Fired, part Doh!

Note – I considered committing suicide instead of posting this (you gotta admit, the irony is nice and juicy) but I haven’t tried everything at Umezono, so I’ll stick around.

Before I get into the details of what happened, let me take a moment to describe the type of corporate phonies for whom I worked. There’s an Atlanta radio station we called the Corporate Station that plays inoffensive light jazz, the kind of stuff that Barry Manilow wouldn’t touch because it doesn’t have enough in-your-face attitude. Corporate employees were fond of tuning into that station and leaving it on a moderate volume when they exited their cars. If, during the course of the day, they had to take clients out to lunch or drive their fellow coworkers and managers to a meeting, they would crank the car and this jazz-like elevator music would emanate from the speakers. Then the employee would say “Whoops – I left the radio on”, pretend to be mildly embarrassed, and shut it off. It was supposed to look like the radio had been accidentally left on and tuned to their favorite station. The light jazz implied the employee had a great personality and was hip and modern without actually listening to something as potentially offensive as, say, real jazz. Country music would brand you as an ignorant redneck, and rock & roll is still considered subversive by the BS powers that be. No, only light jazz would do, or possibly big band once you made it into upper management.

The thing that really got me is that all the management and potential management robots knew this maneuver, and yet still pretended to be impressed whenever a BS coworker pulled that stunt on them. I saw done several times, and instead of pointing out what a bunch of hypocrites they all were, I kept my thoughts to myself. I didn’t fit in with those people, and I had no desire to put on an act for 40+ hours a week, so silence was the tool I used to get through my day. As it turned out – bad idea.

After I got settled into my newly created position (BellSouth likes to reorganize constantly), I found that I had an abundance of duties and responsibilities but no real authority to get anything done. The only two people directly reporting to me were good workers who generally kept things running without needing anything from me except a little space in which to operate. The majority of the workers who impacted my admin and materials department were unionized; their supervisors only had limited control over them and didn’t care to exercise that control on my behalf.

To make matters worse, I was stuck in the unenviable position of dealing with the local railroads. We often joked the BS stance on customer service was “We don’t care – we’re the phone company”, but BS had nothing on the railroads. In a meeting with our previous plant manager, the RR reps had openly laughed – really laughed – when our guy complained about their deliveries. To top that, most of the complaints I was ordered to address sprang from lies created by our own BS employees who were just making excuses for not doing their jobs.

And to make matters even worse, the accounting division of our BS company (a full third of the office workers were accountants) demanded that I drop every matter when they came calling without an appointment, but refused to assist me when asked. The woman who had also applied for my position was particularly fond of rejecting all my paperwork, claiming I didn’t use the correct accounting codes. She said she didn’t know the right codes, but would instinctively know if the paperwork was correct. It was all she could do to contain her grin when informing me of BS stuff like that.

I had already resumed writing so I had begun the process of putting my life on the path I wanted instead of the one assigned to me by work and my mother, but I was still attending college and working every day of the week, often sleeping less than four hours a night. My ulcer was growing worse and my hair continuing to thin, and I knew I needed to get out of that job. I had been in talks with my boss, the plant manager, to either get a new job (not what they wanted) or to at least make my job more equitable. I had expressed the usual watered-down corporate feelings (“I am dissatisfied with my job” and “I am very dissatisfied with my job”), but nothing seemed to make an impression.

The day I got quit or got fired (you make the call) was total hell. My phone rang every few minutes with either a complaint or request from some department or employee. I spent the first part of the morning in a phone meeting with a supplier who sold us bad materials and refused to back their product. Then an accountant dropped by and demanded an immediate explanation for all the materials wasted on one job. After nearly an hour of researching the job and providing possible explanations, to which he brushed away saying “That doesn’t explain what I’m seeing here”, I stopped and asked what waste percentage his calculations showed (the accountants felt they should be able to demand an explanation without revealing their secret, private numbers). He told me the waste for that job was 170% - that’s right, his paperwork told him that while making our product, we threw away nearly twice the amount of raw materials that existed in the first place. I patiently explained that while 170% may work in the math world, in the real world you can’t go over 100% or under 0%. He left to investigate, un-humbled and doubting my claim. What did I know? I wasn’t a college graduate like himself.

Next I got to deal with another BS / RR issue. BS claimed the railroad passed us by without a shipment, while the RR said they stopped by but we hadn’t unloaded the previous shipment so they had to leave those cars in place. The plant manager told me to always assume the RR was lying, but it had always been our guys who looked guilty whenever I researched an issue. I recommended we roll back the security tape and see who was lying, which made my BS boss go into wide-eyed panic mode and say “No no no, don’t do that, don’t do that.” That’s when I finally understood that they didn’t want me to solve any problems, they just wanted a low-level manager to take the blame for everything. Note – my department was not only in charge of materials, but also scheduling the work flow so it was a convenient one-stop shop for blamestorming.

Just before lunch, the accounting bitch who still hated me for getting the job from hell dropped by, suppressing a huge grin, and informed me that she had just rejected my quarterly reports because they didn’t have the correct codes. Again, she didn’t know the right codes, but she’d know when the paperwork looked correct. I had entered the data into an antiquated BS system that only accepted manual input and took hours to complete and would now have to be restarted from scratch.

My stomach was rumbling worse than ever, and it finally dawned on me that this job was literally killing me. More accurately, I was letting it kill me because I carted about my job performance and was putting everything I had into a position that mostly served as a dumping ground for the accountants and other managers. In an attempt to downsize, BS had been offering sizeable severance packages to any employees who volunteered to quit. Most didn’t, but they got a few to leave by surreptitiously informing them that if they didn’t quit they’d get fired anyway and would lose the money. Even though I wasn’t one targeted for termination, I decided that I’d had enough and wanted out.

I don’t remember precisely what I said, but this is the basic information I included in my resignation e-mail: “I hate this job. I want to discuss accepting BS’s offer of voluntary resignation in exchange for their severance package. I’m going home for the rest of the day and don’t want to be bothered, but I’ll be back in the morning and we can discuss it then.” Then I set the e-mail to deliver to the plant manager and HR manager shortly after I left and went home.

Some of you can probably guess what caused the problem, but you’ll have to wait for the next part to find out for sure. Stay tuned for part San, when the skullduggery really hits the fan.