I had no clue that my job was in jeapordy. Hell, I almost bought a car on Sunday!

I show up today and my replacement is logged in to my server.

"Oh... well we weren't going to tell you until after new years. We didn't think you'd be in today."

Me: "I was supposed to be in today. And here I am."

"Oh, well we just aren't satisfied, but we still want you to do a few projects for us now and then (ie, we aren't completely firing you so that you can't claim unemployment). Everyone here likes you. Would you still like to come to the Xmas party tonight?"

Me: "Merry Christmas, but no."

Sorry buddy that sucks, Good luck finding something.

Hmmm. They did not downsize but replaced you? Is this a relative of the boss or something?

Sorry to hear that.

No
make them decide and in writing.

They can certainly fire you, but force them to lay you off (and reduction in hours can count)

Laid off gets unemployment, fired or stuck in limbo doesn't.

get it in writing.

Did they half ass fire you and let you keep your access to their servers and network?  They sound like some real winners.  

Well... hate to say it but it sounds like you weren't what they wanted.

It happens.

you werent stealing stuff and refused to install AV gear at your bosses place?

bummer

Make them give it to you in writing that your lay offed, replaced. File for unemployement do cash gigs, buy more ammo at the states expense... I dont know where I got that from.

Wow.. sorry to hear that.  Sometimes management isn't the brightest, ya know?


Company I used to work for called an all-hands meeting one morning.  Made sure *everybody* was going to be there.  During the meeting they said there were going to be some staff adjustments and also let it out that the unix admins would be training their replacements over the coming weeks.  After that was said, almost as if on-cue, the unix admins packed up and walked out of the room.  Management assumed that they were just mad and would walk it off.  Instead, what they did was go back to their desks, change the root passwords on all the servers, deleted their personal id's from it, cleaned out their desks and left.

After waiting around 3 weeks to finally be able to bill a customer again (we normally did a few million in billing per day), management hopefully learned to never do stupid stuff like that again.  Several of the admins were running cron jobs under their own ids, so lots of stuff quit working that first night.

I can relate with ya.

I got laid off over the phone while on Christmas break several years ago. The boss called me on Dec 27th and said not to come back to work after the first.

It sucks.

Yep, really not a good idea to fuck people that have skills to get another job in a week.  

This too shall pass...hang in there.

I got laid off on Christmas Eve one time.  It was awful, but not for me.  I hated the job anyway.  The guy laying people off was almost in tears by the end of it.  I was one of the last to get it that day, and he'd been laying people off all day.  I was out of a job and even I felt sorry for the guy.  They shouldn't have made the guy do an 8 hour day of laying people off on Christmas Eve.  It was bullshit.  I had another job inside of an hour, I didn't even make it out of the building.  I made sure he knew that before I left.  I like to think it made his day at least a little better.

If you didn't file for UI today, do it on Friday.

Edit:  You might even be able to file on-line right now.  Do it.

I'm sorry to hear that, man.

Sorry to hear this.  Sure is a shitty way to find out.

Good luck in getting your next job.

HH

Don't some States have laws against doing that kind of thing as it is company property/systems/whatever that were messed with?

This is why my entire networks documentation is stored in my brain and my brain alone

Go work for somebody that gives a shit about people.

Fuck these Assholes. It's disgusting what they did to you.

And this was in 1999, when IT jobs were paying *really* well leading up to Y2K.  I'm sure those unix admins made at least another 20% over what they were already taking in.

It is always amazing to me how management thinks they can do without the IT staff that make everything run.  Another company I worked for told its network admins (5 of them) that they didn't need them anymore since everything was now setup and running.  They were gone for 1 day when they started having problems.  4 of the admins already had other job offers by the time my company got back with them.  The 5th guy told them he'd only come back if they'd pay him $250/hr.  After 2 more days of being down they told him they'd do it.  BTW, this was in 1997, so 250/hr was *really* good money.  He was there for a year and 1/2 before they got enough staff together they could fire him.  At least he made enough during that time he could take a couple years of vacation if he wanted.

Bizarre?

That really sucks. Sorry guy. Hope you find something else soon.

Sorry to hear about your recent job status guys.

These things happen...........now don't do anything rash........................ be calm and extremely professional....................................this is of the utmost importance........ you don't want to appear upset or vengefull......................remember the wife and children....................................don't allow yourself to react foolishly like you're a victim....i...............................t's just a fact of life that takes place regardless of how well you perform at your job...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Do all these things and then............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... HUNT THE MOTHER-FUCKER DOWN AND KILL HIM!!!!!

