My Experiments

The Employment Theory — If You Don’t Actually Work, They Will Actually Fire You

Midlife Crisis? Early Menopause? Satan?

Let’s just say that several aspects of my life had been put into motion prior to the events presented here. So, when the universe started talking, I started listening. Do the opposite of what you would normally do. That was the message I got. I was suspicious but I chose to follow the path laid out before me. Alright. I’ll bite. Let’s see where this goes…

Mind you, messages from the universe are interpreted differently by different people based on a variety of factors (e.g. where one is on their own path to discovery, where one is in life, their financial situation, relationship status, age, health, etc.) Being where I was in my life at that time — pretty financially stable, on a quest for knowledge, open for demonic possession — I took the message literally.

Things in my world suddenly became SpongeBob’s “opposite day.” I started doing some really weird shit. The first order of business was to start testing some theories.

Theory: If You Don’t Actually Work, They Will Actually Fire You

In 2020, I had begun employment with a very affluent company doing exactly what I had recently gotten my Graduate degree for. I intended to settle in, build up my second retirement, and live comfortably until I was old enough for social security (which is still a long time from now btw). That’s what it was supposed to be anyway.

I can only assume that because I had worked for this company almost a decade earlier, they didn’t feel it necessary to provide a whole lot of direction on what the hell I was supposed to be doing and who exactly my boss(es) were. I had two. WTH? While I don’t generally require being micromanaged, some sort of management would have been nice. Almost immediately when I asked questions, they made me feel stupid for even asking. Apparently, I should have already known these things? (I honestly am not stupid, btw.)

My first assignment upon beginning employment changed requirements so I was essentially an extra at that point and needed to be billable for a project. I was handed over to a new team in October 2021 with the hope that I had finally found where I belonged. Surely this new team would be more rewarding. Wrong.

My hope slowly started going down the drain as 2022 rolled in. My questions again were stupid. I didn’t have a clear understanding of exactly what was expected of me. I had no prior experience in this particular aspect, which they were fully aware of when they took me on as a team member. I was assigned to admittedly the “problem children” and tossed to the wolves pretty clueless. I did what I was assigned to do. At least I thought I was? I was obviously struggling, and I repeatedly let both of my bosses know this. Repeatedly.

As I repeatedly requested work and they consistently refused to give it to me, I found myself faced with an ethical dilemma. I had a couple of obvious choices here: 1) I could elevate the issue even higher, which undoubtedly would have brought immediate attention to something I wasn’t even clear wasn’t actually my fault in the first place, or 2) I could do this odd thing that I would never, ever in the entire world actually do… I could continue doing exactly what I was not doing because they weren’t giving, and I could still get paid for not doing it. Hmmm.

Okay, so admittedly, my personal ethical choices had been questionable in the past. I will give you that. But my career was always different. In the military, I worked tirelessly and exceeded any and all expectations. Always. I never took credit for things I didn’t do. I was the exceptional leader. An expert in my field and my name was known across my command. These attributes, the quality of my work, and dedication to my job spoke bounds of my professional reputation. I took great pride in that.

However, after the military, as a government contractor, I first found that companies claiming that applicants must have great “attention to detail” didn’t know even know what that meant, or they had just copied and pasted some generic job post but hadn’t really paid attention to what they were “looking for.” My attention to detail was always impeccable but almost always unappreciated. I had been overworked for a decade and had little to show for it.

That was my state of mind when I accepted their offer in the first place. Thus, I had (mis)assumed this was going to be yet another one of those jobs.

I opted for #2, confident this was, for whatever reason, the right course of action for something. That sounds smart, right?

At first, I spent months living with this guilt knowing that the time I reported on my timesheet working was more likely spent laying out at my pool getting my summer tan on with some vodka and club soda.

I had started this amazing home project that I had decided to put virtually all my efforts into. That will be its own blog but let’s just say that it didn’t pay shit but it was worth more than anything I was getting from them.

So, exactly how long would it take for them to figure out I wasn’t really working?

About 10 months, approximately $65K, and an $8K+ retirement fund.

As my performance improvement plan by June 2022 indicated, I essentially couldn’t do anything right. Sneaky bastards. They had strategically written it so that nobody else within the firm was going to want me for any job. Not even the helpdesk jobs. I couldn’t attend meetings, I missed all deadlines, I couldn’t work on my own, etc, etc, etc. I’m not sure that I have ever felt as shunned and ignored in any job I’ve ever held. They butchered me.

My Performance — According to Them

A s written, this is my (edited) assessment of my performance (their grammar was horrible), as was sternly read to me surprisingly merely moments after specifically being invited to attend a meeting that would have been actually beneficial to me from the start: (WTF?)

“Your current performance is not consistent with the firmwide behaviors for your level as evidenced by the following examples:

- You have not demonstrated flexibility in changing your work situations and have not built mutually supportive working relationships with clients, subcontractors, and peers.

- As we have discussed in late April and again in May, you have missed several deadlines and deliverables since joining the team. For example:

— A tasking due on April 12th: You contacted a team lead at 9:00 PM on April 12th for help, received help on April 13th, and agreed to submit that evening. Tasking was not completed by the deadline, adding a note stating that you overslept.

— You were requested to review training slides with input on April 27th. You received the training slide deck a week before training, attended the training event on May 4th. The training lead sent an e-mail a month after the event, reminding you to review and offer feedback. When I spoke to you about obligating yourself to give feedback and the importance of getting it back to said party in a timely manner, you said you had but it had been stuck in your outbox.

