Yeehah! I'm not fired!

From an earlier thread which I won’t link to I had let y’all know that I got put on probabtion at work. Just got out of the final meeting with my bitch of a boss and the HR drone and I passed with flying colors.

My BOAB went on and on about how far I’ve come and how proud she is of me and blah blah blah. This demonstrates to me her utter cluelessness and the overall worthlessness of the process because other than incorporating a required address verification into my calls (which I never bothered with before on the grounds that it was ludicrous) I have done absolutely nothing different over the last four weeks. I handle calls exactly the same, I speak to customers exactly the same, nothing different at all. This dumb probation was based on the fact that several customers in a short period complained about me. Well golly whiz, I work trying to pry money out of people who don’t want to pay it or else I’ll take away their telephone service and they don’t want to lose it. They will say anything to and about anyone if they think they can use it to buy more time. Some of them even (gasp!) lie about how they were treated by a phone representative. I had a high number of complaints one month and a low number of complaints the following month. On such things are employment decisions made.

On the original probabtion notice there’s a line about how if I backslide after successfully completing the probation I can be terminated without another term of probation. I asked in the meeting what the expiration date on that clause is, and there isn’t one. So another bad month a year in the future and I could still be shitcanned. Supposedly my BOAB would take the time factor into account when making the decision but she doesn’t actually have to.

I suppose I should be gratified that I still have a job but instead the whole ordeal has left me feeling nothing but contemptuous of the process and the people involved in it.

Good to hear it. I remember that thread, it pissed me off.

That is great news! Your probation went by really fast! Have you done anything to look for a new job? I still think that is in order.

If I were you I would start looking. Just in case.

What you need to understand is that the whole process is about proving to your boss that you will jump through any old hoop. Address verification is probably a McGuffin. (Maybe there’s some legal reason, but I doubt that it really matters.)

Good luck finding a job that makes you happier.
If you want revenge, when you get to be a boss, don’t do this to people.

The address verification is because we are doing business over the telephone. We are required by the company (I am unaware of any regulation; we’re a phone company) to verify either the Social Security number or the billing address. This is supposedly to prevent fraud, or to prevent someone other than the customer from calling in to, say, have the customer’s service disconnected as a prank or revenge. Of course someone who set up a fraudulent account is already going to have the SSN and any idiot out for revenge is able to get the customer’s billing address (99% of the time it’s the home address). So…ludicrous requirement.

I’ve been in the supervisory/QA kind of job before and I have no problem with performing up to reasonable expectations and I have no problem with holding those whom I evaluate to those standards. What chaps my ass is the idea that something completely beyond my control (whether a customer decides to complain or not) can get me fired. Sure, if I do something wrong and actually treat a customer badly then discipline me, no question of that on my part. It’s the total arbitrariness of it that I find grotesque.