Things go pear-shaped
Last week we were sitting round the dinner table eating our sausage and mash when the telephone rang. It was my mother.
'I've just had a call from hubski's boss. They don't want him to start at 5am tomorrow, they want him to go in at 10 instead for a meeting, to discuss his progress to date.'
'Oh. That's interesting.'
'That's what I thought.'
Apart from the fact that Human Resources (or Human Remains, as I prefer to call them) in hubski's company had yet again failed to get the message that we changed address 3 months ago, this could mean only one thing.
Hubski was about to get the push. The end of his probation period was still a month away.
The writing had been on the wall from the beginning. Since returning from Germany in November, having passed his flight dispatcher exams, his induction programme had been mysteriously delayed. It took five weeks for his Heathrow pass to come through. Nobody seemed bothered. In the end, they told him to stop calling, and wait. So we had Christmas and New Year together as a family for the first time ever, which admittedly, was great.
His four week 'training period' consisted of following people round who didn't want to followed round, getting his head around contradictory instructions. Rising at 2.30am to begin the long commute to work was all the harder when nobody on the early shift knew what he was supposed to be doing.
One Friday, when he'd been working late, he turned up subdued. He was in trouble for messing up a load sheet. He'd started filling it in according to one set of instructions, but the next supervisor on shift had said it was all wrong.
The next week he was called in for an warning interview, followed by a letter. In disbelief, we read that if there was not a 'significant improvement' in hubski's performance, his 'suitability for the post would be reassessed'. Together, we tried to work out what was going wrong. Hubski was baffled. In the interview, his manager had said 'it's not your performance I have a problem with. It's your attitude.' He said that all he was trying to do was working out what they wanted from him. He knew he could do the job. It was the people he couldn't work out - two of the supervisors in particular.
We had a couple of theories. One, personal dislike. Two, several more trainees than usual had passed the training course (which had a high failure rate), and now one of them needed to be culled.
Boiling with rage, I drafted a nice positive letter back for hubski, thanking the manager for his feedback and stating that 'I am looking forward to moving on from my training period and proving my competence' blah blah. Ha. That would surprise them. If they thought hubski was some idiot foreigner who couldn't stand up for himself, they were wrong.
I spent the next two weeks hoping that it would blow over. But I couldn't ignore hubski's increasingly bleak mood, and the kinds of things he was saying, which gave me an unpleasant feeling of déjà vu. 'People look though me.' 'I don't feel like I belong there. I feel like an unwanted guest, as if people are waiting for me to leave'. Exactly as it had been in my last French workplace. From which I got the sack.
So when the summoning phone call came, it wasn't much of a surprise. The positive reports and clearances he'd received since the warning were mysteriously missing from his file. Yes, the manager conceded, there had been an improvement in performance. 'But for me, the improvement has not been significant enough' (remember the letter?). No specific reason or incident was cited, no evidence offered, and the dismissal letter stated simply that 'you have not passed your probation.' So we're still guessing.
The strangest thing of all happened today, when hubski rang in to arrange to drop off his uniform. One of his former colleagues picked up the phone, and asked him how he was feeling.
'You must have been really ill.'
'Sorry?'
'Well, you've been off sick all this time.'
The managers chose not to tell hubski's colleagues that he'd been sacked. Instead, they chose to say that he'd been taken ill.
Go figure.
'I've just had a call from hubski's boss. They don't want him to start at 5am tomorrow, they want him to go in at 10 instead for a meeting, to discuss his progress to date.'
'Oh. That's interesting.'
'That's what I thought.'
Apart from the fact that Human Resources (or Human Remains, as I prefer to call them) in hubski's company had yet again failed to get the message that we changed address 3 months ago, this could mean only one thing.
Hubski was about to get the push. The end of his probation period was still a month away.
The writing had been on the wall from the beginning. Since returning from Germany in November, having passed his flight dispatcher exams, his induction programme had been mysteriously delayed. It took five weeks for his Heathrow pass to come through. Nobody seemed bothered. In the end, they told him to stop calling, and wait. So we had Christmas and New Year together as a family for the first time ever, which admittedly, was great.
His four week 'training period' consisted of following people round who didn't want to followed round, getting his head around contradictory instructions. Rising at 2.30am to begin the long commute to work was all the harder when nobody on the early shift knew what he was supposed to be doing.
One Friday, when he'd been working late, he turned up subdued. He was in trouble for messing up a load sheet. He'd started filling it in according to one set of instructions, but the next supervisor on shift had said it was all wrong.
The next week he was called in for an warning interview, followed by a letter. In disbelief, we read that if there was not a 'significant improvement' in hubski's performance, his 'suitability for the post would be reassessed'. Together, we tried to work out what was going wrong. Hubski was baffled. In the interview, his manager had said 'it's not your performance I have a problem with. It's your attitude.' He said that all he was trying to do was working out what they wanted from him. He knew he could do the job. It was the people he couldn't work out - two of the supervisors in particular.
We had a couple of theories. One, personal dislike. Two, several more trainees than usual had passed the training course (which had a high failure rate), and now one of them needed to be culled.
Boiling with rage, I drafted a nice positive letter back for hubski, thanking the manager for his feedback and stating that 'I am looking forward to moving on from my training period and proving my competence' blah blah. Ha. That would surprise them. If they thought hubski was some idiot foreigner who couldn't stand up for himself, they were wrong.
I spent the next two weeks hoping that it would blow over. But I couldn't ignore hubski's increasingly bleak mood, and the kinds of things he was saying, which gave me an unpleasant feeling of déjà vu. 'People look though me.' 'I don't feel like I belong there. I feel like an unwanted guest, as if people are waiting for me to leave'. Exactly as it had been in my last French workplace. From which I got the sack.
So when the summoning phone call came, it wasn't much of a surprise. The positive reports and clearances he'd received since the warning were mysteriously missing from his file. Yes, the manager conceded, there had been an improvement in performance. 'But for me, the improvement has not been significant enough' (remember the letter?). No specific reason or incident was cited, no evidence offered, and the dismissal letter stated simply that 'you have not passed your probation.' So we're still guessing.
The strangest thing of all happened today, when hubski rang in to arrange to drop off his uniform. One of his former colleagues picked up the phone, and asked him how he was feeling.
'You must have been really ill.'
'Sorry?'
'Well, you've been off sick all this time.'
The managers chose not to tell hubski's colleagues that he'd been sacked. Instead, they chose to say that he'd been taken ill.
Go figure.
posted by francesca tereshkova | 12:40 PM
|
2 comments