— After missing the firm’s deadlines for submitting goals and expressing it was top of your priorities, you didn’t submit an e-mail to the help desk until the week of the deadline although it was discussed with your Career Manager the week prior on May 19th.

— You submitted a task to another team lead, missed the deadline, and reworked it incorrectly. Deliverable was unusable. Submission of deliverables was due May 31st. It was submitted June 6.

- Failure to understand the scheduling and contractual obligations of the contract by arriving late to meetings or missing them altogether.

Failure to complete your assigned projects by agreed deadlines directly affects the team’s performance and adds complexity to the work’s assignment as several team leads do not wish to be assigned to work with you.”

A bit harsh eh?

Let me caveat to what I’m about to say here with the fact that I did not, at any time, have an advocate to act on my behalf. I was not expressly given an opportunity to defend myself as I was told it would make no difference anyway. Thus, this article is the first and only time that I’ve actually had the opportunity to say anything in my defense. However, I’m pretty sure if they really knew what I had and had not been doing, the firm would have possibly taken legal action. So, perhaps I got off easy.

I was speechless. They had it all wrong! Their details were so inaccurate! Lies! It was all lies; lies I tell ya!

Get Your Facts Straight

Now, if they knew the truth, the following would be a more accurate summary:

Yes, I had waited until the last minute to complete my projects, requesting extensions virtually every time but I did meet (most) deadlines, as they were provided to me. I would assume as adults, especially with someone they knew wasn’t experienced in this particular aspect, they would have built in some buffer time to allow for rework and correction. Unless told specifically that it was a top priority item, I assumed that buffer was incorporated into the deadline I was given. That’s what I would do. Duh. I wouldn’t just trust something that one of my inexperienced subordinates submitted to me to be perfect, first time, to provide directly to the client. That’s as much their fault as mine.

They did not believe at handling things at the lowest level, as I had always been trained, and instead of talking to me about it and actually teaching me something, they felt it more appropriate to go straight to my boss(es) and just bitch about what I had or had not done. The one specific instance I had actually felt like someone had taken the time to teach me something, she was the one that led to my demise when she immediately contacted my bosses’s boss and explained that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, and they should place me elsewhere in the team.

Not only did they not want to place me elsewhere within the team, they obviously didn’t want to place me elsewhere in the entire firm. And they wrote it in such a way that would ensure that is exactly how it happened. I worked more trying to find another job within the firm that last month than I ever did actually doing what I was hired to do. I got about $4500 essentially in unemployment. I guess I didn’t get a totally bad deal…

The fact is that I had spent most of my workday at my pool. I had very likely been sipping on apple Smirnoff and club soda. Again, they weren’t giving me work despite my repeated requests and the consistent feedback that I was accused of not giving nor accepting. Wrong. That’s bullshit.

I do have a medical condition that causes sleeping problems, and I told them this up front, immediately upon assignment. However, apparently there was actually a process within the firm that would give me this excuse legally that not one person mentioned to me so I couldn’t accuse them of discrimination. I had overslept maybe twice and I was told each time it was no big deal; not to worry but apparently someone was making hashmarks on a post-it with my name on it. It was probably neon orange.

That email requesting feedback on training done the month prior was sent out to everyone as a final chance to provide feedback, not me specifically. And it really was stuck in my Outbox.

The goals and expectations deadline thing I didn’t even email the helpdesk about until yada yada was a godamn hang-up in their system that not even she knew how to fix. Furthermore, she was the only one that could have pushed it through, but she had taken the day off. Had she been working that day, the deadline would have been met. I had been working on getting that one fixed for weeks and had even been a month proactive to get it done apparently before it was even on anyone else’s radar. She had even told me the requirement was stupid and made no sense and she didn’t understand why we had to do it anyway. Whatever.

And they were nitpicking on the meetings for which I was late. Seven minutes here. Three minutes there. For a couple of meetings. Out of how many? Tons. I had expressed to them on many occasions that I had no godamn idea who the people on the call were, where they were from, what they were trying to accomplish, what they wanted from us, what whomever the hell wanted from me. Jesus. One particular meeting I missed was due to a connection problem for which I was not provided with the new number to call back in and I had no way of proving that. Bitch.

I had explained to them that I typically worked an off-schedule, being primarily in the evening and night because of my sleeping problems. No one had a problem with that until they did.

Oh, and most importantly, let’s not forget the at-will employment thing which has always been the biggest crock of bullshit ever to me. Employment may be terminated by an employer or an employee for absolutely no reason at all. That’s an out for everyone involved and…in hindsight, I should have used it. Dammit.

Results of the Study

In conclusion, I would say that, yes, the theory is correct. (Didn’t see that one coming did ya?)

But…because I have to get my last bit in, I can say it is also dependent on the company you’re working for. I had been doing technical scientific contract work for about eight years by that point and had worked for at least six companies within that time. Most of them would barely have noticed anything I wasn’t doing as long as the client wasn’t complaining. I had burnt out. I really had. I lost my passion for my technical career and voluntarily opted to come back to my roots. I told them on my last day that perhaps it was time for a career change. And here I am.

I can successfully say that I am middle-brained and can span across hemispheres but I’m glad to be back home where there really aren’t any rules other than to make some sense, hopefully do it well, and end your sentences with some sort of punctuation (unless you’re a poet; those rules don’t apply to you.) I will once again be working hard to hopefully get noticed but I will be happier doing it.

Gone are the days of not being allowed to begin a sentence with “and” or “but.” No more case studies and root-cause analyses. (Unless you’re conducting experiments like I’m still apparently driven to do.) I have more coming. Just wait.