That reminds me of the day I arrived at a Pep Boys in Tucson, AZ and there were a few ex-employees milling around out front. The doors were locked and there was a note stating that the location had been closed and all employees were laid-off. That, to me, was so chicken shit and gutless, that I swore I'd never visit a Pep Boys ever again. I still haven't and won't.
There are areas in Texas where your per diem is not going to cover your actual costs unless you either own a camper or share a place with about 3 other people. These young guys who treat per diem as income are fools.
I did that to an employer as well once upon a time.?ÿ
In my defense he was more than a two weeks past due on my pay and had his bookkeeper lie for him to tell me the check was in the office. (The check had not been written.).?ÿ
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I did did get my back pay two weeks later.?ÿ
I did that to an employer as well once upon a time.?ÿ
In my defense he was more than a two weeks past due on my pay and had his bookkeeper lie for him to tell me the check was in the office. (The check had not been written.).?ÿ
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I did did get my back pay two weeks later.?ÿ
my two job quitting stories:
1. first job out of college, selling fords at the local mega-dealership.?ÿ i was horrible at it.?ÿ and all the stereotypes on earth about car sales and salesmen, added up, wouldn't do justice to how jacked up that environment was.?ÿ one saturday when i was already casting my eyes upon other ventures, i walked up to the sales manager's desk with the usual "they wanna know if we'll take x..."?ÿ sales manager (alpha male-wannabe shyster) says "dashner, i've sh&t turds bigger than you."?ÿ i said (and still, to this day, don't know how i managed to pull this off): "makes sense, you're the biggest a**hole i've ever met."?ÿ put my company pager on the desk in front of him and walked out the door.?ÿ last time i ever tried selling ANYTHING as a job.
2. few years after that i was working in a sign shop, sorta realizing my dream of being a practicing visual artist.?ÿ great group of guys, great environment, still one of the most enjoyable jobs i've ever had.?ÿ but like the quote above: paychecks started bouncing.?ÿ and equivocators started equivocating (from behind the wheel of her new mercedes s class or whatever it was).?ÿ monday morning after the third straight friday of "the bank screwed up the deposit", i walked into her desk with a pawn ticket and said "you're gonna need to run down the road and pick the welder up ifn' i'm gonna get anything done today."?ÿ well, you can guess how that went.?ÿ that was about a month before i became a land surveyor.
My surveying career also started with a no-notice quit.?ÿ I was a month or two into a job as a welding equipment repair person and gas cylinder delivery guy when I got a call from the union apprenticeship program that I had applied to almost 5 years earlier.?ÿ They said to show up at a Sacramento engineering/surveying firm in the morning at 7:00 if I wanted the job.?ÿ I didn't think it would be right to quit without notice, but when I spoke to the store manager about it he said, "It's a crappy thing to do, but you're young and it's a good opportunity.?ÿ I'd take it if I were you."?ÿ So I did.?ÿ That was in 1977.
Left a job almost 27 years ago. Been with the same employer ever since. I guess it worked out okay.?ÿ
About 20 years ago I had the unfortunate experience of working for a complete and total pcycho for 2 months. His pcyhotic behavior would manifest itself others to see and enjoy when he was under stress which was quite frequent. When this happened he would go through the office ranting a raving. He would threaten folks with a$$ whippings, berate and humiliate people and for the 2 black folks there he would give them extra special treatment. The straw that broke the camels back for me was when he came out of his office and without any warning he swept all my files and everything else off my desk and berated me about my file management and then told me to clean it up. I got up and walked out.
The next morning I came into work with and tossed the keys on his desk and told him "I quit". He looked at me and said "You effing pu$$y"! "Why are leaving?"?ÿ
I calmly replied; "After yestersay I decided that I would find another job or kill you, it's your choice".
He Simply said; "Good luck"
I had actually brought in my 444 Marlin that morning. It was the absolute worse job I have ever had and was 2 months of pure hell.
I won't name names but if I did Andy Bruner would know him. The company doesn't exist anymore.
