Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Unemployment Diary Day One

Hi.

I’ve recently as of Monday found myself unemployed.  This is what has transpired so far.

Day One.

Woken up by a 9 am call from my boss. I hate these. Usually means i won’t be able to go back to sleep for the rest of the day.  He also has beaten my iPhone alarm. Which is also set to go off at 9 am. That mean’s he dialed exactly as his watch struck 9.

“Did I wake you?”

“Huh? Of Course not. Go ahead”

He begins to tell me of exciting new changes within the company. And he will no longer need the services of the other employee. I’m with him so far. Sales and Support will now be handled by the company they are merging with.  And here I am expecting him to say , like he’s told me numerous times before, that i will be handling the Network Infrastructure and providing Tier 2 support., to the new employees.  

Then he goes on to say. Our work with you will now be project based.  *RECORD SCRATCHES*

“Say What?” Project based? I can’t feed my family on projects. What they told me is after 5 years. And after keeping their company afloat for 3 of those years, on my back. That I’m fucked. 

“Send in a resume to the new company and we’ll be glad to submit it.”

This didn’t just happen overnight. You kept me on the hook with promises, and not paying me on-time for several months. Just to fuck me like this? Wonderful.

I can’t tell you how many people lied to me during this process. People I thought were my friends, and were looking out for my interests as well. People I did favors for because they requested them of me. That their company was having issues. And I needed to be patient in collection of my pay.

“You Just need to Chill for Today”

Why he said this like I would be coming in to work tomorrow I did not know. This is repugnant behavior.

“I don’t even have access to the server”

You never did. I made sure of that.  But I checked my access, Email. Website, Phone. Server, Billing system. All revoked. But I am the only one.  In fact password changes had begun on Thursday of last week. But they lied to me about why it was done.

This is when i realized I was terminated.  "You Just need to Chill For Today” indeed. How about chilling for the rest of my life?

After realizing what had occurred. What was done to two previous network admins. And what they had made me do to other co-workers. I decided against destroying their business. from the inside. I needed to collect my money, I have access to a lot of the routers and a lot oft he locations. I could call each one individually and do hardware resets on the routers. It would take them several days and several hundreds of dollars in manpower to deduce what had happened. But they still owe me money.  And this behavior is beneath me.  At least for now.

“Do you have any questions for me?” Yeah where the fuck is all the back pay you owe me? Plus Expenses and Bonuses.

I decided to file for unemployment. Fat lot of good it will do me though, I am several weeks behind in pay already. I spoke with Unemployment expert Josh and he said it would be several weeks before i would see any benefits. But that doesn’t matter since former coworkers had failed to recieve any such benefits from this company.

If I had known this situation had been coming. I would have found another job. Had my resume floating around sooner. Curbed my spending habits. I just bought an iPad and had an expensive get together at my house.  And Ive been spending my income tax refund to pay the bills I couldn’t afford because of my employers paying me late.

“We know you have a family and don’t want to leave you in the lurch”

But you did motherfucker. You just Did.

 

2 comments:

Nichole@JustChildrensBooks said...

They can't deny you unemployment. They can try, but you can appeal and I see no reason why they would win an appeal. You weren't fired.

As far as back pay contact your state's Dept of Labor and file a complaint if they don't give you all your back pay by their next pay date.

No company can be trusted to play it straight when it comes to layoffs, especially one as shady sounding as yours. Funny, b/c they all want 2 weeks notice when you quit but very few give employees any notice.

J said...

Hey Nichole.
Previous coworkers have tried to apply for unemployment and have been denied. I want to give it a shot as well. But I dont have high hopes. They protected themselves by calling us independent contractors. Another unfortunate situation is that they are actually located out of state. But I willd efinitely look into the Dept of Labor and trying to file some sort of complaint.


And in my contract, they stated they needed to give me 10 days notice before alayoff, or they will have to give me ten days pay.