I got fired after a month and a half and I don't know why!

The BBQ Pit
1

I went to work for a food distribution software company 6 weeks ago as a business analyst in charge of customer support. This was a small company of less than 30 people so I was the only person in a like position. I had to take calls from corporate customers and resolve them as quickly as possible.

The person that “trained” me was the guy who had the job before me and got promoted. I put that in quotation marks because he apparently took great joy in watching try to figure stuff out on my own and then flounder when it took too long. Dominic would give me the :rolleyes: whenever I asked a question about what to do, why it is done that way, or what the parts of my job were. He would answer a very specific question as tersely as possible. That was the only guidance I was given.

My boss didn’t speak to me the first week I was there. After that, he went on vacation for two weeks. After he returned, I attended my first group status meeting. I gave my status for everything that I was working on and I noticed my boss giving me a funny look. “What is the status of the IQ data load?” he asked. I answered, “What is the IQ data load?” because I had never heard of it before. “That is probably the most important part of your job” he said. “You should be working on that all the time”. I felt humiliated and embarrassed but then pissed off because no one even told me what my job really was et alone the specifics and priorities of what I should be doing.

A few days later, I got called into HR for a one month review. It was really bad. I explained that I had zero guidance on what I was supposed to be doing and everything that I knew about, I was doing well. They told me to put together a schedule of any training that I needed. I knew at that time that the only person that could help me was me. I started taking manuals and documentation home and reading them at night because no one else was going to tell me anything.

My boss didn’t speak to me for the next two weeks except for the occasional “hello”. Yesterday, I got called into HR after lunch and they let me know that it was my last day. I insisted that they tell me why and they said, “We just don’t think that this is a good match”. I pressed for details and they wouldn’t tell me anything. I pressed again and they pointed out that I once sent the wrong file to a customer my first week on the job (which I recognized after I sent it and fixed it within 5 minutes). That mistake ranks about a .2 on a scale of one to ten. I asked when they made the decision and they told me right after my one-month review.

I am truly baffled. I was only there for one month, training myself, had no idea what my responsibilities were, no one would tell me, and they decide that I am not a good fit? Talk about unfair and setting someone up for failure. This shit is almost enough to make me turn socialist.

2

Humm - tough break - although it sounds like working there would have been a drag anyhow. :frowning:

Good luck finding something else.

3

I got fired once over a “Hold” button on a phone. True story.

4

That really sucks! I’m sorry that happened to you.

5

Well… how often did you access the boards from work?

Just kidding, sorry about what happened. Their loss though.

6

That sucks, but who would want to work for such assnozzles, anyway?

Be glad you are free from their evil clutches.

7

dood, the same thing happened to me last Thanksgiving. I got fired because the phone company screwed up our voicemail and my new boss wouldn’t believe that it wasn’t my fault.

8

Sorry to hear you had such a rough time. Probably your best bet is to move on and find a better company. Sadly, a lot of companies are as badly run as the one you got released from.

9

The bad news: Most companies have a 90-day evaluation period, during which you can be let go for no reason whatsoever. You have no real recourse because of this.

The good news: A small company that is run as shoddily as your former employer seems to be isn’t long for this earth. Consider:

  1. They have no formal training procedure;
  2. Their communication level among employees is non-existent;
  3. They have no interest in solving problems, preferring instead to ignore them;
  4. They have no interest in constructive feedback from employees.

Add it up, and it sounds like a really good recipe for a really bad company.

10

Hey, Shag, if your location didn’t say Mass., I’d think you worked at the same company I did five years ago. Reading your post was deja vu, man. The only thing I can think of was you were the wrong person at the wrong time in a politically charged environment (as I found out later from former cow-orkers).

11

I’m sorry that happened, but honestly- I’ve worked for companies like that before, and further employment would have meant further headaches and bullshit. Good luck finding a new job.

12

I’m sorry, Shagnasty. You have a right to be pissed.

13

I had the same thing happen to me. Exactly. They wouldn’t tell me why, but I think it was because I wasn’t a Stepford Assistant. These people had no sense of humor, misled me on my job duties, and generally sucked the big one.

Shag, you are lucky to be gone. The money thing is an issue, I’m sure, but you wouldn’t have been happy there anyway. Onward and upward!

14

Ahhh, misleading job descriptions. One woman with whom I worked a few years back was hired for a job at a brokerage house as the assistant to the head of the trading floor. When she came in on her first day, she found out that she was supposed to the the assistant’s assistant. She walked out.

15

Oh do tell!

Shag, from what you’ve told us, this is probably a blessing in disguise-it sounds like a seriously shitty and incompetant business.

Good luck!

16

[hijack]
Shagnasty, I’ve been meaning to ask you this for a long, long time and just haven’t gotten around to it: what does your username mean? I only ask because my dad used to have a cat named Shagnasty. I never asked him why or what it was supposed to mean, I just assumed it was something silly he made up. I’m dying of curiosity; what does it mean to you?
[/hijack]

Oh, and I’m sorry you got fired, but maybe it’s for the best that you’re getting out of there instead of being trapped for years and years in hell.

17

Believe it or not, I don’t think it means anything in particular. It just sounds funny. However, neither me nor your father made it up ourselves. It is a fairly old nickname. From what I can tell, you most commonly hear it used in the South and also in England. I have had older people tell me that they knew someone with that nickname when they were growing up. My best friend in high school called me Shagnasty so I decided to use it as an alias on this board. If you Google, “Shagnasty” you will see that lots of guys and some buinesses use the name too.

18

And here I thought it was just because the cat was a shaggy, nasty old barn cat :stuck_out_tongue:

(Not really, I remember the cat actually being quite friendly for a barn cat; it even had a name, unlike alot of the other barn cats.)

Thanks, Shagnasty!

[/hijack over]

19

I have been fired many, many times. Perhaps this story will make you feel better, Shag:
Back in the mid-90’s, I was waiting some post-collegiate tables at a Memphis pub grub joint. I had been there a month–just long enough to figure out that the money was OK–when I got a call from my half-sister. It seems that my long-estranged father had had a brain aneurysm, the doctors believed he was on his deathbed, and he was asking to see me. Time was of the essence, I was told, as he could kick off any moment. I was supposed to work that night, so I made an emergency call to my notoriously-strict manager, who agreed to find someone to work the shift for me. I hopped in my barely roadworthy car and rushed to Nashville, where I arrived after ICU visiting hours. I was told to return the next morning at 10, so I stayed the night with one of my oldest friends, who lives there.

The next morning at 10, his room was empty. I feared the worst, but the nurse told me he was in a CAT scan and I should return at 2 when the next set of visiting hours began. My friend and I retired to downtown Nashville for lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe, but were caught in a huge downpour as we walked from our parking space to the restaurant. Dripping wet, we requested some bar towels and ate lunch soaked to the bone. Then we returned to the hospital, which was located in the north several miles away. There we discovered that the rainstorm we had been caught in was the leading edge of a tornado that had ripped the roof off of a mall, and the hospital my father was laid up in was the closest to the scene of the disaster. The hospital was on disaster footing–patients were being triaged and treated in the parking lot and no one who wasn’t bleeding from the eyeballs was allowed inside. My pleas that this might be the last time I could see my father alive went unheeded, and we were again turned away.

Finally on Day 3 of the ordeal I finally got in to see him. By now, his prognosis had improved. The bleeding in his skull had mysteriously stopped, and they were waiting on the outcome of some tests to see if he was going to be able to go home soon. I visited with him for a little while and got to meet his flavor of the month, a cute but stupid insurance salesperson from Brentwood. With my illusions of a deathbed apology for years of sociopathic behavior fading fast, I told him that I would stick around until tomorrow and find out if he was going to be OK.

The next day I once again went to the hospital at visiting hours, and once again the room was empty. The nurse on duty told me he was being moved to a non-ICU room. I finally found his room and he said that the doctors had told him his prognosis had improved, but they were still waiting on one more test, which should be ready by the morning. I told him I had to go back to Memphis to get back to my job, gave him my phone number, and said please, please please call me and tell me what the doctors said. He said he would. So I drove back to Memphis, broke and physically and mentally exhausted.

The next day I didn’t hear from him. I called the hospital and got the runaround. Nobody knew anything, but he didn’t appear to be there any more. I went to work as scheduled. My boss asked me where the hell I had been. I told him. My boss asked me how my father was. I said I didn’t know. He didn’t believe me and fired me on the spot in front of a bar full of customers, calling me a damned lazy liar.

20

I would not say you did anything wrong, but if you ever find yourslf in a similar situation, again, I would offer a couple of suggestions (for newhires):

Don’t ever let the boss go a week without talking to you. If your “trainer” is doing a crappy job, then you need to let the boss know. (You also need to find out from the boss–not the trainer–exactly what duties he expects you to be doing. The trainer may have been getting by, shirking something that was high on the bosses priority list.)

When your “trainer” is doing a bad job, you need to go to the boss and explain that you and the trainer seem to be miscommunicating.

When the boss tells you that something you’ve never heard of is your highest priority, follow him out of the meeting and into his office to find out what he’s talking about.

Any time you get a bad fitness report that is too vague to be useful, start sending out your resumes.