davidh777

That does suck, but maybe the boss knew what was in the works but really did appreciate you and wanted to express it. Ultimately hollow, but a gesture nonetheless.

Several years ago, our department morale was cratering so the bosses gave iPod shuffles to those of us who were still there. The fact that they couldn’t spring for nanos made the gesture feel cheap. Most of us were gone shortly after.

LurkerDan

this is the part that I find most odd. Why one would keep a card like that for two years, and THEN post about the firing. The weirdness of some of the members here never cease to amaze me. It's like Otter is a collection of completely normal people and some very anti-social/disturbed people, and I cannot always keep straight (and we don't always know) which is which.

Sonic

Some people hold on to those memories that somehow affected them the most. This thread reminds me of keeping old love letters, memorabilia of past relationships etc. Some have difficulty getting over the pain.

emanon

I love busting on Alan as much as the next guy, but he states in his original post:

So he took the picture two yeas ago.

Which, of course, is not to say that he didn't save the card. In fact, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say he did, and it's in the produce drawer of his fridge, along with his birth certificate and the last 20 years of W-2 forms.

GatorDeb

The first post said he tacked the card up and took the picture before being fired, so he didn't keep the card, just the picture.

Sonic

ewwwww

dsa_shea

I bet you're not exactly sure what he does either. I love it when those at the top question what the workers in the office or wherever do, but when the nails are to the wood, they are unwilling or desperately do not want to come down to the floor and help. I've seen it multiple times throughout my life. Those with supposedly more experience not wanting to do what they think are menial jobs at the workplace, even if temporarily, to keep things going.

William Fuld

dex14

Vibiana

I have been working full time for 38 years. In that time I have worked for about a dozen organizations, not counting temping stints, some of which were intentional for months at a time while I played at writing or wanted flexibility (all those interludes were in my 20s). I've been with my current employer the longest, since 2007.

I have been fired four times. Twice because of my attitude or actions, twice because the job just didn't fit my abilities. I think getting fired is something that happens to a lot of people at least once. It's nothing to be ashamed of if you learn from it and move on.

Alan Smithee

The card was left tacked up after I left, so someone had to take it down and ponder how fucked up it was.

OK, my main reason for posting this was just that they HAD to have known I wasn't going to be there much longer, but gave me that card anyways. It's possible that everyone had gotten one that day, they seemed to be doing an "employee appreciation day" which included having lunch brought in but they still shouldn't have given that card to me if they had known.

Since you're dying to hear the story, let me tell it: I've disclosed before that I have autism, which makes it hard for me to communicate with and understand people sometimes. One thing I've found while working, and I've generally been considered a very good employee most places, is that I sometimes need VERY specific instructions on how to do things if I'm not familiar with them, which proved disastrous in this case.

It was a property management company and my position was Property Accountant, dealing with a number of apartment buildings. Everyone there was assigned an assortment of them. I found that I didn't have much prior knowledge of how they operated in terms of my job duties- one thing was going through records done by the on-site management and maintenance people and correcting how they had classified some expenses. This was also my first real accounting job in general, and I'd been a bit insecure about the limited experience I'd had before. I went back to school and graduated with a degree in accounting, but afterwards found it difficult to get a job. A lot of places wanted more experience than I'd had. This was a place I wanted to work and was really happy that they had hired me; they interviewed me once and passed but hired me the next year.

All new hires were assigned people to train them, and there were issues with the person I got. Honestly she was rather senile, making a few mistakes herself, and she also frequently left the office for hours at a time to visit an ailing relative leaving me to do my work with nobody else to ask for help. I did well on a few things such as printing checks, but the biggest problem I had was with the monthly reports I was supposed to run. She had shown me many of the steps out of order, so there were times when I would complete some sections only to have them turn out useless because I hadn't done one of the earlier steps yet. The reports were routinely turned in late also- I kept track of when they were due but I couldn't complete them without this person's help. On the due days I was willing to stay as late as it took to get them done, but my trainer wanted to leave and said "We'll just have to hope we get them done tomorrow." Eventually the reports would get turned in late, but often my trainer would just complete them for me without even letting me watch and see how they were done.

I should have spoken up to someone, anyone, about this, but I didn't want to be seen as negative. The person training me had been there for 25 years and was well-liked, so I thought for me, a new person, to criticize her would just make me look bad. I'd also been talking to a job counselor outside of work and their answer was that this was probably "just the way they did things there" so just be patient and eventually my trainer would help me get more proficient. I kept dropping hints that I needed more straightforward instructions on how to do some of my tasks, but that just never happened. I did eventually disclose to them that I had autism and was easily distracted by outside noises, to their credit they had a few things fixed such as a squeaky door down the hall which regularly set me off and they had someone from human resources check in with me to see how that worked out. I expressed concern about my job performance then and was told my comments would be "passed on", but this all went on for about 3 months.

Finally, a directive from the higher-ups came saying that generally, any reports being completed late were simply unacceptable. I don't know if my trainer got any sort of talking-to, but I was soon placed with a new trainer. I thought that would turn things around, but it seemed from the get-go that she wanted me to fail. She immediately said things trying to make me feel guilty that she was spending time training me. I remember a lot of the training was done in a small office where, in early February, the air conditioning was blasting cold air. This was like torture but I didn't dare complain about that. Often when I asked questions, she replied with "You should already know that" and when I made mistakes she said "why would you do that?" This just made me feel more stressed and ironically led to me making more mistakes. I was pretty sure that she was telling my manager that I wasn't catching on and I should just be fired. It was around then that I got the card shown here, from a supervisor- if I had read it at face value, it seemed she was saying that she liked how I was persevering and maintained a positive attitude as I truly was trying to become proficient with everything.

This made me a little less worried about being fired, but I had talked to someone at the human resources department and had a meeting set up where I planned to lay all the details out on the table including the poor training I'd had initially and how I still wasn't being given straightforward instructions. I was called in and fired a couple days before that meeting was supposed to have taken place. This was the very week the COVID lockdowns had started; it's likely they canned me then because I would have had to start working from home and I wasn't in any capacity to do that, but I'll never know for sure. I thought it was especially cold to leave me unemployed at that point though, when it would be hard to find a new job right away.

The good news is the day after I was fired, I was called to start a job with the government similar to one I had done before where I would be helping business owners apply for government loans to offset their losses from the COVID situation. That got me through the rest of the year financially. Later I got another accounting job, though only temporary, and this time I got very clear instructions on how to do everything and within two weeks I was able to perform all of my duties on my own without asking for help, I even worked a few days with nobody else in the building and never had to call for help- I had clear step by step instructions on how to run their weekly reports and caught on quick. I was well-liked there and the only reason I wasn't picked up permanently was because of their structure- basically people who were already permanent employees had top priority, and one of them had decided they wanted that position and tested well enough to get it. That really sucked but at least it showed that I could do accounting work if someone just took a few minutes to walk me through the steps the first time. Right now I have a few upcoming interviews and hopefully one of those will actually lead somewhere permanent.

Point of this post though was that even if I deserved to get fired, it was pretty fucked up to get that card and have my mind put at ease even for a minute.

Alan Smithee

One thing I never do is give any "attitude". I was afraid that having this firing on my record would make it harder to find work afterwards, but after a recent phone interview with another company they sent me an online application to fill out and move forward. One of the questions was "Have you ever been terminated from a position, and if so explain" so I gave a short answer in the limited space they had, pointing out this was the ONLY time I'd ever been fired for performance issues and I'd be glad to answer any further questions about it. I thought that made them decide not to move any further with me, but later they called me to set up the next interview which will be this week.

T-bone22

I'm sure every employee in your department got the same card that day. For you to fixate on that as "why would they give me that card, if I wasn't doing a good job" is odd. It was a generic form letter. Would you have felt better if everyone around you received a card except for you?

It sounds to me like you were not grasping the duties of the job or perhaps were not quite qualified for the job duties. I don't believe the blame lies with your trainers. You'll find a position for which you are suited if you REALLY want to try. What's the longest period of time that you've held a job, after having finished going back to school?

Why So Blu?

Wow, if this isn't ironic then I don't know what is. Considering what your apartment looks like and you working for a company that manages apartments buildings has some seriously fucked up optics.

TGM

they didn't want you to cause a scene.

it's a cheap card not a car.

not giving you one yet everyone else getting one would've tipped you off before they were ready to get their ducks in a row and fire you on their terms when it was deemed best for the company.

Noonan

Were you fired or laid off? You keep saying fired but that doesn't seem to be the case.

milo bloom

As a manager of a small team, your training stories are very frustrating. It really sounds like they just wanted somebody that could walk in and do it already instead of taking the time to train the type of worker they wanted. I'm glad you managed to find a place where they took the time to train you correctly. Even as a manager, I have to learn new things sometimes and when they just dump the task on us without fully explaining it, I'll end up making mistakes and getting into heated discussions with my senior manager.

Speaking of which, she is constantly pushing me to do things like the little cards to let my people know how much I appreciate them, or buy them lunches and things and I hate that. When I was in their position, I didn't want useless cards or pizza parties, I wanted the company to show they appreciated me by paying me a good salary.
I would feel like absolute crap if I sent my team some little things like the cards or candies and then the next day layoffs were announced and they were let go for reasons out of my control.

mndtrp

I'm aware of the amount of power my boss has to increase my salary or bonus, and that amount is very little. She has to work within the framework the company provides, and if the company only approves a .5% raise, that's all she can give out. Because of that, I appreciate her emails of recognition, and the very rare lunch bought for us. Yeah, I'd rather have a 10% raise, but that's just not something that can be done very often. If I was caught up in company layoffs, it's unlikely I'd hold it against my boss if she had to deliver the bad news.

As far as Alan's experience, I agree that while it may not have been the best fit for him, the trainers really seemed to drop the ball here. If there wasn't a clearly defined process to do things, Alan and the trainer could have used the opportunity to start laying it out. Documenting the steps, in order, as they were discovered could have alleviated some of his issues. Seems like it might have been better for him to bail out of there, though.

jfoobar

In general, the larger an organization is, the less control managers have over salary. Some (most) large corporations have paybanding scales that would probably rival the government, at least until you get into the executive space anyway. Sometimes all you can do as a frontline manager is give your best employees really positive reviews so that they get a larger one-time end of year bonus. Other than that, they can apply for positions within the company that have a higher payband or, as I have seen people do many times, leave the company for a year or two and then come back again into a position with a substantially higher payband. Outside of that, pizza parties it is unfortunately. The pizza money comes out of an entirely different bucket of funds.

milo bloom

I get all that, I do. I'm just not interested in rolling over and dealing out meaningless platitudes. I get on Amazon from time to time and find unique/funny tins of cookies or candy and send them to their homes and we have daily meetings to catch up and I will make sure to praise them and thank them for fixing extra problems and such, I'm not a cold, heartless taskmaster. I just hate the puppet performance of meaningless actions.

General Zod

About 12 years ago we got an email that was sent to everyone underneath a particular director that praised us for our work on this huge project and what a great success it was and how we are a real bright spot in the organization blah blah blah.. That Friday afternoon they made an announcement that about half of us were getting outsourced . I got called into a meeting with my leadership (up to that director level) and they had no idea it was going to happen and most of them were on the list. My director was laid off as part of this but fought for our team to stay and he was successful. 7 years later he came back and he's our director again. In fact most of the people who had been laid off from that are back. The whole thing was a complete disaster and waste of money but probably looked good on some resume somewhere. The end result, however, is that we became a group that used to really spend all kinds of extra time working late and innovating and doing whatever we could to really stand out but, ever since then, we just do what we are asked to do. Even though all the leaders who made the decision back then are gone it doesn't matter.. we'll never forget. Now when we get emails from leadership saying good job on this or that we always, in team meetings, recommend everyone update their resume. It is said tongue-in-cheek but with a ring of truth..

Sonic

Ah man I'm sorry bro for what you going through. I had no idea. Wishing you positive energy and good success on your latest interview hoping you get the job.