Losing a Toxic Job is a Blessing in Disguise.

Let’s face it: No one likes getting laid off.

It doesn’t matter why you’re getting the boot either.  If anything, being laid off for no good reason is even worse.  Being pulled into an office where you’re forced to sign a bunch of forms, and then having your belongings handed to you in a box while you do the walk of shame out the door in front of everyone, sucks.

Wednesday of this week, I got canned.  It wasn’t for any ‘actual’ reason either.  My job had an antiquated physical time-clock which required punching in and out for meals as well as start and stop times.  I’m a space-cadet at heart, and while I’m reliable once I get into a habit, anything that throws me off my routine is gonna make me forget stuff.

Earlier this week, I forgot to clock out to lunch.  Due to prior health issues between me and the tiny human, this mean that I ran out of the meager, six-month-resetting points that workers were provided with.  So it was that my turn to get pink-slipped arrived.

I was angry, AM angry, because this happened after I had spent the better part of a year jumping through hoops to make my job happy.  I had restructured my life around my work time and time again, from when we left the house, to who picked up tiny human and who dropped him off.  We had a setup for baby-sitters on days the wife had to stay at school late.  I showed up every day, I did the work I was asked, and I tried my best not to rock the boat while I did what they wanted.

And yet…

There I was, walking out of the building for the last time with all my knick-knacks in my arms, with nothing left but the drive home and the dreaded moment when I had to tell the wife that our life was now one continuous emergency.

After spending the better part of two days fuming and guilty and depressed, I finally realized something.

I have been set free.

My old job was… not good.  We went through personnel frequently.  To the point where I hardly bothered to learn names before they hit a month.  In the space of six weeks, we had four different people manning the front desk.

We had many, many people quit on their first day.

My boss is / was a nightmare.  There’s micro-management, then there’s whatever he is.  His ideas were the only ideas that mattered.  Everything had to go through him.  God forbid you have an idea he didn’t approve of, and if he ever presented you with an option it was only because he’d already made up his mind and wanted you see if you were smart enough to agree with him.

Furthermore, even if you did put everything through him, everything was going through him.  He missed stuff or forgot about stuff because he was dealing with literally all the things.  Projects would get left behind, and then there’s you holding the bag on something that went sour because he forgot about it.  You can pull up all the emails in the universe, and it won’t matter because you didn’t get it done despite the fact he was why it wasn’t getting done.

He pulled people into the office for talking to each other.  He pulled people into the office for not talking to each other.  He pulled people in the office to yell at them about missing work.  He pulled people into his office to yell at them for doing their job, but not doing it “fast enough”.

Basically, to work where I did was to endure a constant barrage of “You’re not good enough” mixed in with a bunch of sexist, racist nonsense he called jokes.  Things that even fifteen or twenty years ago would have been over the line of decency in an office setting.

His meetings ran for hours, and during that time it was mostly him running his mouth for no other reason than to hear himself talk.  He talked about anything and everything that wasn’t why we were in that office.  He would call people into the office for hours when all he needed them for was one ten minute segment towards the end.

I cannot overstate this enough: His nonsense was a forest fire which consumed personnel at lightning speed.

I started in February, and by the time this Wednesday rolled around, no one I had started with was still there.

None.  Zilch.  Zip.  Zero.

Then I woke up Friday morning to a moment of clarity.  I wasn’t tense.  I wasn’t nervous.  I wasn’t filled with anger and sorrow and dread.  There was no sense of foreboding, no omnipresent but invisible threat loomed over my day.

I didn’t have to go into work and bust my butt for eight hours a day only to be told I’m not busting my butt hard enough and that my butt busting wasn’t good enough and that I need to turn it up a notch otherwise my butt would get busted.

Yes, being jobless sucks.  Yes, I’ve put my amazing and hardworking wife in a bind with my missed time-clock punch.  Yes, looking for work in the modern economy is an exercise in masochism.

Yet I cannot feel anything other than relief.  Wednesday morning had me dreading Monday like the weekend had already come and gone.  It was that bad.

My old job was purgatory; a torturous wasteland where you couldn’t make any progress no matter how hard you tried.  There was no forward momentum.  There was only the misery of exertion forever denied the payoff of success.

While I hope none of you have to deal with being fired and I hope even more fervently that you never have to deal with a toxic workplace, there are those of us who aren’t so lucky.  For those blasted to the pits, I exhort you to take heart once your time is served.

I’m going to pull a Babe Ruth and call my shot: Being fired from that toxic nonsense was the best thing that could’ve happened to me.

Freefully,

The Unsheathed Quill