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[Mongrel]

Also congratulations on your escape from a hell you've been complaining about for the past couple years, Mongrel.

This isn't the same place I was at two years ago though. It's also not really all THAT great escaping. If it was, I'd have left already of my own free will.

I mean six years, three jobs. I'd be three-for-three on getting fired, but I quit the first one before things became totally ridiculous. The other two I rode into the ground.

Hell, I know I'm totally unsuited to working in a conventional office environment, but it's the only thing I'm qualified to do and I still owe tons of money for my student loans, so while the usual speil of "You should go back to school" is probably correct, it's not really practical.

Been jamming my square peg into round holes [innuendo joke goes here] for near a decade now. It's pretty tiresome at this point.

[R^2]

Didn't get the job I interviewed for,  and got cut yesterday instead of getting some training on the line. The search for greener pastures continues.

[Niku]

After this week, my job will either rise to heaven or sink to hell.

[Büge]

Really? It's not going to just drift through Purgatory?

[Mongrel]

Heh. First update.

So, my main contact with "What's going on" is the sales rep for western canada, who I got along really well with. She's already promised me a really nice letter of recommendation and some useful advice and info. Yay!

But the funny bit is this: So far, the company's intial Brilliant Plan™ is to have the Salespeople enter orders (remember: I was the only customer service dork or order jockey for the entire country).

This is a sales force that has been missing a Quebec rep for over 6 months and has never worked with the order entry software ever. Their backup plan was also to ask - after the fact - if any of them are bilingual (nope!).

[Ziiro]

What was their official reason for canning you, anyway?

[Mongrel]

For deliberately sending out a dozen orders on expired pricing (at the request of the Sales/Account Manager for that account, though he later denied asking me to do so), violating prolicy and the integrity of the system to do so. 

There's a process in place where the Sales/Account Manager for that account technically could have requested an extension, but while they'd tell you "Of course we would have done that." now, I can damn well tell you they would NOT have approved it at the time we got the orders. We DID ask for extensions a couple of times and man, was there a lot of hellfire that followed. The job of the Sales/Account Manager who asked was threatened for asking.

Without an extension, the hospitals would have been required to pay a premium - without warning - of roughly 50% to 200% depending on the item, effectively blackmailing the hospital due to our own massive incompetance. I can also tell you that there are at least a half-dozen major hospital groups that are waiting on products RIGHT NOW that we hadn't shipped yet because of arguments over incorrect prices.

Hell, I DID wind up following the official 'blackmail' policy many times, and hated it every time we did it. 

[Dooly]

For deliberately sending out a dozen orders on expired pricing (at the request of the Sales/Account Manager for that account, though he later denied asking me to do so), violating prolicy and the integrity of the system to do so.

I'm guessing he didn't put that request in writing.

[Mongrel]

Nope.

Oh I knew it was a risk and a dumb thing to do.

Ultimately? My boss hated me was a schoolmarm who believed from the very first day that I 'must always be trying to get away with something', whereas the sales guys treated me great. I decided that even if they were manipulating me purely for their own ends, I was more than happy to be manipulated.

[teg]

My night started off with one of those wonderful customers that just ruins your whole night.
This old lady shows up acting incredibly spaced out. I asked her for her card or ID four or five times while she rambled on without really acknowledging that I was saying anything (I'm only now realizing that she was probably talking to herself and not to me). Eventually when I asked her for it a fifth or sixth time she was all "is there some sort of problem, because I can take my business elsewhere" or whatever.

Of course, I'm not allowed to say anything.

In the end, she didn't even have a real ID. I made her an account with her work ID, even though I can get fired for that and grouped her items to save her as much money as possible and recieved nothing but grief because she refused to cooperate.


I think the policy where customers are allowed to complain about staff but staff aren't allowed to complain about customers should be fixed. Apparently Wal-Mart is finally starting to slacken its "the customer is always right" mantra, so hopefully the rest of the retail world follows suit and people start remembering that you are supposed to actually acknowledge that there is a human being on the other side of the counter.

[Mongrel]

I'd like to think that, but really it'll just be an excuse for even more people to be rude whenever they feel like it.

Not that I don't agree that it's a stupid policy.

[Shinra]

I think the best thing you could have done in that situation was told her to take her business elsewhere.

If there's a policy that you can't take a work ID to make an account with, you need to follow the policy. If somebody fires you for not helping her, you can file wrongful termination or at least get unemployment.

[Thad]

So okay.  Apparently a few weeks back Dwight's inventory turned up short a couple of laptops.  Not brand new ones, more like two-year-old ones; the sort of thing we can still send out to people who don't want to budget a new laptop, but, in practice, I have like 15 of the suckers just collecting dust because nobody wants them.

[...]

The upshot of this is that now [...] we have to count everything, every day.  Like, down to every single fucking stick of RAM.

And by "we", well, you can see where I'm going with this.  So yeah, my morning inventory that used to take 10 minutes now takes about 45.  I am, of course, expected to fit just as much work into the rest of the day as I did before.

And it didn't hit me until yesterday, but the new inventory sheet they gave me that I have to fill out each and every single morning, to make sure nothing like that ever happens again?

Guess what model of laptop isn't actually on it.

[Rosencrantz]

The Air Force once blamed me for losing an old laptop that I didn't actually lose and charged me $1500 for it. The worst part was that a guy spent about a year investigating it, and his official statement said that I was not to be held responsible for the damn thing... so of course the military pinned it on me anyway.

[Niku]

http://culturemap.com/newsdetail/08-29-10-the-angelika-suddenly-closes-houston-loses-its-downtown-film-center/

The theater I work at is now literally the only first run arthouse theater in Houston.  Things are going to become insane for us in short order, I imagine.  I'm not sure yet if this is part of heaven or hell.

[Royal☭]

Soon your marquees will be the talk of the town.

[Mongrel]

So, over the last week some interesting stuff has been happening.

The company offered me a month's salary in exchange for a release of claim, money I could really use badly (I'm still pretty broke from paying for my trip in July to go to my cousin's wedding, though I did pay down some of that debt in August). I talked to an attorney about the whole thing, and he said I should send in a counter-offer asking for a pile of stuff since I had little to lose, but that he agreed I wouldn't get anything worthwhile if I actually tried to sue (which I had assumed from the start). 

A combination of factors affected any attempt at a counter-offer, the most important of which was that there was no one there who could even reply to one before their deadline for submitting the waiver was up. If I waited, I risked losing even that nominal one-month payment. So I split the difference, and submitted a letter asking for them to resecind their nasty letter of termination (it's pretty petty - the lawyer actually laughed at their choice of language) and to change the reason of termination to a neutral one. This is important for a variety of reasons, not least of which in Canada if you're fired with cause, you have to contest that to get employment insurance payments. I didn't ask for more money or anything complicated, and I sent in the waiver as a show of good faith (but still invoked the lawyer). Basically, all I want is for them to change the official reason I was fired to something neutral like "position restructured" or whatever.

I thought they'd blow me off and I would just be going through the motions, but surprisingly, I might just get what I want. Keepin' my fingers crossed, 'cause that will make things a lot easier for me going forward. I'll find out in a few days.

[Mongrel]

Hm. Apparently they're totally inundated with calls from raging customers upset at my departure. And of course, they can't tell them why I'm gone.

Cold comfort I suppose.

[SCD]

It's a pity that you couldn't meet face to face with some of those customers.  I'm sure one of them would have made a good ref...

[Brentai]

Did I mention I'm being converted to permanent?  Apparently I didn't.  Must have been a little embarrassed announcing it in the middle of everybody else being thrown out on the street.

I found out a couple weeks ago that the one thing I was worried about - being salaried and not being paid overtime - didn't apply to people at my pay grade, and I found out today that the other thing I was worried about - being paid monthly - also doesn't apply to people at my pay grade.  It's still weekly by the hour.

Also the company usually demands a pay cut from temp-to-hires to offset all the PTO and benefits they'll be getting.  They also demanded a pay cut from me... of thirteen cents per hour.

Good times?  Good times.