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The good news: I lost my job on Tuesday.
The better news: This is the happiest I have been in the last 8 months.
I lost my job on Tuesday due to a 'conflict of interest' and a matter of incompetence; I told my 'boss' that he wasn't fit for his position. He didn't like that too much but sometimes the truth does hurt.
Actually, my new found freedom and liberation from a dead end job at a company that held no real future felt quite good. It was something I should have done months ago when I first realized that there was no potential for upward mobility no matter how hard I worked or how good of a job I did.
I have recently become aware as to just how many friends I had there and have been taken aback by their support and the concern for me voiced by my ex-fellow employees. My phone has been ringing non-stop and my email has been deluged with messages from my friends there who want to meet up for lunch. It is truly a good feeling. Almost each and everyone of them felt it was a travesty of justice that I wasn't immediately given the network admin job.
I was and still am held in very high regard by my friends there. I was always there for them when they needed my assistance and they showed their respect for me by voting me the Employee of the Year in 2005 and by their monthly recognition award nominations. Sometimes I would get two, three even four a month. As a side note, I was the last person ever to be voted Employee of the Year as they discontinued it the next year. I guess you just can't top perfection and I most definitely broke the mold. I suspect they quit giving the award because they knew I would probably win it every year from then on, nuk, nyuk.
Now you are probably asking yourself, 'Self, how does someone who is such a great worker and loyal employee end up getting terminated?"
It is a very interesting story indeed. It all started when they let my associate go for being terminally tardy. He was the network admin. My original supervisor and VP of the company told me previously that I should consider myself his equal (even though I was making much less than he was.)
When they let him go, they put up a notice stating they were looking for someone to fill the position. The notice stated that a Associates Degree or higher would be necessary, so I told myself, "Self, I think you deserve this job." I then proceeded to inquire about the position but kept getting stonewalled. Now this really irked me. I kept getting put off and then they told me that they were looking for someone with a higher degree. So I sad, "okay, fine."
Anyway, weeks turn into a month and in the meantime I am doing the work of three people. I was already doing the work of 2 people before they let my associate go. My fellow employees were amazed at my stamina and resilience considering I had just been in a near head on collision with a semi tractor trailer that failed to yield the right of way while I was traveling at 55 mph.
So, after about 5 weeks, they make a decision. They hire this young guy. about the age of thirty I am guessing. His only experience was 5 years in the service. He had no degree on paper. He told me he went to the "school of hard knocks." Now this pissed me off because I had to have the paper to get my job but I gave him the benefit of the doubt and even though I was quite angry about it I decided to give him a chance. He was knowledgeable in many aspects, but I started to notice little things, simple things that anyone with networking and administration experience should know that he didn't know and I noticed that he seemed to have me do certain tasks that he didn't appear to know how to do. Oh, and did I forget to mention they made this guy "my boss?"
This really got me wondering. Then one day we had a major power outage and it took down our cisco routers, firewalls, servers, pretty much absolutely everything even though everything was on APC UPS battery backups. Unbeknownst to me at the time, when our former network admin configured the DHCP scope on the new domain controller we had installed some months before, he did not include exceptions for the AT&T managed routers as well as the switches, network printers and other such devices. When the power came back up, a PC somewhere in the offices got booted up before the router had a chance to and snagged the IP address of said router. As a result, the two devices started butting heads.
This was the new network admin's first real test. As one day dragged into another, he couldn't figure out what was wrong. We kept going back and forth. I told him it was the first of two managed routers that we have, he insisted it was the firewall. He refused to believe me or listen to me even though I had done several tests and came up with the same conclusion every time. Though I am not yet cisco certified, I have hands on experience with both the PIX 506 firewalls and cisco routers. I went to the 'school of hard knocks on these pieces of equipment.
So it gets to be Friday evening and he and I and the VP are in the server room and he brings all the switches and the firewall and routers down and restarts them. Since he had shut down the router I suspected of being the culprit, naturally when he brought the equipment back online we had temporary network connectivity just like every other time I brought that particular router off line then back online. So, being the all wise and powerful network admin he is, he thinks he fixed the problem and he and the VP leave for the weekend all sh#ts and grins. I had to stay until 5:00pm and since I knew what was going to happen I stayed in the server room for a couple of minutes. Sure enough, the network went down again and we lost connectivity to the outer offices and internet again. So I exit the server room and as I am doing so I am approached by two employees and they tell me what I already knew.
Now being the selfless, hard working and dedicated employee that I am, I decide that I have had enough for the night and since I have a pass code to get into the building I will come in on Saturday and take the bull by the horns so that on Monday people will be able to do their work. The company had already lost two and a half days of business and I just could not let this bllsh@t go on. So I come in on Saturday and first get AT&T on the phone and I get them to take a look at the router and they confirm my suspicions. So I go around to every PC I can gain access to and shut them all down. I then proceed to shut down all the routers and switches for good measure and reboot them and lo and behold we have network connectivity. I then monitored the situation for a couple of hours and confirm that the issue has been resolved. I also added an exception for the IP address of the router to the DHCP scope. Oh, I have failed to mention that the whole time I have been in contact with the president of the company and she is aware that I am in the building and of what I am doing.
Everyone comes into work Monday and can connect to the outer offices and to the internet and can do their work. I have saved the company at least one more day of lost wages and business and quite possibly more at the rate our new network administrator was going.
All is well, life is good.
Wait a minute, not so fast. On Tuesday, I have to do some work in our plant 2 production building so I enter my key code into the punch pad and it denies me access. What the f@ck? So I ask my 'boss' about this and he says he will find out about it. In the meantime I approach the guy in charge of programming the keypads (he too, is my friend) and he tells me that he was told to remove my pass code. So I go back to my office and my 'boss' tells me that my pass code expired and had to be reprogrammed in even though I already know better. It is my opinion that the VP had her feelings hurt because I mistakenly did not contact her instead of the president and the vindictive b@tch wanted to teach me a lesson even though I did not leave her out of the loop intentionally. It was an honest mistake.
Okay, so now I now know how incompetent this guy really is. so a couple of months go by bringing me to this last Monday and I start getting into a conversation with my 'boss' and he is trying to load more work on me. I am running all the time, doing all the heavy lifting regardless of my 15 lb lift restriction imposed by my doctor and things turn a bit ugly as I am sick of being lied to and deceived and I tell him in so many words that I think he is incompetent and he is in my chair. Since he is a suck up, a kiss ass and a yes man and doesn't have the balls to question authority, he goes and tells the VP and the next day I am being "let go." Having the foresight to realize what is going on that morning, I tell a couple of people that I know it is coming and say my good byes to them so they knew and so did I before they even told me. As I am leaving, my now ex-'boss' insists that he doesn't have anything to do with it, so even though I don't believe a single word out of his lying mouth, I keep saying to him, "I believed you." That just pissed him off and I just laughed at him.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it!
Edited for typos. I hope I got 'em all.
Edited by VoodooGuru, 16 November 2007 - 05:54 AM.
I wish you well for the future as I'm sure it will prove this was all not in vein 
Take some pics of depp and the set and keep us posted on whats going on in the movie. Great job and enjoy, sounds like a lot of fun!!
Congrats man, Sounds like it could be a lot of fun. I hope everything works out 
