Posted on 09/07/2006 7:26:59 AM PDT by Hydroshock
Let's do a cheery one. How I saved a girl from being laid off.
Our Sr mgr had it in for a woman who ran mainframe jobs. No one knows why. He just didn't like her. I didn't like her because she was a bee och but that was irrelevant. I was told she was going to be laid off at 11AM. I received a call at 11AM from the Sr Mgr looking for her because she wasn't answering her phone. I told him (truth) "I saw her and Doug (company Pres) talking in her office". He lit up. 'What were they talking about?" me: "I don't know. They were really close to each other and I couldn't hear". He hung up and I thought nothing of it. I was really naive. He called around everywhere trying to get the scoop. Eventually, he called her and told her what a fine job she was doing. He even sent her an award to put on her office wall.
Come to find out she was decorating the local posh City Club and Doug was making suggestions. Obviously, the sr mgt thought differently.
One of my bosses didn't like the annual plan that I submitted. He said that one of us needed to get a different job; if I would agree to resign and go quietly I would get severance benefits, otherwise it would be two weeks pay in lieu. I went home, checked the Sunday ads; next day got another job, with a better company, that lasted 16 years until I retired.
A few years later I learned that ex-Boss had been canned when corporate didn't like his annual plan.
Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch....
I was at a job and attended a rif lunch for a to be at the end of the day former coworker. The managers stood up and said how sorry he was to see her go (he was teh one letting us go one by one) but business is business and all. He then said how noce it was to have lunches with the whole crew and he was looking forward to many more it the future. Everyone hit monster.com when we got back!!!!!
Worked with a guy once who told the boss he believed he ought get equal work for equal pay - said he got paid once a week, so he worked once a week. Then he didn't.
That's the problem with with resigning and then accepting a counter-offer. The company knows you are disaffected and looking for work, therefore you are a risk.
Happens all the time.
Moral of the story - if you have accepted a job with another company and have quit your current job, follow through and don't look back.
I only accepted ONE counter-offer, and that came with a guarantee of a minimum of three years' employment from the acceptance of the offer. And I left 18 months later anyway, because even though things improved for a while, they started to go downhill, fast, again. . .
I should have stayed. 6 months later, they closed, but the other two guys who ALSO accepted counter-offers got paid for an additional year, plus a year of bennies, at the time of shut-down. . . a contract, after all, was a contract. . .
When I was just starting out in the private sector, the guy who ran the mainframe got canned. While he was cleaning out his desk, the manager asked him if he'd train his replacement before the end of the day.
"No. What are you going to do, fire me?"
I worked for a medium sized state depat in Cal. My new boss (I didn't apply) was hired as I subsequently found out, by the director because they were involved in various community activities in Davis.
This guy had no management skills and was trying to micro-manage every division under him. I absorbed it all for my division, to protect the employees so they could get their work done.
My bosses boss called me in and told me that she heard their were some problems with the division chiefs and Don. I said that he was a terrible manager and didn't seem to understand the basic principles of managing high level managers. She said that I should help him because I knew a lot about management and had been successful.
I said: It's not my responsibility to clean up the bad personnel decisions of the director and certainly not my responsibility to train my boss in how to manage me. Lastly, he was so defensive there was no way he would listen to a subordinate about his performance. Got some frowns for awhile. This is typical in civil service. By the way they passed over two other very qualified candidates to hire this brainstorm.
When the next director came in, he transferred the guy to the facility planning office where he sat, since our building plan was not funded. Finally, the guy ran screaming out of the building and ran for city council. Of course!
At a company my mother worked for, a long term employee was leaving for another non-competitive job. My mom bought him a cake, with her own money and got everyone together at lunch for a little send off.
She got fired for it.
I've got a great one!
A friend of mine was fired via e-mail by a husband and wife team. The woman did the note and prepared for it to be sent before they left for a 3 day weekend. The husband in the command team took out girl's e-mail. Unfortunately, he did this before the note was actually sent.
And upon their return on Monday, who should be in the office carrying about her job as though it wa perfectly normal?? You got it! The girl whom they thought they had fired. Complete confusion ensued before the 2 parties were able to piece together what had occurred and when they informed the young lady that she had been fired. She threatened legal action to keep her job.
The bosses sent the girl flowers that said; "When life gives you lemons make lemonade." She quit 2 weeks later.
Who would have thought getting fired could be so funny!
