I've just been sacked!

[23 Daves]

And why?  Because I'm that guy at the Nats production company, obviously...

No, seriously, I have just been fired, about 10 minutes ago.  Which is interesting for two reasons.  

Firstly, I was going to quit at the beginning of March anyway with one month's notice, but nobody here had any inkling of my plans.

Secondly, they feel very guilty about firing me and are giving me some money "to help me on my way".

I don't think it's any big secret that I loathe this job and have hated management pretty much from day one, so this, thus far, is their most generous and unexpected gesture.  Unfortunately, due to their timing it does put me a tiny bit short in my travelling budget, which I'm going to have to try to make up in other ways.  That's one problem.

This is also the first time I've ever been fired from a job, and whilst it's supposed to come as a deeply unpleasant shock, I'm afraid to say that I largely feel confused and rather content, as well as deeply flattered to learn that I'm "not Whitehall material" which sounds rather like "You're just not a pedantic egotistical wanker, we're afraid, and you don't seem to like arse-licking politicians much".

What a strange day it's been.

Has anyone else ever been fired?

[Ambient Sheep]

And why?  Because I'm that guy at the Nats production company, obviously...

:-)

...as well as deeply flattered to learn that I'm "not Whitehall material" which sounds rather like "You're just not a pedantic egotistical wanker, we're afraid, and you don't seem to like politicians much".

Excellent!  :-)  Now that you're not there any more, can you tell us where you were working?  Been fascinated to know ever since the William Hague encounter.

Hope it works out, Daves.  I've never been fired myself (although have had the odd brush with authority, not surprising I suppose in 20-odd years of employment), so I can't comment on that bit.

#include "standard_bollocks_about_blessing_in_disguise.h"

[Purple Tentacle]

Yes indeedy, although like you it didn't come as a surprise, and I got a month's pay with no obligation to work notice. I take it you don't have to go back in?

Get yourself home, put the kettle on and watch some Richard and Judy. Enjoy yourself.

[Des Nilsen]

Best wishes Daves, I'm not sure whether to feel pleased or slightly sad for you, though the latter is a little condecending. You were leaving anyway, so best wishes are in order, I think.

;)

Something *slightly* similar happened to me, only I walked out of a job in anger a few weeks before I planned to give a weeks notice of my quitting; I didn't go back and as a result I was technically fired - P45 in the post.

Best wishes again matey.

-

[gazzyk1ns]

It sounds like you're relieved but a little uneasy, because traditionally being fired is a bad thing?

Don't worry about it. The only snag is your finances, and it sounds like they could be in worse shape if they're bunging you a little extra and you've got plans to make up the difference anyway.

Your life still has structure and prospects and that's what's important, isn't it?

[smoker]

bad luck / congratulations then mate. sure you can boost your funds by temping for a bit

i was sacked on my last day of work for a large insurance company. it was an IT helpdesk job, and it was obvious i couldn't do the job and didn't want to do the job, so to be honest i was lucky to last the six months i was there.
anyway on my last day i was overherad telling another employee i didn't give a shit anymore and was immediatley hauled up before the boss who gave me my cards

i was also sacked by norwich union after 2 and a quarter days. i was working on their complaints helpdesk, and accidentally permanently erased a whole file, maybe forty, current outstanding complaints. i was so shocked i laughed out loud, and this was interpreted as my thinking it was funny, BOOT out the door again.

i've quit loads as well, and been bumped from departments by bosses eager to be rid of me, but they're my only two sackings

[twatloops]

There's a few jobs going in the Russian parliament at the moment if you're interested...

[smoker]

or you could be kilroy's replacement

[hands cold, liver warm]

MI5 are recruiting at the moment

[23 Daves]

bad luck / congratulations then mate. sure you can boost your funds by temping for a bit

I'm a temp anyway.  One of those 'long term' temps.  And I think the financial shortfall as a result of this is only the equivalent of about a week and a half's wages, which whilst it's no small sum could be recovered by flogging a few things off and budgeting like crazy.  

The other nice thing is this coincides with the end of the contract on my house (the letting agency being yet another bunch of people I've never seen eye-to-eye with) and I was moving back to my parent's for a bit and dreading the commute into work.  Seems that will no longer be necessary...  and that also would have costed me about £200 in train fares.  So it's swings and roundabouts.  Would have preferred the extra cash, but there you go.

