It turns out the place I interviewed WAS talking about me. I was offered a job and, being a horrible negotiator, took what they offered. What they offered turned out to be $240 less per year than I was making after my recent raise and a few less PTO days.
About that raise… Like most corporations the manager is given a pool of money equal to three percent of all their employees salaries. If someone gets more than a 3% raise then someone else has to get less. In past years I received the standard 3% raise and hoped inflation stayed low. This year I received a 2% raise. A team mate I spoke with received a 2.2%, meaning someone received a very nice raise, indeed! The person formerly known as my manager mentioned in a department meeting that the new policies gave him greater leeway to distributing raises. When I questioned the 2% in my private meeting with him I was essentially told “you need to step up your game if you want more.” This from a guy who also admitted that he didn’t know all the things I did to keep the place running. “Do more and better but I don’t know how much you’re doing to know if ‘more’ is even reasonable. For all I know you could be doing three jobs with acceptable accuracy, but still, do more. But don’t you dare mess up on any of the many things you do.” What this told me was that I could expect this kind of raise for as long as I continued at Investigo, and probably bonuses as well. Fortunately, even though this was before I started applying for jobs, I knew that this was likely the last review I’d have with this bloke.
Brotherhood Mutual wanted me to start in three weeks but that was a day that my wife had an expensive medical procedure scheduled, which would be fully paid under the old employer and not the new (it’s just how health insurance works). Egads! Brotherhood has orientation sessions every two weeks so now I wouldn’t be able to start for five weeks. Double egads! Two weeks is long enough to endure knowing that you are leaving but five weeks? Pure torture!
But also bliss! Nothing can touch you during this time. My team was given more information about the new process and it looked messy. But I didn’t care… I wouldn’t be doing it. We were told about new duties we were taking on because certain people had been let go and it looked like a convoluted mess. But I didn’t care… I wouldn’t be doing it. At team meeting where we were told about all the challenges coming our way with more work and a tight timeframe… but I didn’t care… I wouldn’t be doing it. I had my monthly one on one with my manager where he threw a bunch of negatives my way. But I didn’t care… I wouldn’t be working for him soon.
Everything I read about turning in your resignation said not to give your present employer more than two weeks. You might think you’re doing them a favor but they could turn around and let you go immediately, leaving you without pay. So all of the above happened in the first three weeks, with the one on one being just a few days before I was able to deliver the news to my manager. It was difficult to keep my mouth shut but I did manage to slip in a statement like “I’m work on a plan to improve the quality of my work.” Like leaving.
The big day arrived and I sent my manager an instant message. “Can I call you about something?” Why was my heart pounding? “Sure” was the response.
“I need to tell you that I’ve accepted a position at another company. My last day will be October 22.” Silence. I really think he thought he was going to be able to kick me around for as many years as necessary until I could be let go. I said something about who I thought should handle the various parts of my work and he said something as well. The whole thing lasted about a minute and a half. I then contacted team members and a few others in the company that I had worked with, letting them know. My favorite response “Is this some kind of sick joke?”
If you thought that my manager would contact me to discuss transition of work duties some time during my final two week you would be wrong. I stopped expecting it after the first week. In fact, he didn’t contact me at all. No email, no instant message, no calls. “Oh well,” I thought, “I guess he has it all figured out.” I wrote a few things down and gave them to the team member who would be handling most of my day-to-day duties. Other than that I just kept on working at my usual pace and quality.
When an employee leaves it is customary for the manager to send out an email to the company, wishing them well, sad they are going, thanks for all the work over the past seventeen years, etc. It didn’t happen. Sure, he sent out an email a year before when an employee that he liked left after five years but I apparently wasn’t worth the effort. Since I was planning to work very little on Friday* I sent out my own email on Thursday morning. I got a few responses from co-workers but since we’d been working from home for a year and a half, I think most everyone felt disconnected. More than one let me know that they were looking for jobs elsewhere. That’s telling.
On my last day of working at Investigo I logged in, took care of whatever production support issues needed my attention, and attended my last 9:30 daily meeting. I dinked around a bit and cleaned up my desk and drawers** and then went upstairs to take a shower. I came back down, checked my email to see if anyone else had written and then left for my long co-worker (solo) lunch (my favorite Chinese place which is waaay across town so I don’t usually go).
I returned two hours later and saw that my manager broke two weeks of silence by sending me an instant message around 11:15, which I guess I didn’t see earlier when I checked my email. “Got a minute?” What’s the point in giving him a minute more of my life? He’s had two weeks and anything he had to say would be disingenuous. I signed off my account and closed the Broadridge laptop for the last time.
* When we worked in an office and an employee left, it was customary for his team to take him out to lunch early on their last day, to stay away for a 2-3 of hours, and then to leave. I planned to follow this pattern.
** Since receiving the job offer I had moved all of my personal files and deleted them from my laptop. Seventeen years is a long time to accumulate personal emails and documents and spreadsheets. The parent company increasingly locked things down over the years so there was no writing to USB drives and anything that even remotely looked like a social security number blocked the entire email. So how does a fellow get out dozens of spreadsheets, hundreds of emails, and a few databases? If you have access to the FTP server you find a client who didn’t set up a firewall, that’s how! Upload from work, download at home. Yes, I could have easily stolen every single SSN and address of every client we’d had for a decade but of course I didn’t. That’s where big companies get it so wrong. Sure, you need to have some safeties in place but mostly all those guards meant to ensure data safety only make people less productive, making the job more difficult and time consuming to do. Even without the FTP server I could have easily gotten out SSNs etc through email with a simple scramble/descramble spreadsheet. It’s all about trusting your employees.
*** Post script: Apparently there was a reason why I felt great urgency to get the application in. Scott, who I had lunch with, decided he didn’t like where his new job and asked to come back. However they had just offered me the job. So instead they created a level three position for him, which was needed, and everyone was happy. Had I waited even one week my job would have been open and would have gone back to Scott. God does some pretty nifty things.
No comments:
Post a Comment