Wow, y'all got some great stories out of all that crap.?ÿ Can't say I have ever had a situation like that.?ÿ?ÿ
About 20 years ago I had the unfortunate experience of working for a complete and total pcycho for 2 months.
ha.?ÿ around 15 years ago i worked for somebody similar.?ÿ he was just a few years older than me and in the middle of a divorce.?ÿ and i think his heiress-bride leaving him was putting a big dent in his bolivian marching powder budget.?ÿ usually he'd come stumbling in around 10 or 11.?ÿ go straight to his office, close the door, and then all you'd hear for the next couple hours was the sound of various items in his office bouncing off?ÿ of walls, his desk, the floor and often disintegrating.?ÿ (when i left, 18 months later, his office was the eptiome of the minimalist aesthetic.)
best day of that entire job was one morning when i pulled into the office and there was a whole fleet of local PD cars.?ÿ i thought for sure somebody had taken a dive off the building, or was holed up inside with hostages or something.?ÿ nope.?ÿ turns out there had been a hit and run the evening before at the cantina just up the road- one where nobody was hurt but one car had been t-boned and totalled.?ÿ the t-bone r just happened to leave his front bumper and license plate behind...
at some point i'd had enough.?ÿ but i gave a standard two weeks at that one.?ÿ partly because it wasn't that intolerable, considering he was usually so absent that i basically had the run of the place (as an SIT), and also out of respect to the crews and the other office people.?ÿ really it had more to do with me knowing i was going to need an RPLS endorsement to take the exam, and he wasn't looking like a good candidate to do so.
funny, though- about a month after i quit the rest of the staff all marched into the CEO's office and staged a mutiny.?ÿ basically said "it's all of us or him."?ÿ they were all retained.?ÿ
Layoffs are usually given with no notice.
I was once laid off on a Friday afternoon and only given enough time to collect my personal effects under the watchful eye of the building security guard. It was initially quite painful until when being escorted out the door by my boss I was given a month's severance pay check.?ÿ Monday I got a call from a different firm asking if I'd be interested in an interview.?ÿ Turned out my former boss had contacted them with a recommendation.
Other than when taking a job knowing that it's temporary or seasonal, based on my experience and all I've heard from others, layoffs in this line of work are rarely given with any decent amount of notice.?ÿ Typically, they are given just before quitting time and the employee is given enough time to clear his desk or grab personal gear from the truck.
An employer who has a track record of giving the same notice that is expected from a resigning employee is, IMO, leaps and bounds ahead of most of his colleagues/competition in terms of integrity and basic decency.?ÿ
If this employee was in over his head and knew it, you might have been at least occasionally and casually thinking of having to replace him with someone more competent.?ÿ From his perspective, he may have thought you might act on that sooner rather than later, and this was his way of saving you from firing him while relieving himself of the stress (real or imagined) that his job was on the line and apt to end on any given day.
If you would have sooner or later laid him off because he simply couldn't rise to the challenge of the job, but still would have provided him with a week or two notice, you are truly an exceptionally decent guy (granted, such notice wouldn't make much business sense, but as an act of human decency, it may be the right thing to do, even for some cases of poor performance).
in 1988, I had experiences pertaining to this thread in two consecutive jobs.?ÿ I had been a student co-op employee of the BLM in 86 & 87, and went into the summer of 88 for my 3rd year of it.?ÿ Due to an administrative situation that went FUBAR, after I had returned to work and then received my first check a week or two later, it was about half the size it should have been.?ÿ Trying to get answers while travelling around half the country and working long days in the field was not at all easy.?ÿ I had contacted my boss' boss back in Rolla (Eastern States Cadastral Chief) and asked him to have someone try to find out why my checks were so small.?ÿ Since it didn't affect his wallet, it wasn't much of a priority for him, I guess.
This went on for 3 or 4 pay periods, then one week, everyone at the field office got a check expect me.?ÿ I got a pay stub the next afternoon that showed a negative net pay of about $240.?ÿ Meaning not only would I have no pay that period, but that my nest check would be about half size.?ÿ My chief allowed for a short field day the next day so that I could make phone calls to try to straighten things out.?ÿ Turned out to be that someone in DC had enrolled me in a premium level health plan over the winter, which I never needed or used (or knew I had), and the premiums, without any regular notice to me simply kept piling up, waiting for my return.?ÿ The mystery deductions were to pay for my coverage over the off season.