[Ambient Sheep]

MI5 are recruiting at the moment

Dave working for MI5?  Now *that* would tickle me.

[23 Daves]

Oh ye of little faith.

[Bilko]

Life's a fucker. You may not be angry now but tomorrow you be wanting the bastard who fired you to break his neck in a car crash. I've got this image now of a fat git sitting at a mahogany desk looking up at you with no shame at telling you your services are no longer required, and at the end he offers you his hand and smiles like a treacherous cunt.

Being selfish here you should rat on any MP's and tell us every story worth telling.

[gazzyk1ns]

MI5 are recruiting at the moment

Dave working for MI5?  Now *that* would tickle me.

Pinball working for MI5 would tickle me more!

[hands cold, liver warm]

All MI5 are looking for is someone who is able to say in arabic  "Tell me Osama bin Laden's new address, I have to forward some post." Another job requirement is being able to fire rockets from your car whilst observing european speed limits.

[smoker]

MI5 are recruiting at the moment

Dave working for MI5?  Now *that* would tickle me.

Pinball working for MI5 would tickle me more!

he does know an awful lot about certain subjects. it wouldn't surprise me if pinball turned out to be another david shayler

[23 Daves]

Life's a fucker. You may not be angry now but tomorrow you be wanting the bastard who fired you to break his neck in a car crash. I've got this image now of a fat git sitting at a mahogany desk looking up at you with no shame at telling you your services are no longer required, and at the end he offers you his hand and smiles like a treacherous cunt.

Being selfish here you should rat on any MP's and tell us every story worth telling.

Oh Jesus, it would never stand up to TJ and Neil's libel worries, I assure you.  Please be a little less ambitious.  Also, I don't want to push my luck here, but I am still in the office, I am supposed to finish a week's work here to be entitled to the extra cash, so muck-spreading would be very foolhardy indeed.

The 'fat git' thing is bang on, though. No mahogany desk, unfortunately, just a nicely varnished office standard table.  

I probably will be pissed off tomorrow, but at least I'm in a position (for once) where I don't have to worry about rent or what my next job is going to be.   And it's a complete mystery to me why I was hired here in the first place.  I only went into the agency asking for some admin work to tide me over.

[Ambient Sheep]

Oh ye of little faith.

Was that a response to my MI5 post?  If so I think you misunderstand me.  I don't think you wouldn't be capable, I just assumed that with your apparent political leanings you would either not want to or they wouldn't have you.

Also, I don't want to push my luck here, but I am still in the office, I am supposed to finish a week's work here to be entitled to the extra cash, so muck-spreading would be very foolhardy indeed.

OK, next week then.  (At least tell us where you were working, muckspreading optional.)

Meanwhile I suspect Peter Hammill is right - tomorrow you'll be livid.

[23 Daves]

Oh ye of little faith.

Was that a response to my MI5 post?  If so I think you misunderstand me.  I don't think you wouldn't be capable, I just assumed that with your apparent political leanings you would either not want to or they wouldn't have you.

I was only joking too.  With my apparent political leanings I really shouldn't be doing this job either- minor in the grand scheme of things though it is - but the desperate need for work and a morbid interest in the whole world suckered me in.  Which I realise sounds like Brian May's excuse for playing Sun City in the eighties, but hey, at least I was fired.  The gathered white South African audience didn't bottle Queen offstage, did they?

[Ambient Sheep]

Pinball working for MI5 would tickle me more!

he does know an awful lot about certain subjects. it wouldn't surprise me if pinball turned out to be another david shayler

Pinball seems to know about as much as I do (unless there's stuff he's not saying), and I'm afraid that in my case it's gleaned from little more than regularly reading the Grauniad, Private Eye, New Scientist & glancing at some mates' UFO magazines.

Still, it wouldn't surprise me if someone from that establishment dropped in occasionally to have a read.  I used to have serious suspicions about one or two people on Fidonet.

[Timmay]

Remember, if you've been to have any kind of an operation or any major dentistry work since 1994, you've probably got a Government implant...

[smoker]

Remember, if you've been to have any kind of an operation or any major dentistry work since 1994, you've probably got a Government implant...

i wonder if that's the reason i always get a searing toothache whenever i think bad things about mr tony

[Ambient Sheep]

Remember, if you've been to have any kind of an operation or any major dentistry work since 1994, you've probably got a Government implant...

Yup, because every single surgeon and dentist in the country has been recruited by them, naturally.

