I was "fired" last week

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So I show up for work last week. I pull into the employee’s parking garage and my card doesn’t open the turnstile. Hmmm. I ask the other cars behind me to back up so I can pull into the other turnstile. Still doesn’t work. Again, hmmm. So I park in the visitor’s parking area, which is a pain in the ass because I work in a campus-like setting, and visitor parking is waaay on the other side of where I work.

As I get to the entrance rotunda (the facility is very high security), I buzz Security to let me in because my card isn’t working. It’s happened before because of some screw up and it usually means me having to go to security and get it remagnetized or something. As I enter the rotunda, the security guard takes my card and tells me that I’ve been terminated.

Huh???

If you don’t have a card, the only way you can get into my working area is to be escorted by your manager. So I call my manager. No answer. I call my manager’s manager. No answer. I wait. I can hear my deadlines whizzing by. After two hours of hanging around and trying to get hold of somebody, I think, “Hey, a day off,” leave a final message and off I go home. I try to dial into my computer remotely, and, guess what? I no longer have access. I relax. I swim. I watch bad television.

Next day I get a call from my manager who is all frantic. “Why didn’t you call my cell?!” Well, because your contact information is on my computer, which I no longer have access to. She tells me to hang on, they’re trying to get it straightened out. Further deadlines whizz by, and the reconciliation report for Brazil looks like it’s not going to be submitted on time, which is A Very Bad Thing. My collegues in Brazil are getting panicky because they have no idea what’s going on, only that whenever they send me an e-mail, they get a message back: “No longer in the global directory.” I feel absolutely no stress. Not my screw up.

They finally get it straightened out last Friday. It seems like somebody in HR in New York clicked the wrong button, or looked the wrong way, or some damned thing, and not only I, but about 50 other lucky contestants also became “terminated.” We no longer exist in the eyes of my company.

I’m just now getting access to all my accounts, voice mail, e-mail, and crap I haven’t discovered yet, but I was the lucky one. Those other 50 people? They were already here and working like the corporate drones we are when they were terminated. Security came to each and every one of them at their desks, told them to clear out their shit, and walked them out.

When it happened to me, I knew it was a screw up that would eventually be made right. I can’t imagine those other people, though. With the embarrassment and stress that they probably felt, I can’t imagine they’re happy employees.

There’s a moral here, but damned if I can see it.

2

Is your real name “Buttle” IRL?

3

Alas!

4

Any problem with your paycheck? At least you got an extra vacation out of this fiasco!

5

If you left a message on your manager’s landline, then the appropriate response (from you) would have been “why didn’t you check your messages?”

Glad you were able to enjoy your time off, though I assume this means they will not be paying you for that day (or two)?

And yes, if I were one of the poor unfortunate schlubs to be “fired” and forcibly removed in front of all my coworkers, I’d be mad as hell.

Many years ago I read an article about computer operating systems (and I suppose also software) that suggested the difficulty of performing certain operations should rise in proportion to the seriousness of their consequences. So for example, it’s easy to close your web browser - even by accidentally clicking on the “X” or fat-fingering <ALT>+<F4> - since there generally isn’t any horrible consequence; the last page you were at is stored in the browser’s history, and so the worst you might lose is an unfinished post in the SDMB text entry window. OTOH, it takes a series of deliberate steps and confirmations to reformat a disk; that’s appropriate, since you want to be sure before you irreversibly obliterate potentially gigabytes of information.

By the same token, it should not have been easy for the HR folks to accidentally erase 50 employees from the company. That mistake cost the company 50 man-days of labor, ate into the good will of 50 employees, and may have seriously damaged relationships with partner companies (all your deadlines whizzing by). The moral of the story, I suppose, is that the company needs to understand how this happened, and modify their policies/procedures/software to make sure that accidental terminations are much more unlikely in the future.

6

Sounds like you got off pretty easy. If that happened to me, they’d probably take my work laptop and drill through the hard drive before anybody noticed the screw up. Plus I’d get deported.

