featherlou, I hope you don’t mind my using your thread to tell my story.
About 10 years ago I worked for a midsized nonprofit whose big annual event was a conference involving several international guests. In preparation for this conference, I arranged travel plans for all these guests. We played with the idea of having a van pick the guests up from the airport, but in the end decided it would be too costly; so at the last staff meeting before the conference, I provided my executive director with a list of every guest’s flight information, so that she or her assistant could be at the airport to receive them. This is how the conference had worked in previous years, and I’d listed the information in an easy-to-read format.
One of the guests, a man from Honduras who spoke no English, showed up at the airport in Atlanta and nobody was there to greet him. He spent the night on the street of Atlanta, and nobody could figure out where he was until more than 24 hours later when he showed up 12 miles away from the airport at the office of a local nonprofit associated with ours.
My boss was furious at me. Hadn’t I arranged for him to be picked up? She absolutely denied that I’d given her the flight information. I overheard her talking shit about me to a coworker. That was the last straw: of all her inept mismanagement over the months I’d worked there, that was it. I resigned. Gave a month’s notice. When the conference was over, I found the flight information exactly where she’d left it near her office and gave it to her again.
My exit interview was, in my mind, going to be a place where I explained exactly what a bad manager she was. (It wasn’t just me: at our big gala fundraiser, a fundraiser that lost some $3000, our drunken Board President said she had a toxic personality, and another board member said she was insane, and not in the good way, and the stories just go on and on). She asked me for honest feedback.
Her version of that was trying, over and over and over, to get me to admit fault. She would never accept that she’d done anything wrong. She had no desire to hear what she’d done poorly as a manager.
I wish I’d just kept my mouth shut. Or at least dropped a dime on them with the IRS. No good came out of it.
Dinsdale, even at that job I worked a month’s resignation. At my last main job (before my current one), I worked something like a 1 1/2 year resignation. The only time I’ve ever resigned without notice was for a company that falsely claimed its employees were independent contractors, in order to get away with paying less than minimum wage. I figured if I wasn’t an employee, I didn’t have to give notice :).
Daniel
