Well, I Knew I was Wrong to have Hopes about this Temp Job.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Oh lucky me. It’s happened yet again.

As you may or may not remember, I posted in the “Jobseekers, How’s it Going?” thread saying that I had gotten a month long temp to hire job. I was quite excited, as the CAPITAL LETTERS in my post demonstrated.

So, what happened when I angered the goddesses of fate by acting so with such undignified enthusiasm? The job was yanked out from under me after four days. Well, I suppose that’s better than the two days my last assignment lasted.

I got a call from the agency when I got home from the job today, saying that the company had an “internal person” that they were going to use for the assignment. The agency person said the manager that called him “sounded weird on the phone” and asked me if I had noticed any problems. I said no, nothing was said to me about any problems. I completely understood the job, the software, and everyone was pleasant. I had no idea what, if anything, went wrong. I finished four auditing reports on Excel, and sent them to my supervisor via email, and he answered me with thanks, and no other comment. Surely, if I had done them wrong, he would’ve notified me. But I know I did not do them wrong. I’ve been doing that sort of thing for thirteen years. I dressed appropriately, kept working all day without frittering away any time, and was at my most deferential and polite. I was hoping to be hired after the month was up, and was on my best behavior.

I asked if this was going to reflect badly on my performance, since my other assignment was cut short too when my predecessor there changed his mind about quitting. The agency person said no, they would give me a good review.

So it’s back to square one for me, and I’m still wondering what the hell happened.

God-motherfucking-dammit! Okay, the two day job was just me being a pawn in some company’s negotiating game with a prospective employee, but what the fuck is this? An “internal person”? Don’t fucking tell me I have a job for a month and maybe a permanent position, and then kick my ass out the door when I haven’t done anything wrong. At the very least, I was expecting four weeks of paychecks. Now I’ll get one paycheck for a short week. And who knows what “sounded weird on the phone” means for my performance record, regardless of what the agency person told me about giving me a good review.

And now, I have to start the whole looking for a job shit carnival again!:smack:

Happy fucking Fourth of July weekend, Two Many Cats. You poor luckless loser!.:frowning:

2

Aww crap. That sucks.

But don’t call yourself a loser over it…separate the experience, as bad as it is, from who you are.

Maybe the right job is just around the corner. I’ve seen it happen before!

Good luck…and don’t give up…
-D/a

3

Maybe you should just take that comment at face value, and assume that there was nothing wrong with your work but they simply realized they could get someone in-house to do it. I mean, why would a company pay for a temp if they have someone who’s already on their payroll who can do it?

4

You’re not a loser Two Many Cats. Seems you can’t catch a break- the first mob were playing games and who knows what this was all about. I mean, you may have been about to find something the company did not want found and they needed you out- who knows.

Keep on swinging. You’ll come good in the end.

5

It’s funny as everyone keeps saying the economy is getting so much better and I see people spending in shops, but I still keep hearing about firings, people not being able to land work and such.

I can’t figure if it’s bad luck, statistics lying or just a jobless recovery?

6

As I understand it:

economy goes bad, people start losing jobs, other people get paranoid about losing jobs and dial back on the discretionary spending to make sure there are reserves in the event of job loss. Cycle feeds on itself a bit. less spending, = less jobs = more layoffs.

At some point the people who are still employed feel a little safer about poking their heads out and spending some money. this helps reverse the cycle, more spending = more jobs = companies hire = more spending = more and more jobs.

Granted its more complex than that in real life.

7

I’m sorry you got screwed, that really sucks. Hopefully the temp agency can land you another spot soon.

8

If they had a permanent position to fill, why would they mess around with a temp, at higher rates, for a month?

Maybe all they actually needed was four days work, but figured that if they said that, no qualified person would touch it.

9

Because then they could try different people out till they found one who they liked, and the slightly higher rate they were paying to cover the agency premium is saved by having a month (or more) of full time coverage in the position that isn’t eligible for benefits.

10

Unless there’s still mountains of toxic assets that people are worried will crush the system if they can’t be kept at arms length. Like if in 1933 every bank and every company in America still theoretically had to make good on all the stocks at 1928 prices. :eek:

Sorry, didn’t mean to make this a GD. I stopped in to say my temp assignement just ended. The company still wanted me there but their fiscal year ended and the funds weren’t in the budget for the next FY. At least the temp agency I work with has a good opinion of me and will find me something if there’s anything out there to find.

11

It is entirely possible that you had ZERO to do with the job ending early.

I worked as a temp for many years. Sometimes these things happen. You can go in, do a wonderful job, and for other internal reasons the company ends the assignment early.

It’s possible the person from the company was in trouble for hiring a temp. Perhaps this other person was already in the works, but the person who brought you in didn’t know that. Perhaps it’s internal politics.

Do your best, be professional, try not to take these things personally. It was my experience in the temp world that assignments often ended early.

If you’re working through an agency that may not matter - when I was temping fulltime, that is, working 30-40 hours a week as my job, through an agency, I frankly didn’t care about assignment length. Need me for 18 months? No problem. Need me for 3 hours? No problem. There are people happy to work very short assignments. There are people who don’t care either way. There are people who want longer assignments, and they get understandably upset when someone sayd “one month” and it’s really “four days”.

12

Your auditing report was probably TOO good, if you know what I mean…

13

I am sorry to hear your news. Good luck finding something else quickly!

14

The short version: I can picture that, seen similar shit more than once.

The long version: including in my current assignment.

My current assignment came up because the company is starting the second stage of a new kind of project; this second stage can not be done using “the usual procedures” because it involves foreign branches which aren’t included in those. After more than a year of trying to get in-company people who don’t know either their business-management database or their job chain beyond their daily grind to come up with a workable process, Costing hired me (I don’t know the company very well although I’d been there before for other short assignments, but I know the database and I’m good at process analysis) to come do that and train someone from a foreign branch in the new process. The reaction my boss has gotten from. Every. Single. Person she’s introduced me to has been “oh, but [insert name here] could have done that!” “Really? That’s interesting, s/he has been unable to do it for Over. A. Year.”

Which is how I know how long Costing had been banging their collective head against that particular wall… and if it had been anything but Them Who Shan’t Be Argued With who’d hired me, I would probably have been sent back home within the first week while everybody else went back to not figuring out how to do their jobs :stuck_out_tongue:

15

Maybe the person who was doing it before goofed off a lot. It could have taken, say, two weeks or so to do what you did in four days (or less). When they realized how long it really took, they realized that they could add that part of the job to someone who was already there?

IOW, you were too good!