired me (and two others) JUST to lay us off. The CompUSA project was a really big project for them and they couldn’t afford to lay off any of their trainers currently involved with the project. I wish I hadn’t meekly signed the required legal agreement to obtain my paltry two weeks severance. I have always wondered if I could have successfully sued. What type of lamebrain company experiences such poor planning they fire 3 people 10 days after they start work?
It was a horrible experience. I can’t ever remember feeling that bad, and so worried about how we would make ends meet.
Luckily, the story has a roundabout happy ending. There were a couple of months of fear and misery, but I landed a great job at a Very Large Software Company making MORE money with BETTER benefits doing something I really enjoy.
And DA Consulting stock? 0.06 yes. 0.06
I feel creeped out reading this thread at work.
I’m gonna go.
Oh, I forgot the other big warning sign that failed to register.
I was laid off on a Wed (IIRC). There was a big company-wide meeting the Friday before with all the consultants. I thought it would be a perfect time for the director to introduce us three newbies to our new co-workers, but nada.
I realize now they didn’t introduce us because they knew we weren’t sticking around.
I should clarify: it’s the wife’s company. They are owned completely by a wealthy family in northern europe and I’m going to leave it at that.
I’ve seen people get drunk & violent…and get fired for it. There was even one guy who I never got along with/Hated (spidey sense?) that ended up being fired in handcuffs as he was arrested by the FBI for kidnapping and molesting a little boy in an apartment in Philadelphia. (a doubly neat trick, as he lived in manhattan)
I was told of a secretary who was fired who called one former boss back two weeks later to see if he wanted her for an afternoon trick. :x
And the last place I left before my current job closed that entire building down 6 months after I left, firing/laying off over 500 people en masse.
Masta Wang-Ka, I don’t pretend any of this makes sense. But its just the tip of the iceberg of the stupid stuff tht goes on.
Anonymous Coward, wow. Although your example doesn’t necessarily indicate a common pattern, it does point out that such things are done, and in more than one place. I had no idea–maybe I’ve just been lucky.
Still, I don’t think that I could face myself in the mirror if I was part of a management team that decided to do such a thing (a large group layoff in front of the other employees). And I don’t think that, if I was one of the “survivors,” I’d want to stick around much longer.
Wow, indeed. :eek:
Not really laid-off, just no re-upped.
I used to do temp work and the rule at my agency (IIRC) was that if you worked at a company for 60 days, they had the option to hire you for good! So I was at Company X for nearly two months, doing reception work, when about 3:00 on a Friday afternoon one of the managers sat on the edge of my desk and said, “Well, I just want you to know that I appreciated the work you’ve done and that you’ll be missed.” THIS is how I found out I wasn’t coming back! THe guy claimed that he thought I already knew what was happeneing!
THe woman sitting behind me was almost as flumoxed as I was and kept appologizing to me. I had to ask someone to cover the phones for me while I went into the bathroom for a good cry. Then I called my temp agency and asked them when they were going to tell me this was happening and THEY claimed to be as surprised as I was! THey made a phone call and then called me back to confirm what I had heard. THey chewed out whoever it was at Company X who made the decision for not letting THEM in on it and, really, the policy at the temp agncy was THEY would break the news to someone who wasn’t coming back.
I spoke to a HR person at Company X, my boxful of possesions on my lap, and telling her that the management there should really rethink how they drop such bombs on people. THen I walked out of the building, sobbing. Not my most dignified exit, but I wasn’t exactly ready for what had happened.
Patty
I’m sure I’ve told this story before … forgive me.
Many moons ago I worked for a Very Large Retail Catalog. We switched from mechanical pasteup to an electronic desktop publishing system, which meant the in-house typographers were out of work; the copywriters would be doing the typesetting on (our inferior equivalent of) QuarkXpress.
But the company wouldn’t admit it, oh no. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knew what was soon to happen, but there were no hints of impending layoff from management. No verbal hints, that is.
First they moved all the typographers to cramped quarters in a hallway. Then they unpacked the gigantic new computer monitors (I am not making this up) and placed them all down the hallway, blankly staring at the doomed typographers all day long.
Finally they conducted the mass layoff, by phone. They called each typographer in the hallway, in order, starting with the one at the north end of the hallway, proceeding in an orderly fashion to the last typographer on the south end. (I repeat, I am not making this up. There are others who were there.)