While trying to straighten this out over the phone with the Cadastral Chief, he began asking me "read me the amount in Box X of you r pay stub... now Box Y, now Box XX..." and so on.?ÿ He was sitting at his desk in Rolla checking the math of the pay stub, which frustrated me to no end.?ÿ I knew there was nothing wrong in the math shown on the stub.?ÿ That wasn't the issue.?ÿ The issue was the outsized deduction for a benefit I never asked for, never used, never knew I had, and didn't want.?ÿ The problem was that my enrollment in the premium health plan had been someone else's error and needed to get undone.
After a few minutes of crunching the numbers, he says "It looks right to me."?ÿ It was all I could do to not make some remark about his reasoning and cognitive abilities.?ÿ Instead I replied "Well Louie, it's not right.?ÿ I can't afford to continue to pay the government for the privilege of busting my azz 10 hours a day and paying for the gas to drive my truck all over the country all summer (so far, from MI to MO, to ME, into Quebec, back to ME, back to MO, then to n'rn MN).?ÿ I quit!"?ÿ That's the only time I quit with anything less than 2 week's notice.
Pawned my 41 to my chief for gas $ to get back to MI.?ÿ Stayed with relatives and started looking for a job the day after getting back.?ÿ Found one at a company a friend was working at.?ÿ It was a good job for the 4 or so months it lasted.?ÿ The company had spun off from a large utility engineering company and had placed all their bets on 1 large project.?ÿ Unfortunately, of the 3 partners, none had the foresight to think about lining up work in case this project dried up.?ÿ We were running 8 to 10 field crews, 4 or 5 LS's in the office, another 3 or 4 techs (incl me), and 2 or 3 admin support staff.
The project was part of MI's efforts in competing for a supercollider (undergound atom smasher).?ÿ 6 or 8 states were competing for it.?ÿ MI's strategy was to do the surveying to identify the parcels needed for RW, do scientific studies to demonstrate why MI was ideally suited, and generally get a head start on project progress.?ÿ The winning state invested in political relationships and greasing the gears of democracy.?ÿ Whatever the reason, everything came to a screeching halt.?ÿ The owners were able to parlay a few more weeks work for some of the staff in order to complete the surveying and mapping for parcels already started.?ÿ One partner decided to retire.?ÿ Another started scrambling to find other work for the company, and the third managed the death of his dream over several weeks.
The bosses were honest with us, saying they would keep as many of us busy for as long as they could, but that layoffs were coming, possibly for all of us.?ÿ They allowed us to prepare resumes on the work computers during lunch or after hours.?ÿ They were able to bring in a small stream of work just before having to close up shop.?ÿ When the dust settled, there were two owners, one LSIT, and one 2-man field crew.?ÿ I was the last of about 30 to be let go.?ÿ On my last day, the boss let me know first thing in the morning.?ÿ It still sucked, but I knew for about 3 weeks that it was practically inevitable and thought that telling me at the beginning of the day rather than at the end was a fairly decent thing to do.
I've had to lay people off once so far, but didn't have the freedom of providing notice to them.?ÿ I was an interim survey manager for a multidiscipline firm (LSIT in charge until they could find a qualified LS - I highly recommend against doing this as an employer, and even more so for those offered such a position).?ÿ In a meeting with upper management, we decided that we needed to lay off two employees.?ÿ To my dismay, I was told that I could not give them any notice whatsoever.?ÿ Once I notified them, they had to clear out their personal belongings then I had to walk them out of the building.?ÿ One of the two had actively tried to make it difficult for me to be effective in the job.?ÿ I only felt a twinge of guilt giving him the news.?ÿ The other was over his head, but a hard worker and trying hard.?ÿ I felt lower than low in the manner I had to let him go.
I decided after that, unless I was going to be firing someone for cause, they would get at least a week notice, and preferably more when getting laid off.?ÿ If upper management insisted on layoffs without notice, they could do their own dirty work.?ÿ I'd rather have to look for a job than kick them down the road with no notice while the company holds employees to an expectation of at least 2 weeks notice when they decide to leave.
Giving the respect and courtesy you expect to be shown applies to all relationships, IMO.
Man, after reading about all these stories of people walking out, I don't feel so lonely.?ÿ The reason I have a job posting up is my last hand sent us a text at 7:30 on a Monday morning saying he was quitting.?ÿ No reason mentioned.?ÿ He even still has stuff in the work truck.?ÿ
