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What a busy, busy week this has been.
I worked all week for Kelly Services (yes, I am a "Kelly Girl!") at McGraw-Hill publishers in Bothell. It's a decent job, if a little boring. But it pays well. SO I'm doing OK at it, they like me, and want me back. Definitely a blessing.
I took Friday off to take the train down to Portland to pick up my new vehicle - a 1994 Jeep Cherokee that my faerie friend Scruffy Rumbler has sold me for $1.00 (Wasn't that sweet of him?) Dubbed BoyJeep, it has 280,000 miles on it, and doesn't get great gas mileage - which is why he sold it to me: he commutes 100mi a day to work, so he bought a car with better gas mileage. Scruffy is BoyJeep's only owner, he having bought it new a dozen years ago, and so his sentimental attachment to it was pretty strong. And instead of just selling it to a stranger, he felt better selling it for a token amount to a faerie who really needed it. Which meant ME! ;-) So, I now have a vehicle again.
Anyway, on the train ride down to Portland, I made my weekly phone calls to all of my temp agencies, to tell them I'm available for work.
When I called Adecco, I spoke with a new employee I had never spoken with before, named Sarah. She took my info, and said she'd put me on the active list.
20 minutes later, while I was on another call, she called back & left me a voice mail - informing me that she had just reviewed my employee record, and that it said that "Adecco would not longer work with me."
I had been fired - and nobody had bothered to tell me.
What the fuck?
I called back, and barely restrainig my temper, dmanded to know what the hell was going on.
I was informed by a guy at the agency I've never met named Ben that he had terminated me almost two weeks ago when he was reviewing my file for the unemployment claim I had filed, because I was unreliable, had attendance issues, and poor ability to complete assignments.
I was floored.
He cited three assignments in particular:
First, my assignment as a File Clerk at Verizon last spring, because of sick days (two of them, for which I had given them a doctor's note). This one floored me, because I LOVED that assignment, had received GLOWING reviews, and they even kept me on a month after the assignemnt was supposed to have ended.
The second was my data entry assignemnt at Iron Mountain last summer, which was absolutely dreadful. After 3 weeks, I asked Adecco to terminate the assignment early, as soon as they could find a replacement for me, because having me do data entry 8 hours a day was a really bad fit, and a week later they replaced me - I didn't leave them high and dry, and I asked them not to put me on any more purely data entry assignemnst again.
The third assignment cited, last September, was a 2-day job for Rent-A-Center in Marysville, which after they asked me to violate company rules and carry a sofa bed up 4 flights of stairs - Adecco has a policy that employees are not allowed to lift more than 50 lbs. - and so I didn't work the second day. And I asked not to be put on any general laborer assignments again.
In all of these cases, I felt I was being a responsible employee, letting them know when a job was a bad fit.
In the 5 months since then, I have worked various assignments for Adecco, mainly ultrasound modelling for Phillips Medical in Bothell. As far as I knew, things were going fine, though the job pickings were rather slim.
So to get summarily fired 5 months after the last citeable offense tells me that the reasons given for termination were pure bullshit. If they really were worried about it, why didn't they fire me last September?
Something's obviously changed, to make them dump me like that.
Best I can figure is, Margie, my best advocate at Adecco Everett, who got me some great assignments, left the company last month. I don't know why she left, but if the Adecco employment people who liked me were gone, then I was vulnerable to office politics.
The second is the fact that I filed an unemployment claim for the first time in February. I don't know if that has anything to do with the termination or not, but I suspect it might be. They couldn't just claim "They didn't have work for me," which I suspect is closer to the truth than the attendance/commitment issues - I guess if they admitted that to the state, they would have to pay UI money that they had been withholding form my paycheck. So they came up with a BS reason to fire me.
Anyway, I was severely wounded by this. I didn't see it coming. In my life, I've been fired before, for cause - bad fuck-ups, like when I worked for a florist back in the 1980s, and was fired when I overslept and missed a flower delivery to a Saturday Morning Wedding - and I've been fired before for incompetency - like when I worked as a night desk clerk and couldn't balance the ledger sheets worth a damn - I saw that firing coming weeks away.
But this termination, it blindsided me.
And it hurt in a way that the other ones didn't hurt, because I don't feel I deserved it.
And what makes me even angrier is that I have now been flagged in the Adecco computers as a "problem employee," wheich means that, in the future, if I move to a job market where there are lots of good job fits for me, and I could be a real asset to the company, I won't be allowed to work there, because of office politics and a bad job market in Everett, Washington. It really pisses me off that they have poisoned the well for me, and closed off future job opportunities for me.
I also can't help but wonder if my decision to get my ears pierced and wearing my pearls to work - which hasn't been an issue at all for Kelly Services and Manpower, the other two agencies I work for - isn't also part of the reason for "throwing me away."
Though the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it wasn't the Unemployment Claim that was what really got me filed. Now, granted, this isn't the end of the employment world for me - I am still with three other temp agencies, all of who really like me and place me often in good jobs. It's not going to ruin me financially.
But it STILL HURTS. Even though I tell myself that I shouldn't be taking this so personally.
I have NEVER dealt with rejection well - and I have dealt with a lot of rejection in my life. I've been "thrown away" a lot, ostracized, cast out, and abandoned. And this episode has just dredged up all of these old, old feelings of rejection.
Rejection for me has always resulted in me withdrawing, closing in on myself, clamming up. Or lashing out in anger at those around me - even those not involved in the rejection. I'm trying hard to deal with it in more constructive ways... but it's not easy for me to remain present, in the moment, and connected with those around me, when all I want to do is curl up in a ball and stare catatonically at the wall.