The division was shut down and all the rest of us were laid off a couple of years later. We were fired by one of those consultants who specializes in shutting down divisions to save the company, as his first official action. But that was relatively humane, compared to the way they had intentionally tortured the poor, obsolete typographers.
Working in kitchen at a nursing home, I got called in early to help serve lunch. I figured I was the replacement (gut feeling). So we are standing there serving lunch and in comes the newly fired employee(we had renovations at the time and the boss and assistant bosses offices where temporarily moved down the hall), she is all teared up and screaming incoherently. She then proceeds to flip over 4 trays(90+ cups) full of coffee and tea right into the steam table, then pushes over the cart we were currently filling, it already had 16 trays on it, mostly puree(you know, the baby food like stuff). Then she starts picking up hot plates and flinging them across the kitchen. The boss comes in along with the administrator, and she leaves rather quickly.
We figure its over so we stir the coffee into the beef burgundy and mashed potatoes, wipe the puree peas off the cups that hadn’t spilled, pick up the cart, and get our runner to wash the couple of dishes we will need out of the crashed cart. Someone else was under the counter finding the flying hot plates and we were all staring at each other dumbly.
The next is hearsay, she went looking for our assistant boss, went tear assing across the lobby and managed to grab a bunch of the potted trees and flung them (dirt EVERYWHERE) tipped over the couches and found the assistant boss, whom she tried to strangle(her neck was pretty messed up). I guess she got pulled off, and of course comes back to the kitchen, which is still in the clean up process. As soon as she came in she grabs the salvaged coffee and tea trays(down to about 50 cups now) and flips those back into the steam table, then pushes the uprighted, though now dirty cart over again.
The boss and the administrator come flying in and the
Administrator says “Maam we need to escourt you out of the building”
Psycho"Hit me" what the hell is she thinking?
A: “I’m not going to hit you, but you need to leave” he was really calm
Nutcase"Come one Mother*er, HIT me!!"
A: “Maam we are going to call the police”
Fruit loop"Come on Py HIT ME!!! HIT ME LIKE THIS"
POW POW POW, she popped him in the face about 5 times, it was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life.
She then ran out the back door and into the woods, they finally got her and she got a couple years of probation.
I can still see her CRYSTAL clear saying HIT ME LIKE THIS and popping him in the face, the best part was the dumb expression on the Administrators face, BTW he was fired in the middle of the next state survey.
Sorry for the length.
The weirdest firing story was at my first job after college. It was a nonprofit that did refugee job placement, and I knew the manager of mmy unit was a really nice guy, but was having a hard time with the political hardball played at the agency’s main office.
One day I left early to have my wisdom teeth out. I came in he next day to discover that my boss had been fired. The weirdest part was coming back in from lunch that day to see a guy sitting in the waiting room - it was someone I had studied in Russia with, and last I heard he’d been living three states away. Why was he there? For a job interview with Mr. Ex-Bossman. Our poor receptionist didn’t know what to tell him, even though he obviously wasn’t goinig to have an interview that day. I had the joy of telling him what had happened. (He did eventually get the job.)
Our best work story at my current job was quite colorful, but I’m not feeling flamboyant enough to do a proper job on it right now. Besides, although it should have been a firing story, management procrastinated so long that it technically became a quitting story.
My old law firm was highly civilized when it let lawyers go. There was one tax lawyer there who just wasn’t working out. They gave her several months notice, and when she hadn’t found another job by then then allowed her to keep her office and phone for her job hunt.
Some time later, they needed her office, and asked her, not to leave, but to move to a smaller office downstairs. Hearing this, she went balistic, screaming around the halls about the unfairness of it all.
Needless to say, she no longer had her old office or the smaller one.
I have a friend who used to work at Compaq and recounted the following story to me several months before he left the company himself. Apparently one of his colleagues forwarded a joke email and intended to send it to everyone in the building, but he accidentally sent it to the “Global” address, which meant that it went to every Compaq employee across the entire globe, including the Board of Directors and the CEO. About thirty seconds after he hit “send”, his manager strode over and fired him on the spot. Their reasoning was that even though the joke was harmless, the company would have been toast if his message had contained a virus.