7

What I’m amazed by is that that one button simultaneously ‘fires’ him as well as turns off his key card and denies access to his computer (from home). You’d think that would be at least three separate systems. If for no other reason, so that if one system got FUBAR’d at least the employees could still enter the building. Based on that, I’d make sure your health insurance stays in tact and that other things like your severance or PTO doesn’t get automatically paid out.

Just be glad it didn’t tear the sleeves off your suit and punch a hole in your hat when you weren’t looking.

8

Yep, that was the first thing I asked her. She was pretty red faced.

No one at HR is talking (to me, at least). The woman I talked with just mumbled something about “new software.”

The Security guys, on the other hand, were very efficient.

9

It’s incredibly easy to generate a script that says “DROP TABLE tblEverythingThatsImportantToUsAndWereScrewedWithout.”

10

Bummer. I’ve been on the “fixing it” end of that problem - more than once. It isn’t uncommon.

We used to do things by first name, last name - instead of by some sort of identification number. We used to terminate the wrong person in the systems all the time. When things became more automated, those sorts of systems became VERY problematic.

We had an offshore contracting developer read a use case where “termination” resulted in - well, all the things that happen when termination happens. He or she decided that all changes in status were “terminations” - guess what happened when we converted a mass of contractors at once? Yep. Should have been caught in use case testing, but it wasn’t. And it never occurred to anyone that 48 hours after releasing the system, we’d convert 200 people.

11

Three separate functions means the possibility of delay in getting one of those functions done, or possibly them falling through the cracks entirely. You want the soon to be fired employee to have access to the building? The computer system? Because, of course, a disgruntled person would never erase, damage, or sabotage information or facilities.

12

Whoa, what a story! :eek:

I’ve never heard of anything like that happening. It’s mind-boggling. To hear that it happens to other people frequently is shocking.

It’s awesome that the OP was able to remain so calm. I doubt I would be.

When I read the story, it was like one of those mysteries with a real strange clincher at the end. Definitely not what I expected.

13

I once had an insurance claim denied because I was officially no longer working for my company. Apparently I had been dropped from the PeopleSoft program that tracks employees, for some reason. But that was the extent of it - nothing else was affected, and when I mentioned it to HR they went off and took care of it.

14

Which is why you set such things up ahead of time and use a dead-man swith that… nevermind… forget I said that… :stuck_out_tongue:

15

Sorry, I don’t get it.

16

Any idea how many of them have not returned?

17

It’s a plot point from the excellent film Brazil. A literal bug in a computerized system causes a misprint of the order of the capture and execution of a terrorist named Tuttle, resulting in a low-level bureaucrat named Buttle being captured instead. Dystopian craziness ensues.

18

Wow. What a great capsule summary.

19

Part of my job is as a systems administrator for a secure system in a mega-corp. Because of that, I and all the other administrators in the company get a daily e-mail of who to terminate. It is a hassle for me because I have to terminate them from my system within a couple of hours, document it, and place the proof of the termination in a shared location where it is reviewed by another group for compliance. Twice I have gotten termination orders for people I knew and didn’t believe were really fired. There is absolutely nothing I could do about it other than ask them “So, anything special going on with you today?”. Both times the answer was no but I still had to can them as did every other administrator and security person. All of their access goes poof including door access.

Those were both mistakes and very costly ones in terms of everyone’s time. There is no way to reverse a termination at all. The person has to be effectively rehired that day and start over with loads of paperwork from themselves and their bosses all the way up to reapply for every type of access they had and some of it takes days or weeks to process. I told the supervisor of one of them what it would take to get everything restored and he said in all seriousness, “That’s a lot of work. He is an OK worker but not the best one I have. Maybe I should just let the mistake stand.” He recanted when I told him how horrible that sounded but that would have to top the list of crappy reasons to fire someone.

20

That HR is by far the department in any organization that provides the least return on investment.