You Know I'm Not One for Mincing Words...

I was fired today. In case you're wondering why I keep my employer a guarded secret, this is why. I've sensed this coming for three and a half years now; when you get a job somewhere and one supervisor tells you, "Yes! You will be trained to do anything you can here, and you'll have the opportunity for advancement!"

And that supervisor's successor says, "You were hired on here to do one job, and one job only. Your training will not be renewed when this quarter is up, and your job does not allow you the opportunity for advancement," you know something is terribly, terribly wrong.

So, I've filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission in Frankfort. I'll be getting my ducks in a row, and talking to several people over the course of the next couple of months. I'm going to put up a fight. This workplace deserves it; I am not the only one who has faced that sort of treatment. I may be the only one preparing to do something about it. And, if rumors are true about the nature of my former employer, that somehow they're so immune to lawsuits that no judge, or even lawyer will listen, I'll be posting their name wherever I can and telling my story to whomever will listen.

In the meantime, I also plan on filing for unemployment; I was told that I'm eligible for that. (They told me in a tone that suggested concern for my well being. If that were truly the case, I would not have been jerked around for all these years. I left a job at which I was perfectly happy, but didn't have the pay or benefits or advancement opportunities that the newer job had, and would never have left had my recent ex-employer been forthright about my position.)

On another blog I write (the one at deviantArt), someone said something about how they had something similar, and I add much worse (being told that he was going to be training his replacement the day he told his bosses that he needed a week off for his honeymoon), that he went into a temp job that worked out for the best for him.

Temp work is something I view with great suspicion. I don't know how much things have changed in the past 23 years, but when my father went through a temp agency in '82, there was actually a clause in the contract that prevented his employer from ever hiring him permanently. I know I'll be moving on, but I quite simply do not wish to encourage temp services if they're going to use that sort of wrangling.

That's a low-down, dirty trick to pull on a 29 year old man -- with a 9 year old son and 7 year old daughter -- who had no hope of ever doing anything more than work at a factory through a temp agency. Those folks at that factory really wanted to hire him, but couldn't ... thanks to that contract! Just like in my case, though, things did work out for the best. When Dad was about 7 or 8 months older than I am right now, he went back to college. He told me recently that the only thing that kept him out between 1971 and 1986 was financial aid; sometime within those fifteen years, someone turned on a spigot. Sure, college was cheaper in '71, but my grandparents didn't have the money to send him, and financial aid was only in the hundreds of dollars. (Dad even had a class schedule that fall. When he saw that the aid would leave a gap that his income and his parents' combined wouldn't fill, he had to withdraw.) But, in '86, he wound up getting a couple of thousand in aid; the rest is history. He went from struggling working stiff to struggling High School science teacher. (You can guess, though -- the struggling wasn't quite so bad once he became a teacher. But, then again, a full time job -- with full pay -- at a factory would probably have been better. Dad and I are a lot alike, though; I couldn't see either one of us being happy with seeing the same situations day in and day out, year after year.)