This was the most F-ed up firing I have ever witnessed:
HR manager flies in to spend the week at our office (about 9 people - we were a regional team). She basically hangs out with us all week, goes to lunch/dinner with us, etc. Then, on Friday, the CEO flies in unexpectedly (for us, anyway) and goes into my boss’ office with my boss and the HR Manager. They proceed to fire him.
I say proceed because, I kid you not, they went back and forth for about two hours. I have never seen anything so unprofessional in my life. We could hear the three of them arguing through the door (no, this was not a partnership or anything, my boss was simply an employee of the company).
It was also crystal clear that the HR manager knew about this the whole week and thought it was a great idea to hang with us all (boss included) like she didn’t know it was coming. We all hated her after this episode, not so much because we liked him so much but because she just showed how totally incompetent she was and what poor judgement she had.
Anyway, after two hours pass, they finally open the door and the CEO asks me for boxes. HR bitch tells me to order pizza for everyone. Then, they allow my ex-boss to CALL HIS WIFE to come and help him pack. (You all would TOTALLY recognize the name of this company, BTW, this is not some small outfit). In the meatime, they leave him alone in his office during which time he stuffed important papers in his briefcase and ran out and down to his car before they noticed (he ran by my desk clutching the briefcase).
His wife arrives and starts screaming at the CEO in between slamming office doors all over the place. We were all in the conference room eating pizza during this because we weren’t allowed to leave. WTF??
They finally finished packing up about 2 hours after that and HR moron escorted them out. What the purpose of THAT was, I have no idea - they were alone in his office the entire time they were packing and he also walked out with his company laptop right in front of her face. (She called me later to ask if he still had his laptop and I told her that she had walked him out while he was holding it).
They told him that they would most certainly leave his voicemail activated for however long he wished and then had me disable it as soon as he left.
Just a bizarre scene.
I’ve seen a few instances where the “When I hand in my notice, I’m gonna tell them exactly what is wrong with this place” scenario was played out, to the full.
I don’t believe anything good can ever come of it - the latest instance was a case in point - the employee, who was disgruntled but had never mentioned any of her grievances, handed in her notice, then a few days later, suddenly collared her boss and reeled off a catalogue of wrongs.
He’s a reasonable man and he was initially quite concerned, but given that nothing had ever been said in the past, and taking advice from others, reached the unsurprising conclusion that the employee was the real problem.
It never works - if you’re unhappy, leave, or speak up, but don’t do both - it will just make you look stupid.
So what’d you say?
I got laid off one time. I was a contractor for the Feds. They ran out of money to pay for everyone and we knew they were going to get rid of half of us or so. I thought that I was ok as I had been there the longest, made less then most people and knew all the ins and outs of the job.
Well I come into work and can’t long into the computer to sign in. This is at 8 or so. A bit later the boss comes around and says you’ve been laid off. I wasn’t that pissed really, but I ride a commuter train, they only run one way so I was stuck there for a good six hours before the first train home. I wish they would have said something as I would have driven to work.
Oooooo, I can’t believe I forgot this one!
I worked at this company that was a partnership between a man and a woman. I worked for the guy. The woman was the most vile person I have ever met. She was evil, and I don’t say that about just anyone. She used to go to staff meetings wearing huge “Alexis Carrington” hats. I saw a review she did of an employee once and it said things like “No one likes you and you don’t even see how everyone talks about you behind your back.”
Anyway, she hated my guts. I was hired at a MUCH higher salary than her assistant and for some reason that just bugged her (technically, my boss was the higher of the two). I think that she felt that since I was making so much more I should be working until 9:00 at night. In reality, she hired her assistant at a crappy salary and I wasn’t even making what I had been making two jobs prior because it was such a lousy market.
So she basically chews on my boss’ ear until I can see the tide turning. She was just unbelievably relentless in her jabs at me and highlighting (to him) every single thing I did wrong. And finally he turns out to be a Boss with No Balls and decides to terminate me.
Except he doesn’t tell me this. He interviews people and I somehow end up screening a call from a woman about the “assistant” position. I ask him point blank if he is letting me go and he says OH NO…how could I EVER think that? No, he is simply trying to find an assistant for one of the new people! He even pokes me in the arm while telling me how “silly” I am!
About two days later, I go to lunch with a friend of mine, who has another friend who had interviewed for my position. I go back to the office, sat down in front of his desk and said, “So, let me get this straight, you are NOT looking to replace me?” He said “Oh God, no” and I said, “well, that’s funny because I just had lunch with someone who interviewed for my position.” (I took out the middle person).
