This Too Shall Pass...At Least, I Hope So

Well, that was quick…Remember that “great” job?

I got fired from it today.

Apparently, though no one told me this, I was being held to some performance benchmarks which—again, though no one told me this—I was not meeting. Of course, I would have met these benchmarks, had I known what they were, or even that they existed (over and above a vague syllabus that was given to me on my first day, then never mentioned again). But I was never even given an indication that there was a problem; the most that was said was that I was a little behind where I needed to be, with no information given regarding what I should do to improve.

I’m….floored. Absolutely floored. If I went into detail about how this place operated, you would wonder how they could EVER let ANYONE go for ANYTHING; the guy who got hired a week ahead of me is blatantly playing computer games, and there are guys playing putt-putt golf in the office, but somehow I get fired??? Further, I was given almost no guidance at all. I was given the program and the documentation and told to “learn” it. Well, I tried. I fished for feedback, trying to find out what I should do to catch up. And when they told me they were letting me go, I even asked them if I could have one more week, to try to catch up—they said no. So obviously they had their minds made up. (I could, if I wanted to, make a point that somehow there’s only ONE other woman in the department other than the boss…I won’t make that point, because I’m trying not to see myself as a victim here. But let me tell you: it’s tempting. You’d be tempted too, I’ll bet, if you were me.)

I know I will be fine; I know I will find another job, that I am not unemployable, that I am *most likely* smarter than a 5th-grader. I KNOW these things, intellectually.

In my heart, though, I’ve gotta admit: I feel like crap. (I will resist the temptation to describe the qualities of the crap I feel like—I’m trying to steer myself away from the blatantly scatological, but I’ll tell you, this resisting-temptation stuff is hard, especially on a day like this!) I am now engaged in second-guessing each and every decision I made over the four weeks I was employed there, every comment that passed my lips (most especially the ones from that post), every action I took or did not take. And that feeling sucks. It sucks, it sucks, it sucks.

Tonight, I am drinking beer and watching the Bulls.
Tomorrow: back to the drawing board.