It hurts, so much.
I worked all week for Kelly Services (yes, I am a "Kelly Girl!") at McGraw-Hill publishers in Bothell. It's a decent job, if a little boring. But it pays well. SO I'm doing OK at it, they like me, and want me back. Definitely a blessing.
I took Friday off to take the train down to Portland to pick up my new vehicle - a 1994 Jeep Cherokee that my faerie friend Scruffy Rumbler has sold me for $1.00 (Wasn't that sweet of him?) Dubbed BoyJeep, it has 280,000 miles on it, and doesn't get great gas mileage - which is why he sold it to me: he commutes 100mi a day to work, so he bought a car with better gas mileage. Scruffy is BoyJeep's only owner, he having bought it new a dozen years ago, and so his sentimental attachment to it was pretty strong. And instead of just selling it to a stranger, he felt better selling it for a token amount to a faerie who really needed it. Which meant ME! ;-) So, I now have a vehicle again.
Anyway, on the train ride down to Portland, I made my weekly phone calls to all of my temp agencies, to tell them I'm available for work.
When I called Adecco, I spoke with a new employee I had never spoken with before, named Sarah. She took my info, and said she'd put me on the active list.
20 minutes later, while I was on another call, she called back & left me a voice mail - informing me that she had just reviewed my employee record, and that it said that "Adecco would not longer work with me."
I had been fired - and nobody had bothered to tell me.
What the fuck?
I called back, and barely restrainig my temper, dmanded to know what the hell was going on.
I was informed by a guy at the agency I've never met named Ben that he had terminated me almost two weeks ago when he was reviewing my file for the unemployment claim I had filed, because I was unreliable, had attendance issues, and poor ability to complete assignments.
I was floored.
He cited three assignments in particular:
First, my assignment as a File Clerk at Verizon last spring, because of sick days (two of them, for which I had given them a doctor's note). This one floored me, because I LOVED that assignment, had received GLOWING reviews, and they even kept me on a month after the assignemnt was supposed to have ended.
The second was my data entry assignemnt at Iron Mountain last summer, which was absolutely dreadful. After 3 weeks, I asked Adecco to terminate the assignment early, as soon as they could find a replacement for me, because having me do data entry 8 hours a day was a really bad fit, and a week later they replaced me - I didn't leave them high and dry, and I asked them not to put me on any more purely data entry assignemnst again.
The third assignment cited, last September, was a 2-day job for Rent-A-Center in Marysville, which after they asked me to violate company rules and carry a sofa bed up 4 flights of stairs - Adecco has a policy that employees are not allowed to lift more than 50 lbs. - and so I didn't work the second day. And I asked not to be put on any general laborer assignments again.
In all of these cases, I felt I was being a responsible employee, letting them know when a job was a bad fit.
In the 5 months since then, I have worked various assignments for Adecco, mainly ultrasound modelling for Phillips Medical in Bothell. As far as I knew, things were going fine, though the job pickings were rather slim.
So to get summarily fired 5 months after the last citeable offense tells me that the reasons given for termination were pure bullshit. If they really were worried about it, why didn't they fire me last September?
Something's obviously changed, to make them dump me like that.
Best I can figure is, Margie, my best advocate at Adecco Everett, who got me some great assignments, left the company last month. I don't know why she left, but if the Adecco employment people who liked me were gone, then I was vulnerable to office politics.
The second is the fact that I filed an unemployment claim for the first time in February. I don't know if that has anything to do with the termination or not, but I suspect it might be. They couldn't just claim "They didn't have work for me," which I suspect is closer to the truth than the attendance/commitment issues - I guess if they admitted that to the state, they would have to pay UI money that they had been withholding form my paycheck. So they came up with a BS reason to fire me.
Anyway, I was severely wounded by this. I didn't see it coming. In my life, I've been fired before, for cause - bad fuck-ups, like when I worked for a florist back in the 1980s, and was fired when I overslept and missed a flower delivery to a Saturday Morning Wedding - and I've been fired before for incompetency - like when I worked as a night desk clerk and couldn't balance the ledger sheets worth a damn - I saw that firing coming weeks away.
But this termination, it blindsided me.
And it hurt in a way that the other ones didn't hurt, because I don't feel I deserved it.
And what makes me even angrier is that I have now been flagged in the Adecco computers as a "problem employee," wheich means that, in the future, if I move to a job market where there are lots of good job fits for me, and I could be a real asset to the company, I won't be allowed to work there, because of office politics and a bad job market in Everett, Washington. It really pisses me off that they have poisoned the well for me, and closed off future job opportunities for me.
I also can't help but wonder if my decision to get my ears pierced and wearing my pearls to work - which hasn't been an issue at all for Kelly Services and Manpower, the other two agencies I work for - isn't also part of the reason for "throwing me away."
Though the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it wasn't the Unemployment Claim that was what really got me filed. Now, granted, this isn't the end of the employment world for me - I am still with three other temp agencies, all of who really like me and place me often in good jobs. It's not going to ruin me financially.
But it STILL HURTS. Even though I tell myself that I shouldn't be taking this so personally.
I have NEVER dealt with rejection well - and I have dealt with a lot of rejection in my life. I've been "thrown away" a lot, ostracized, cast out, and abandoned. And this episode has just dredged up all of these old, old feelings of rejection.
Rejection for me has always resulted in me withdrawing, closing in on myself, clamming up. Or lashing out in anger at those around me - even those not involved in the rejection. I'm trying hard to deal with it in more constructive ways... but it's not easy for me to remain present, in the moment, and connected with those around me, when all I want to do is curl up in a ball and stare catatonically at the wall.
It hurts, so much.