It was, basically, my crappiest job- doing data entry, in an unheated, un-airconditioned warehouse. There were three of us, all sitting in that warehouse, keeping track of incoming packages for IBM. It was hell.
The company insisted on a 24-hour turnaround on all packages- we had to process all incoming packages within 24 hours. No problem.
One month I got Employee of the Month- and less than ten days later, I was fired. My boss chose to interpret “24 hour turnaround” as “done the day it comes in”, and a shipment had come in ten minutes after I’d left, after a 10-hour day (of COURSE we didn’t get OT).
I quickly figured out why I’d really been fired- the boss there was the supervisor of the entire warehouse, and was insanely protective of his position. He couldn’t control who was made Employee of the Month, but he could sure as hell get them fired just in case his bosses felt like promoting any of us.
The same thing had happened the month before- a coworker made EotM, and then days later, was fired for being late… because an ice storm had closed everything down.
Two months after I was fired, the guy did the same thing to someone else. I wonder if his supervisors ever figured out the pattern…
I wasn’t exactly fired, but I came in second when I had to compete for my own job after my first year’s contract finished. It was my first teaching job out of graduate school. They opened up the position as tenure-track after 1 year and ended up hiring someone with considerably more experience and senority than I had who simply wanted to teach at a place closer to where her husband worked.
However, the chair of my department recommended me enthusiatically as a replacement for my replacement, as it were. The school where she had been teaching was rather put out at her sudden departure and hired me pretty much on the spot. Not only that, but my husband had also been hired, in a completely independent process by a different department at the same school. We had been living 2000 miles apart for a year while he finished his degree. So we got to teach at the same school for 5 years until bailing on academia completely. Other dual academic types can tell you how sweet and unlikely this is these days.
I was fired from my first job out of college at a local Property Management company for refusing to use Paradox to create their custom databse. One of the "VP"s had some hard-on for Paradox, and I kept gently saying that dBase was much much better. I was told in no uncertain terms that I had to use Paradox to create the database, so I created it in dBase anyway, left the copy on the desk, and left for XMas vacation.
When they called me to tell me I had to come in and fix it or I was fired, I said “There’s a comma delimited copy on there too, you can import that into Paradox if you must” and hung up.
Pagan (though during my termination meeting I was accused of being everything from a witch to a Satanist). Among other complaints, “someone” had called my supervisor, the director of the department, and our floor at the hospital telling them they should be careful because I might “cast a spell on them or something” and going on to mention that perhaps the community would be less than pleased to discover that there was a Satan-worshipper working in department. The epitomy of “won’t someone think of the children.” :rolleyes: And although they were convinced that my website contained tons and tons of offensive material, neither the director nor the head of HR had actually bothered to look at the site. :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
There’s obviously lots to the story that I can’t reveal on a public site… feel free to email me if you’re interested in the details.
Once, from a gritty, pre-professional job while I was working through my first college degree. It was a hard job–exhausting, rotten hours, terrible working conditions–but the people made it fun. We took perverse pride in doing the job well and having a blast at the same time. We’d pump a 16 hour day, then go out and decompress.
Unfortunately we trusted the “big” boss, a veteran, to go out with us. We never let the lines blur back on the job but he wasn’t satisfied with that. One night he got puking, crawling drunk. He literally fell over in the street. Like a total, sober fool, I assured a cop that I would 1.) get him off the sidewalk and 2. drive him home so he wouldn’t get arrested. And I did.
Two days later I was fired. My direct supervisor–a great, tough guy–actually teared up when he had to do it. Forget glowing evaluations and promotions. I wasn’t the only one who’d seen The Big Guy puking drunk but I was the fool-on-record who’d stepped up to help him.
Know what’s still bitter, after all these years? I didn’t exactly respect him for losing control but it was forgiveable. It was okay. We were a team, doing a tough job. All of us blew off steam in different ways and trusted one another to understand, make allowances. It was a matter of trust.
Until then. So much for trust. The Big Boss funked and I got fired, for seeing him when he was vulnerable.
I’ve been fired a few times, including from a self-proclaimed “well-respected” Ph.D program once.
IMH estimation, on the job, I do very high quality work in significanly greater quantity than my peers, but if eventually management begins to dislike my attitiude, they almost always seem to want more and more and more with little if anything to offer in return other than a “usually” empty threat of termination.
“Slight hijack”: if things start looking bad, it’s usually a good idea to weigh the pros and cons of accepting an offer to resign vs termination so as not to have to make that decision on-the-spot under duress. “end Slight hijack”
I was laid off on the 8th, along with seven others. The official reason was “Your position has been eliminated.” In reality, the new VP has a reputation of bringing her own people over from her previous departments. So there is a posting on the company employment board for the position I was just laid off from! Other employees who were not laid off were “shuffled” to fill the positions left vacant by the eight of us, and scuttlebutt says they’ll only be there long enough to trade the VP’s Chosen Ones. (Scuttlebutt further says the layoffs will be in April.)
There is no way my performance was a factor. I taught one still-employed person how to work her desk, and I worked it better when it was mine. I also have more skills than she does, so the data got loaded more quickly and was of higher quality. But my nose is clean. With all of her brown-nosing, the VP and Manager she “tattled” to are now no longer talking to her. They got what they want, and now they’re casting her aside. So the layoffs were purely political.
I’d been laid off before. Before joining the company for which I most recently worked, I was working for an aerospace company. They ran out of money on one of their projects and took it from the project I was on. (They offered to hire me back, but I already had a better job slightly closer to home.)
Before that, I was with another aerospace company. We had a special facility specifically for a certain project. When the project came to an end, there were layoffs. A month before I got that job, the same company laid me off from another location because other contracts were ending.
So I’ve been laid off four times, but never “fired”.