His jaw dropped. Now, for my revenge, I told him that I completely understood and I would be more than happy to finish out the week tidying everything up - no hard feelings, it’s for the best, anyway. I guess I was as good at lying as he was. I spent the next three days doing nothing, and I mean nothing. People were calling up to schedule meetings and I didn’t even write anything down. I “forgot” to make his travel arrangments - that kind of stuff.
Then, on that Friday, the HR person called me in to do the “exit interview.” I asked for a witness, which kind of threw her. She got someone. I asked her in front of the witness why I was being terminated, which threw her again, because she was under the impression that this was kissy and nice. She said she didn’t know, that my boss had not given her a reason. I repeated it. Then I tossed my key, security card, and a short letter that said I had retained a lawyer due to the hostile work environment (gave the lawyer’s name), and walked out.
The freak out voicemail he left me was priceless. I never spoke to him again, nor did I pursue the case (I had, in fact, gone to a lawyer who agreed to take the case). I know it made him (and her I would imagine) positively sick when they thought about the fact that they had left me access to all the files and everything and I could have done virtually anything. I didn’t do anything horrible, but it filled me with glee knowing they were excreting their pants wondering if I had.
This is minor compared to some of your stories, but I still get a chuckle out of it.
I work at, let’s say, CompanyX. When I first started, the accountant had already been notified that she was being let go. I wasn’t the replacement, by the way. On the first day that the new person started, she couldn’t log on to the computer in the office that the previous accountant had used. They finally had to call in our computer consultants to get through the password system’s back door, and discovered that the previous accountant had changed her password to “CompanyXsucks”.
Yeah, my ex-colleague did that… although it was while he worked for the company. Our General Manger was himself an “absentee employee” and left everything under the supervision of the comptroller, Dimbulb.
The comptroller, Dimbulb, was an idiot. He had no degree in accounting - in fact he had no degree of any kind. He completed highschool and taken a few accounting courses at a college (never finished so had no diploma or even a certificate).
He was so technically inept, he would address e-mail’s by typing the persons name into the “To” field as in: “TO: Cecil Adams, SUBJECT: Oustanding Account.” No @ to be found. The messages would bounce and he’d call up our ISP and yell at them for their sub-standard service. He expressed concern about the “CD burner” we used to back-up files. He thought it was like a paper shredder and destroyed CDs by burning them (think “flames and smoke”).
Seeing as how he presented such a danger to all things computerized, my co-worker decided to protect the network by locking out Dimbulb. He would illicitly hack into the admin, and change the password to “DimbulbIsADick.”
Eventually some IT consultants would be called in to “fix” it, but they were smart enough to figure out why someone was changing the password (clearly we had to keep Dimbulb out lest he wreak havoc), and never told Dimbulb that the password was getting deliberately changed, nor did they tell him that the password was always changed to “DimbulbIsADick.”
Oh, and to make this relevent to the OP: My co-worker gave notice because he hated the new production manager, and within minutes security swooped in to escort him out. Worried that he might “do something” while he was cleaning out his desk, the comptroller decided to pull the plug on his computer. He ripped the printer cord out of the back (you know the old ones that were screwed in place?) taking quite a bit of compuer guts with it.
This story came from my Mother after a mass layoff at her old company about five years ago.
Apparently, there was this one employee there that was basically a jackass. He wanted everything his way, and even mouthed off to his boss because he didn’t like a descision that the boss had made. He refused to change his attitude, going as far to threaten to wreck havoc on the building wide computer system. Well, a few months after he was hired, the company had a mass layoff. They sent everyone on each floor to two seperate conference rooms. One was for people getting laid off, the other was for people getting kept. This guy was in the room for getting laid off. Each person was allowed (on their own!) to go back to their office to gather personal belongings and say good bye to co-workers. They had roughly an hour to do this. Now, this guy went back to his office, locked the door, proped a chair against it, and went balistic. He threw stuff at his window, he tried to screw up the computer system (he was already locked out), he called the CEO and his bosses screaming at them, he completely wrecked his office, and he refused to come out. Eventually the rent-a-cops on premises unlocked and beat down his door, and he was led out in handcuffs with the remains of his stuff thrown into a small box.
:smack: