So much for my job. It turned out that the company I went to work for hired me too soon, and the work they were expecting to come through failed to materialize, and my position will not exist in its current form once my boss get back into town.
Yeah … about that last bit.
This all came down Monday evening after I’d come home from work. I was already stressed because our landlords were having our home reappraised, and that meant I had to spend all weekend cleaning the yard (because I failed to keep it up after I did it the last time, like I said I would), and I hadn’t had time to clean the place because I’d been working, and there was a stranger in my house taking pictures of it. But the whole process was actually pretty painless, and afterward I checked my email and voice mail. Out of the blue, there was a message from my boss saying that he’d “just gotten a phone call” and it meant he’d “be out of town for a few weeks” and he wasn’t sure when he’d get back, but since he wasn’t done training me there was no point in me coming to work until his return.
WHAAAAAAAA?????????
When I finally got a hold of him the next day, he talked about “reevaluating how we could best to work together” when he got back, but since that would be at least two weeks from now and possibly a month, dealing with a sudden “personal issue”, but he knew that I had “a bunch of other things going on” and would “totally understand” if I “took another opportunity”. I asked if there was a problem with my performance, and he said no. Since he seemed to be calling me from a freeway rest stop, based on the background noise, I decided it was pointless to try and get any more information out of him. The phone call ended with me having no idea whether my job still existed, and whether my boss actually wanted me in it if it did.
I emailed the CEO (the other person besides my boss who worked in the office) and told him I had some questions about my job. It took until today to connect with him, but when I asked him whether my job still existed, he at least was direct. He honestly doesn’t know. He admitted they’d made a big mistake, and apologized for the disruption he’d caused in my life. There will be some sort of job when my boss gets back but it won’t be full-time work anytime soon.
Pretty much every job I’ve ever had has ended badly, if not disastrously. I’ve been fired for disclosing my disabilities, I’ve joined workplaces right before the owner decides to shut them down, and my last employer went bankrupt and still technically owes me $1000 in back pay (and I got off easy compared to some of my colleagues). I’ve begun to feel like any organization that hires me has something horribly, seriously wrong with it, and it’s only a matter of time before any job I take will blow up in my face.
For that reason, it meant a lot for the CEO of this company to own his mistake. It helps me believe that this is not somehow my fault — I took the job in good faith; they were the ones who screwed up. It also meant a lot for him to apologize for doing this to me.
My boss, on the other hand, did none of those things. He apologized for telling me this “in such an impersonal way” (via phone and email) but never apologized for the substance of what he was saying — which was THAT I NO LONGER HAD A DAMN JOB. But then, he never even told me that much; it was all about “reevaluating how we could best work together”. I’d call it passive-aggressive, but that gives it too much spine.
Oddly, as I prepared for the mortgage appraiser, I’d been ruminating on how to have a conversation with him about what I felt were problems in our communication. The way he handled this whole matter indicates that he’s too conflict-shy to have the capacity for that conversation, let alone to address substantive communication issues. If I’ve learned one thing in my life, it’s that people like that do more damage than anyone else in the world, save for actual sociopaths. I’m well shot of him.
But now I find myself, once again, disabled and on the job market, scrolling through listings that call for people who can do “light bookkeeping”, have “excellent math skills”, or are “proficient in Excel”. *sigh*
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