Miasmatic Review

I'm the Terminator!

Since I’ve had direct reports with my company, I’ve never had to terminate someone. Don’t get me wrong, two of my people have been fired, but someone else did that when I wasn’t even in the office. Hell, I didn’t know it was happening until I got back and found out. Well, that’s no longer true. In fact I’m making up for lost time.

Back on Valentines Day, (again I wasn’t in the office) there was an incident involving the misuse of company assets that involved A LOT of people. This was big enough that it went up the chain of management all the way to the executive level to determine what kind of action was going to happen. We ended up scouring through disciplinary records of the staff involved. Based on past disciplinary action, upper management made a determination on the type of disciplinary action was going to be taking place this time. They did this to make sure there was consistency as it involved employees working for different supervisors in multiple departments and units.

When the dust cleared it came down to everything from a warning for first time offenses to termination for repeat offenders. The only person I had involved received a verbal warning before so they were given a permanent written warning this time that could lead to termination if they do it again. Thus none of my people were getting terminated. Yet, I ended up doing all the other terminations.

One of the individuals terminated asked me to assist, just because I’m a guy and she thought there might be trouble. The others didn’t have supervisors in the office that day and the terminations had to be done. Because the other supervisors, even the ones that worked in the same unit, didn’t directly supervise these people, they didn’t want to do it. In fact they felt I should do it. They were scared of what these individuals were going to do, they were repeated disciplinary problems. Their logic was that they wouldn’t get upset if I was doing it because, “Contagion, you’ll kick their ass if they start anything.” Yea, that’s right.

So I spent most of the day terminating or handing out punishments to people. And I’m not done yet. Nope, we ran out of time before we could get to everyone. I’m mentally exhausted from doing this. I feel bad for the people that were terminated. Don’t get me wrong, they brought this upon themselves, but really it should have been their supervisor or one they worked with that handed out the punishment. Not the guy in the office they deal with rarely. And contrary to some people’s belief, I took no pleasure from doing it.

The worse part is that word spread quickly. You don’t start firing people left and right on the same day with out people not only noticing, but also noticing who is escorting them out of the office. Some of the people I terminated were friends with or relatives of employees of mine. When I returned to my unit for stuff, my own employees wouldn’t look or talk to me. They kept they eyes diverted. At one point they were gathered and talking and when they saw me, they all scattered to the wind like roaches when a light comes on.

Needless to say, tonight I’m mentally and emotionally drained. I’d like to have a drink, but the only think I have is that nasty Bud Light Chelada.