You arrogant irresponsible little brat! I hired you despite your former employer telling me that you left without notice, because she said you were a great worker and because you sat down with me and explained how that situation was intolerable and that you couldn’t stand to give notice.
So, Monday you left a message with the service saying you wouldn’t be in because of brake problems and you would call back later that day to update us. It’s Friday now and no call. The cell phone number you gave as your contact last week is disconnected. We have no way to reach you.
I’m not stupid, I know you had an interview last week for a better job. Even if you had left without notice, I would have been somewhat upset, but I would have wished you well and given you a good reference. But to not even call to tell us you wouldn’t be working here anyway is beyond disrespectful. I could have had an ad in this weekend’s paper. I could have told my part-time receptionist who has been dying to work full-time that she could now have the job.
If this were the first time this had happened, I could write it off. But two years ago the same thing happenned. An employee left for lunch and never came back. What kind of stupid, rude, irresponsible generation are we raising?
P.S. I’m so nice, I would have even paid your remaining vacation time. Just try to collect your last check now. You’ll have to show up in person and explain yourself to me first.
I feel sorry for you but don’t blame the generation. Every generation has selfish, silly gits.
She is an irresponsible person but I doubt it is the generation. I take it she is young. Young people are always more cavalier about leaving low paying jobs.
You may not have a choice about this one. I don’t know much about the law, but it seems that she could just say she was on vacation, then quit, and be justified in asking for her full wages, without having to be berated by you first.
WRT to you hiring her knowing full well that she left her last employer with no notice… If a guy cheats on his wife with you, you have no right to be surprised when he cheats on you with someone else.
This happened to us once. A temp was told she wasn’t going to be hired permanently, she left for lunch and that was the last we saw of her. She told me she had talked to our boss about taking a long lunch. When I asked my boss (around 3pm, since I was covering the phones and had been stuck there, missing my lunch) if she knew when Temp was coming back, I found out that our boss had never been told she was taking a long lunch.
Well, she did explain that the situation was “intolerable.” I wonder if she finds working for you “intolerable?” (Not that you are, of course, but it seems she was able to explain it away to your satisfaction.)
She probably didn’t want to quit until she was sure she had found a better job.
Regardless, since this is the place for airing out asshole suggestions, if you know where she interviewed, why don’t you call the manager there and ask, “Is she working for you? Because she never quit her job here.”
It depends on the terms and conditions of her employment. If they state that she must give a certain amount of notice before quitting in order to cash out any remaining vacation time, they’re within their rights to refuse to pay her for unused vacation if she give no notice at all.
Heh. I did this once. I just decided I no longer worked at the place and never bothered telling a soul. When my called the next night to ask why I hadn’t shown up for my shift, I was genuinely surprised that he never got my telepathic message.
Funnily enough, a few months later I went back and asked to be rehired. They took me back, and soon enough I was the hardest working and most loyal person there. I was promoted to manager within a year.
Unfortunately, you don’t have a choice here. By law, you have to get her last check out to her within 72 hours (I think that’s the rule.) You can’t withhold it for an explanation. Of course since she never actually quit, you could always just say you’ve been waiting for her to come back to work.
Now, I’ve called and quit jobs I’ve found intolerable before, but I couldn’t imagine just never going back. Well, I could imagine it, hell, I’ve dreamt about it before, but I’d never have the nerve to actually do it. How irresponsible!
I used to run a small night shift in a manufacturing plant, in Fort Myers, FL back in the 1960s; we had people get up for coffee break and never come back. People just failing to show up was not at all uncommon. Yes, it happened before I took over the shift, too.
Just to clarify-when this woman left her last job, she didn’t give notice, but she at least said “I quit!” and walked out. I would expect at least that courtesy.
Also, I did hire the parttimer, but I still need somebody to replace her.
Finally, I think in VA you have 30 days to mail a final check. This is an at-will state so I have no obligation to pay accrued vacation. I wouldn’t actually withhold her check, but unless she at least calls to tell me her address, I am under no obligation to make an effort to find her. It is her job to contact me.
From what you have described, you are perfectly right at being very upset at her. However, let me play a devil’s advocate for a moment and surmise that not every employer deserves even a bare modicum of courtesy. Sometimes the right thing to do is to get up for a coffee break and not come back. Courtesies are reserved for beings we consider to be deserving of courtesies, and when you cease to be that in somebodie’s eyes, you are not going to get any.
As for me, I am a very tolerant person. If somebody drives me to the point where I would forego everything, leave without saying a word and not come back, it also means that if it were legal, socially acceptable and I could spare the moment, I wouldn’t hesitate to beat that person to death with a shovel in front of their children.
Thankfully, so far this has not happened, but my life experience has shown me that it might indeed be possible. If I work for you, and I one day come into work with a big titanium shovel, call the cops!
Well, I’ve seen both sides of it. At least twice in the past six months we’ve hired people who simply disappeared almost immediately after hiring. One of them didn’t show up for his second day of orientation. Guess he decided that work in the oil patch wasn’t for him, except that he hadn’t actually been to the oil patch yet.
OTOH, there’s the arrogant, abusive dicksucker of a marketing manager who seems to have everyone here on the point of beating him to death with cricket bats. After having put on a theatrical performance in front of several colleagues yesterday in which he berated me at length for a series of imagined deficiencies in training materials unrelated to his area of responsibility and that he did not actually know the content of, he then turned to one of the people watching and said “I like to give him a hard time”. I find myself entertaining fantasies of either stomping out in a wordless huff or duct-taping him to a chair and pushing it out the window. Unfortunately, the latter action would ultimately be unrewarding, as we work in a ground-floor office. Maybe if I stuck a lit firecracker in his smirking ferret face first.
Anyway, as the above may indicate, if for some reason I’m ever antagonized to the point of walking out, I’ll make sure the person doing the antagonizing knows about it.
Can you blame her? Being a temp sucks. No job security, no benefits, and usually no respect from either employers or permanent workers. I would totally not blame a temp for walking after she’s been told she’s never going to enjoy the benefits of a stable job with you. One afternoon spent in your office is one fewer afternoon she has to search for a stable job.
Employers today (not necessarily the OP) have no respect for workers. They can fire us (esp temps) for no reason and with no prior warning. Respect is a two-way street. I wouldn’t have the balls to walk out the way this receptionist did, but I can’t blame her given the current atmosphere for entry-level workers nowadays. You have to grab while the grabbing’s good; jobs are scarce enough that if she went through the process of giving two weeks’ notice she might have passed up that better job somewhere else. I agree that she should have at least said something, though, even if it was just “smell you later.”
I have to agree with this. As an employer, it kinda sucks when an employee walks out. But as an employee, it can be life-devastating to have your employer just decide one day “your services are no longer required,” and that’s the way it often happens. Employers often have this attitude that everything is “just business.” Then they get upset when employees finally figure out everything is “just business.” The law says I can just walk out. Why should I mess with my bottom line when the law says I can just walk out? You’d fire my ass in a heartbeat if it’d save you a few bucks.
Not the OP necessarily, but that’s how I see the current business climate.
Your former receptionist should have called and left a message on your answering machine, just like the way one of my temp jobs fired me unexpectedly. That seems to be the bare minimum.
I tend to agree. Most jobs that expect two weeks if a worker is displeased with the job notice certainly wouldn’t offer it to an employee, if the employee wasn’t meeting expectations. If you expect loyalty, you must give respect.
That being said, I have had my own employees quit without notice – or even just not showing up without calling – even after lavish amounts of attention. I had one employee who I met with nearly daily, helped with personal issues, became a sounding board for, and generally had a beyond-work type of relationship. She was very young, pregnant, and a victim of domestic abuse – she showed up injured at work with visible bruises, even. She asked for help from me and I did what I could to help without pressuring her. I helped her move from temporary to permanent employee, too. She moved out, things were going better, then one day she just up and disappeared, and wouldn’t return my calls – and she was very reliable, usually.
I was terribly concerned, thinking she might be dead in a ditch from her psycho boyfriend or some other horrible situation. I planned to call the police, but first called her family members, who were confused and promised to talk to her but were sure she was fine. I tried back after an hour, then they too wouldn’t answer my calls or return messages. I never heard from her but her family left a message that day that they had reached her and told her I was looking for her (so I knew she was OK at least). I thought she might be having difficulty with her pregnancy, as she had been ill, so I started a disability claim for her just in case. Finally, after several weeks, and being contacted by our HR department many times, I found out through HR that she admitted that she had quit. She wouldn’t even call me. Finally, at their direction, she called and left a message on my voice mail overnight that she had quit because she was moving, with her abusive boyfriend, out of state. It made me sad for her, and generally pretty rejected.
I’ve had lots of other employees disappear, mostly contractors, but some permanent employees. Call centers…
That bites, featherlou, talk about a kick in the stomach when you’re least expecting it!
How’s this for another bare minimum? After 7 months on a temp assignment, I take a message for our HR lady from another temp service telling her the person replacing me has accepted the assignment and will be there @ 9 am the next day. And that’s just how it was phrased, knew my name and everything. I don’t think the person on the phone was being cruel, I’m sure they thought I wanted to leave. I didn’t and thought everything was going along fine. (Turns out I had worked a half hour of overtime, and since this company doesn’t even pay their permanent employees for OT…zero tolerance.) Did the HR lady have any shame? She did not; that’s ‘just business’. That was the last temp assignment I accepted for a Japanese company.
I don’t think it’s generational. Way back when I worked for a large computer manufacturer outside Houston (ahem) one gentleman accepted a position which included a sign-on bonus and other funds to cover the move. The start day came and went and he never showed up. His phone was disconnected and the signon bonus was gone. Turns out he bragged to too many friends and word got back to the director that he had taken another job and ‘screwed’ my company out of a nice chunk of change. The last I heard the lawyers were going after him to get the money back just on principle.
Another fellow left his security badge on his desk and didn’t bother telling anyone he was quitting. He also left several under dollars in phone bills from faxing his resume all over.