[Blue Jam]

Remember, if you've been to have any kind of an operation or any major dentistry work since 1994, you've probably got a Government implant...

At the Science Museum in 2002, I saw a display showcasing the work of school pupils who had entered an inventor's competition. The overall winner, who was about 15, had designed a form of electronic ID that could be implanted into a tooth- there was a big glass model of a tooth to explain how it would work. I thought "I'd love to meet the little bastard who designed that, thanks a bunch, you cunt..."

Has anyone else ever been fired?

Yes, from my first proper graduate job, which is a pain in the arse. It was the first time I'd ever been fired, and although I didn't need the money, I badly needed the work experience. There was a clique of geeky blokes there (four, out of eight full-time employees) who were constantly looking for any excuse to get me sacked, going through my personal e-mail, temporary internet files, etc, looking for anything at all. I couldn't use any non-work sites and deleted my temporary internet files every day, as the Amazon and eBay pop-ups I got would have been enough for them to make an excuse. On the last day I was there, I found one of them sat at my desk, going through my computer with a post-it note headed "********'s Passwords", having logged on with my password, which I was assured would not be passed on to anyone else. I also used that password for non-work stuff, and have had to change all my passwords since leaving. They were looking for all my passwords, so they could check even more sites for "evidence" that I deserved to be sacked- I had done nothing wrong, was using no non-work sites, and was constantly watching my back and tryign to give them no reason to get me sacked.

I got sacked because the boss could tell I wasn't happy working there, and I admitted that I felt I couldn't trust these four colleagues, and as one can't work with people one doesn't trust, he decided that it would be best to sack me. The geek clique were being lazy and losing the company money (employing and sacking me after a few weeks of work must have cost them a few thousand pounds, including the extra pay I got as compensation), but he said "what you've got to understand is that we're a small company with very valued staff" ie, "you've only been here a few weeks, it's much easier for us to sack you than it is to sack them, piss off."

Office politics pisses me off so much that I'm now looking for alternative employment as I've said before, possibly working abroad or in the public sector. I think I'd better avoid Whitehall though...

[smoker]

Office politics pisses me off so much that I'm now looking for alternative employment as I've said before, possibly working abroad or in the public sector. I think I'd better avoid Whitehall though...

seven years of work and a dozen jobs have taught me one thing, the only way to avoid office politics is to avoid offices

[hencole]

I got sacked from a part time cleaning job for going to McDonalds at lunch time. The trouble is I worked in a Hotel and had been cleaning rooms all morning. Unfortunately the mains water got turned off for some repairs. All the idiot guests left all the taps on, so when the water was turned back on half the rooms flooded. I was pissed off about this as it was my lunch break, and wasn't aware we weren't allowed of the premisis despite having worked there for two years. They cited some sub section of my contract that stipulates I wasn't supposed to leave the site (I think they made that all up, because a month later the place was bought out and all part time staff fired anyway).

[Blue Jam]

seven years of work and a dozen jobs have taught me one thing, the only way to avoid office politics is to avoid offices

That's my plan- I think I should become a tree surgeon...

[Sherringford Hovis]

This is also the first time I've ever been fired from a job, and whilst it's supposed to come as a deeply unpleasant shock, I'm afraid to say that I largely feel confused and rather content [snip]

Has anyone else ever been fired?

I can't even remember the amount of times I've been sacked from crappy jobs, it feels better and better each and every time it happens - congratulations: I hope it's the first of many, until you get a job you actually give a monkey's about! Don't go overboard though - getting sacked is such a rush that you can end up doing it for no reason at all...

Took me 10 years from leaving school to rack these up that I remember (in no real particular order) - there's more from some shitty agency jobs that I'm sure have slipped my mind for now:

Bakery (Saturday/part-time) - fired for eating too many cakes and telling the other staff that the manageress used to get her norks out of Page 3 (it was the truth, but she'd found God in the meantime, and there's something in The Commandments about not coveting thy manager's norks, or something).

Posh Hotel bar - lied about my age to get a booze-serving job at 16... peachy for weeks until some sod grassed me up. I never found out who it was, but the hotel liked me enough/was worried about getting in the shit, so they told me to come back and work there when I was 18. So I did - see below.

Department store cafe (Saturday/part-time)- Generally arsing about and 'being a bad influence' on my co-workers. My boss was humiliated when loads of the old dears who were regulars kept asking after the whereabouts of "that nice young man that sounds like Frankie Howerd/Sid James/Oscar Wilde/Popeye/insert stupid (and bad) impression name here" for weeks afterwards though.

