I've Been Fired Not Once, But Twice

So the first thing I did was go out and buy new clothes.  I picked up a selection of nice slacks, and as many nice tops as I could afford, which really amounted to about three.  But because I'm very big on being comfortable, and because I had to shop the plus section at Wal-Mart instead of being able to afford Lane Bryant on the salary I was making, they weren't really the nicest clothes you'd ever seen.  I was still professional looking, but not in a suit. 

But really, I was a reservations manager, what do you expect?  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  On the first day, I was shown my new workspace.  I was waiting to be moved into the nice little office that had been the home of reservations before.  But no, the lady before me wanted to keep her office since she'd just been promoted, instead of moving to the area where she should have been.  Did I get that other area?  Of course not.

I was regulated to a cubicle.  A narrow cubicle in a windowless room, with barely enough space for my chair, my filing cabinet, and my computer.  I ended up having to beg maintenance to put in a keyboard tray for me because my CPU, monitor, and keyboard couldn't all fit on the desk with any space for papers.

Of course, since space was at such a premium that wasn't enough, because obviously the students working in the dining hall needed a computer and some space to do whatever it was they needed to do.  So my cubicle was halved, and they got half of it.  Which didn't satisfy them of course, and led to lots of dirty dishes and random paperwork being left all over my workspace.

But I persevered, because they were college students, and not worth my time, me the college graduate.  Then came the day my boss took me aside and told me that because I was behind the front desk so often (fixing other people's mistakes, covering for slackers who didn't show up, etc) that the big boss really felt I should be wearing the front desk uniform.

The implication was that my clothing wasn't dressy enough for them.  Now, picture the heaviest, scratchiest, most obnoxious polo shirt you can imagine.  Now picture it three sizes too big because in order to make it fit a girl with any kind of chest you have to get it large enough to be a tent.  Then imagine having to tuck it in to khaki pants, the entire extra yard of it that hangs down. 

Now, feeling like I'm wearing a navy cotton circus tent, I'm indistinguishable from the college students working the desk.  But I stayed, I worked just as hard. 

But I had this really pesky habit of expecting my coworkers to do their own jobs, and file their paperwork properly and in a timely fashion.  I've learned since then that sales departments are supposed to do their paperwork, they're supposed to promise anything and everything to get a client, and then never tell anyone else so that when the client complains that they didn't have extra electrical outlets added to the conference room, they can say "Goodness, I can't believe they didn't do that for you!  Here, I'll give them a sound lashing!"

I was pretty quickly called to task for telling sales each time they did something wrong, or didn't inform me like they should.  Instead of picking up their slack, I was actually bothering them with work they shouldn't have had to think about.  They of course complained to my boss who told me I need to give 110%!  Be a go-getter!  And naturally, since she had been in my job before I was, these were all things she was saying she did.

I resisted saying that if she hadn't coddled them maybe they wouldn't expect it.  I just renamed her The Enabler in my head and went back to taking phone calls.  Though sometimes I would "forget" to take my phones off of forward when I came in each morning, and spend the morning reading message boards and pretending to think "I wonder why nobody is calling to reserve a room!"

Yeah, that caught up with me.  So in my navy polo dress (tucked in, never forget that) I was called into the office that should have been mine.  "Things are slipping through the cracks..." and other cliches followed.  A month to shape up, have fun and go get 'em! 

Since I liked the benefits, and since I had already booked two really cheap hotel stays in the coming months with my employee discount, I decided that I'd give it a shot.  But there's this tricky thing in the hotel industry where the work you put in today doesn't come to light until the guests actually stay, which is usually months away.  So of course, there was only minimal progress.

But they were doing me a favor in letting me go, of course.  "You aren't happy here..."  Well, of course not.  "You don't want to do this for the rest of your life..." Who does?  The best part?  They fired me the day before I was leaving for one of my vacations and "As a favor" they let me keep my reservations for the room at my cheaper rate.  But my other vacation would be cancelled.

Ironically, they also fired me the day I was leaving early to attend a job fair looking for somebody that would at least let me wear my own clothes and not make me spend a fortune washing three polo shirts twice a week.

If they had waited only four more days, I actually would have had another job offer and would have quit, saving them and the government a month's worth of unemployment (I wasn't able to start right away at the new place).  Now the saga of THAT job would keep me talking for hundreds more words, especially when you consider it was a writing job.  But the degree of bitter involving that one almost rivals an angry relationship, one of those where you burn everything he every gave you, spit every time you say his name, and sometimes get really tired or drunk and start sayings like "I was the best thing that ever happened to him!  He'll never find another woman like me!"  Of course, those are both very true statements, even if it is about a job and not some loser guy who decided to go for a woman he wouldn't have to spend as much money on because she wasn't a college graduate.  Well, I think my analogy just stretched itself and broke right in half.

Now, I'm in corporate retail.  Sometimes, when our cafe is shorthanded, I'm forced to sling coffee and whip up lattes for grumpy office workers desperate to escape the indignities of their own jobs.  In the end, I almost think I'm on the better side of that fence.

(Posted by M)