The worst thing about a bad boss is going to work each day...I literally had knots in my gut every morning about 3 a.m. (two hours before the alarm went off); and most nights I didn't sleep at all. I know that those times with the boss destroyed my health as before she came I used to run seven miles a day during lunch hour (I'm not at least 60 pounds heavier and 60 times more apathetic about proper exercise). The problem I had was I couldn't quit as I was too far vested in the company plan.
Everyone in the office walked on eggs around the boss, my female co-workers were especially vulnerable as she seemed to take great pleasure in humiliating them in public before firing them--and G-d help them if they were better looking (which was often the case) because she made it doubly hard on them.
One particular attractive female co-worker, undergoing the stress of a new baby, really got on the boss's jealous side. There was an anonymous note sent to the co-worker's husband implying that she was involved in an office affair and we all knew where it came from but could not prove it. Finally, though, the corporate office got tired of all the turnover, complaints from our customers as well as their employees, and did an internal investigation...revenge certainly is sweet!
Years ago I worked for a company that went through a chapter 11, as a result they laid off 3/4 of the first level managers and about half of the people that worked for them.
I went from managing one office to managing two AND I had the task of laying off a ton of people who had worked for other managers.
I called one of the field guys that worked for someone I considered a friend and told him that I needed him to come in and bring all of his company tools, the truck etc. His manager called me about 10 minutes later and said "How come YOU'RE bringing "Ted" in". I had to tell him I was laying "Ted" off. He started in asking me why he wasn't laying "Ted" off what with it being his guy and all and then it dawned on him. Crappy way to find out your getting whacked.
The second office I took over, they literally walked the old manager out the front door while I walked in the back door. His seat was still warm. Then I laid off most of the people who worked for him.
Dark, bleak time. Not a good feeling to get rid of dozens of folks because someone else went to the Enron school of accounting. I left a month later, never could get the blood off my hands.
It happens, my brother had to lay off a friend of his once. But he was lucky the business picked up a few months later and he rehired him.
She got fired for it.
You've got to be kidding. Isn't that illegal?
I had two female managers whose lives were out of control and, God willing, it will never happen again.
The first one, when I was 18 and thought she understood I was applying for a summer job because I clearly stated my intention to go to college in the fall if I got a summer job, when I gave my notice, took me into the very public stairwell and ripped my face off for lying to her about how long I would work there, vowing to make sure that "everyone" would know what I "had done" and she'd make sure no one ever hired me again. (Boy, was she wrong!) She used to talk to the whole office about her assistant as soon as that poor lady stepped out of the office. "Well, Carol [who was pregnant with her first child and probably in her late 30's] only works because they NEED the money!" Who doesn't? But it was much worse than that on every front for everyone who worked for this unhealthy, unhappy woman with a pinch of power. After I gave my notice, she wouldn't let me train my replacement, and banished me to a corner of a file room and told me to prepare documents for microfilming for the next two weeks. I guess she thought it was a punishment. I loved being out of her line of fire.
The second one -- Oh My Gosh -- tyrant doesn't even come close. Her specialty was humiliating the men around her in shouting matches. She had to be at least 200 pounds overweight (probably weighed 350 lbs.), was extremely intelligent, and an absolute wreck of a human being. Her feminazi friend from way back happened to get promoted to be the director of our state agency (the largest state agency), and brought my new boss on board, swamping more than a few boats in the process. My new boss would go into staff meetings and get into almost armed combat with the men. It was impossible to contain or curb her because her boss sat there letting it happen. The big, grown up men in my division used to hate to be summoned to her office because not only were their faces going to be ripped off, and possibly parts of their anatomy, but everyone up and down the hall was going to hear it. You didn't know which was worse, having the door shut, or having it open.
It finally got so bad that the agency director told her she had to go to a doctor and get some medication, and take six weeks off and get into some sort of treatment program for whatever was wrong with her. I honestly believe she had split personalities. She came back, stayed on her meds, and became somewhat tolerable, but was transferred to a position that kept her wings clipped.
Then, the Day of Retribution came. We got a new governor, a Republican, and the woman head of my state agency got fired, as is usual. One of the men my boss tried to castrate in the loudest, most public terms was chosen to replace my boss's boss (who, by the way, used to work as an intern for Bella Abzug, if that sort of gives you an idea where her head was). One of the first things the new director did was show her the door. And he was a lot nicer about it than she ever would have been.
Correction: it was my boss who had worked as an intern for Bella Abzug.
In TX, I know a guy who was fired for having a republican campaign sticker on his car. At will state and all.
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