Fast Food place that sounds like 'McRonalds' (yeah, yeah,I know - at 18 I had the social conscience of a dog turd on the steps of The Vatican) - Sitting contemplating the infinite while having a fag on an upturned bucket in the cleaning cupboard on a quiet Sunday morning, my reverie was rudely disturbed by the Area Manager on a snap inspection. He nearly burst into tears, poor man - my behaviour was actually personally insulting to him.

Michelin-starred restaurant - just incompetant. No story at all. Sorry.

Posh hotel bar - Now I was 18, I was an adult and fully responsible for my actions, so I got sacked for being repeatedly drunk on duty and sleeping in a spare room on several occasions. Sometimes I was lucky enough to sleep with one of the owners' daughter in a spare room, but luckily they never found out about that, or I'd be dead by now - old-fashioned Mediterranean family, see.

Unposh hotel - found out by management for taking bribes from rentboys to get their parade of clients past me to rooms that they'd hired at an hourly rate - all masterminded by the Head Porter, who got away with it and continued with the scam the very next day.

Pub - barring twatty customers who spent a lot just because I couldn't stand their stupid faces or Daily Snail opinions tends to rub the landlord up the wrong way.

Cleaning job - for being crap at cleaning

Car collection and delivery for valeting/service company - going missing for too long with some of the sportier models

Delivery of watercoolers and water - for repeatedly getting horribly lost, making late deliveries and using the van out of hours for lugging gear and mates to gigs and operating my own private 'man and van' removals service.

Parcel delivery - for unreasonably expecting my employers to do their paperwork properly so I was actually insured to drive their vehicles.

Retail security job - the client of the firm I worked for refused to let me work there for being 'too rough' with shoplifters. As soon as the firm saw the videotapes, they promoted me though, so I'm not sure this one counts.

Council groundsman - with three other blokes because we all refused to work in the pouring rain when they told us that we had to be there three months before they'd issue us with wet weather gear.

Another pub - I was assistant manager of a brand new town-centre boozer, on a night that we didn't have any bouncers, my manager got sent down for GBH despite the fact that he was set upon by four fairly hard geezers - three of whom he'd thrown out of his old pub for selling drugs - and he decked them all single-handedly. The brewery played it safe and sacked everyone, and renamed and refitted the pub.

Computer games magazines - Most senior editorial fella didn't like me because I got a few people interested in joining the NUJ, so he waited until my line manager was on holiday to accuse me of accessing 'inappropriate material' on the Interweb, yet when pressed for real evidence, could only show that I'd been to Indymedia out of office hours. Best thing that ever happened to me: that company's nearest competitor hired me just to annoy him, and now I've got the first job since 1995 that I actually care about!

[bespoke]

I've been made redundant once, which was a shit experience.
Even in temp jobs it always feels better to do the dumping yourself rather than be dumped, despite the transitory nature of the work.
Conversely, that's why they sack you if they get a whiff of your leave.

[23 Daves]

This is also the first time I've ever been fired from a job, and whilst it's supposed to come as a deeply unpleasant shock, I'm afraid to say that I largely feel confused and rather content [snip]

Has anyone else ever been fired?

I can't even remember the amount of times I've been sacked from crappy jobs, it feels better and better each and every time it happens

That is an impressive list, sir!

I don't feel too bad this morning, actually, though my mood hasn't been helped by the fact my girlfriend's computer (and the only working computer we have in the house at the moment) seems to have contracted the Happy99 virus (God knows how) and the standard virus shifter online won't budge it.  It's not been a fantastic week.

To be honest, though, in the cold light of day I think I can say I've learnt the following:

a/ Some companies have such unbelievably high standards and expect you to live for the job so much that it's a waste of time taking the work on if you're only half-interested and doing it for the money
b/ If managers are shouty, obnoxious and anal it's probably not a good idea to fearlessly bring a list of your 'problems' with a transition to a meeting - well-founded and helpful though they may well be
c/ don't say "Well, if there is a problem I'm more than happy to talk to you about it one-on-one, we can have a closer look at what's going on"
d/ don't even hint in a meeting that you're probably not interested in the job on a long-term basis

In other words, be a good slave, and gibber and shake in front of thy master.

Ah well, I'm never going to be working with these cretins again.