Oh yes, I suppose I 'm back. It's been a while, but hopefully I'll have lots of time to contribute to this blog in the not too distant future.

The Forlorn Hope

Well, it's official. I'm ready to leave my crappy little job. Needless to say I've been gradually getting more and more disillusioned by the intrinsic crapness of the whole company. I've been bored. I’ve been bored and I've made mistakes. I've been overworked and that’s lead to the odd error. Who said "to err is human". I'm not sure, but then neither, I'm sure, are my soon to be former employers. I think as far as they're concerned I need to be some sort of Nietzsche superman (less fun than DC comics Superman admittedly). Anyway, just a few months ago they decided to take disciplinary action against me for some of the vaguest reasons. They said that they thought I was unhappy. No really, that was what they said. Of course they came up with a few other things by the time of the hearing (and that must be the loosest use of the word on record). They refused to accept that I was overworked. They refused to acknowledge the fact that I was receiving more calls than my predecessor despite the testimony (now it really sounds like I’m talking about a court case albeit a kangaroo one) from someone who shares my office to the contrary. In fact they tried to imply that I was only getting more calls because my customers had to keep checking things with me because they were not confident about what I was saying. He then went on to say that he didn't have any confidence in me and then, without a hint of irony criticised me for my lack of confidence. Needless to say they decided to give me a warning. Not exactly a fair and balanced verdict. More than a touch heavy handed really. I'd complained that I felt like I was under constant scrutiny. They denied it. They told me that I should go to my boss for help if I needed it. As you’ll subsequently see they didn't really mean it.

So fast forward 6 weeks, by which point I'd managed to correct any of their minor issues. Of course that wasn’t good enough. So, they weren’t putting me under scrutiny yet they had been compiling a secret list of any mistakes that I'd made. Not only that they had decided that I was costing the company money by losing them orders. Let’s forget about the fact that my Boss had failed to order enough/any stock and I continually had to tell customers that they couldn’t have the stuff they wanted. Oh, and let's put to one side the fact that the stock records are so continually wrong that I quite frequently told customers that we had stock of what subsequently turned out to be phantom doors. Or maybe it was because the warehouse continued to deliver incorrect or damaged doors. Perhaps it was because orders were continually mis-invoiced by the accounts people. No, all of this was clearly of no importance. It was obvious, I was solely responsible for everything that went wrong in the company (that may be overstating it a tad, but only a tad). I must be responsible, since I was the one who had to spend huge amounts of my time fixing all the problems. And besides, there's no way that I could be making mistakes because they had reorganised my schedule so that almost half of my work for the week now had to be done on a Monday. Oh, and on top of that Monday was the day on which I had to attend a weekly meeting tat usually lasted for around 2 hours. And the fact that I couldn’t return all of the messages that had been left in my voicemail because by the time I left the meeting I only had 30mins to do so before all of my customers shut up shop for the day is invariably not going to be seen as a valid reason.

Oh, and this one’s brilliant. You remember what I said a couple of paragraphs ago about how they'd told me that I could talk to my boss when I needed help. They mentioned that he'd be very approachable. Lies.

I had a problem with a customer. One of the things that I was accused of was not sticking to company policy. So, when a customer asked for a free delivery when he'd ordered less than the qualifying amount I told him no. He insisted that he speak to my boss. I told him that he would say the same thing. He still insisted. So, I ended the call and relayed the message to my boss. Needless to say he wasn't prepared to make the call and told me to tell my customer just that. I duly did what he said and that, somewhat miffed protestations from the customer aside, was that. Except of course it wasn't because the whole episode was brought up as reason for disciplinary action against me. Quite frankly I thought that I was allowed to pass on messages from customers and ask for help from my boss. Apparently I must have been terribly out of order.

Well, this is pretty much all I'm going to say to them on Wednesday. They may be perfectly reasonable arguments, but then their not perfectly reasonable people. Their behaviour to date provides more than adequate proof to back up that assertion.

I'm tired of the whole thing really. I'm tired of working in an atmosphere of oppression, of working for a hopeless inadequate who's clearly incapable of running his own company and has to rely on a scapegoat (that would be me) to blame when he can only afford to kit out his house with a £100 toilet brush holder. Actually I think that his bog brush receptacle may have cost a little more than that, but that only adds to the validity of my argument.

It possibly goes without saying that I’ve made my mind up to leave regardless of the foregone conclusion. I mean outcome.