These fucking pricks need to understand that fucking over the hard working people is not acceptable!!!!!

yep, half fired... i have all my access... and no i'm not going to fuck with anything. period.

fucking them will be when they want me to do "one of those projects" a few weeks down the line and i'm suddenly unavailable and they miss their deadline.

I would say 250 an hr is good pay. Shit man, that's almost half a mil before taxes if you only work a 40hr work week, every week, all year.

Yep, he hosed them, and IMO, they had it coming.

This same company was horrible about paying low wages b/c they were the only IT shop for miles and miles around (think just north of Sioux City, IA), so they had the locals under their thumb.  They only paid good wages to IT when it meant they couldn't get stuff done otherwise, and most of the time, they'd only pay the wages AFTER the person was gone and they realized they'd screwed up.  For instance, before I left that company I told my manager my pay was about 30% under industry average for what I was doing and that it needed to come up in 6 months or I'd be out of there.


Well, at 6 months, there was no raise, but he did "do me a favor" and put me in a higher pay bracket so I'd have an easier time getting a raise (thanks a lot).  In other words, he did nothing.  So, I started looking.  Within 2 weeks I'd lined up a job in Ohio for close to double what I was making there ($65K vs $35K) doing the same thing, and with much better benefits.  Given that I didn't want to be mean about it, I told him I needed to talk to him.  

So, one morning we sat down and I showed him my offer, and said I needed him to meet me half-way ($52K, which was still way under average) in order for me to stay.  He said he couldn't do it, so I handed him my 2-weeks notice already printed out.  Since I was their only configuration management guy who built their developer's code and sent it to QC and Production, he asked me what he thought he was supposed to do with me gone.  I basically told him it wasn't my problem anymore.

After I left I found out that about a month went by with them not being able to follow procedures and release code into QC and Prod.  They did put some emergency fixes in, but weren't sure how to rebuild it/tag it, so it became quite a mess with developers not knowing what to work from.  After a couple weeks of that, they brought in two PVCS Version Manager consultants, each of which were paid $175/hr + expenses, and they flew them back and forth each week.  They were there for around a year before they trained somebody to replace them.  


The kicker:  They could have paid me for 13 years at $52K for what they paid these two guys just in an hourly rate for a year, and then when the bozos left they had locked down the version control system so tight that developers couldn't even add new files, much less promote stuff.

That necessitated a call from a buddy who still worked there to ask me to help break the security on the app.  I told him this was his freebie and any other calls after this would cost him, so in a few minutes I had him into the app as an admin and he was good to go.

It's hilarious to google earth that place I used to work and see their huge parking lot completely empty.  I guess that manager really did me a favor in helping me to bail before they completely screwed up and I got laid off years later, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't smile a bit when I found out later on what happened after I left regarding their code.

sorry dude, if that is the way they do bizzness then they did you a favor, fuck'em.

There was a social worker where I work fired yesterday. Three freakin' weeks before her TWO YEAR probation was up and she would have been permanent. And, what two days before Christmas. Apparently, she said something that the higher ups got wind of and she was out the door. Never worked with her, but heard she was pretty good at her job.

This is why you keep your mouth SHUT until the day after.  

You work for fucking assholes.

PWNED!!

Sorry I know its a shitty deal, but seriously that has got to be the worst luck story I've read here this year.  Good thing you didn't get that car.

A few co-workers were let go last Friday.  It's never easy, but this time of year makes it that much worse.

Hope you find something else, soon.

I worked for a bank, just finished their largest Merger ever, they had bought a small bank in the northwest. The "project group" the ones that oversaw the mergers was giving their kickoff meeting for this banks conversion. The Conference call for that was the strangest I've ever been on, right there over the speaker phone I listened to this entire group get shitcanned. One minute they are giving me contact info in Seattle, the next a guy walks into their conference room in Atlanta and sez "This program is canceled, everyone in here is released from the company as of now, your packages and separation info are on your desk, pick them up as you leave, women may get their purses, other than that we will pack and send you personal items to your home." What I really got a kick out of was this one girl that always gave me lots of shit had just bought a Range Rover the day before.

Considering what they could have done, this nothing.

As for the OP, you boss is a Flaming Monkey's Ass for screwing your Christmas that way. I really am sorry to hear what happened. I hope that your have good luck in the coming days, and find a good job soon.

Damn, my cousin was shown the door today because the voters replaced his boss. The incoming boss didn't like him, and Merry Christmas! Nice timing I thought...My cousin did call me and tell me he knew it was coming, so he already had something else lined up.

Your company has no idea how unemployment works.

At least you get a free ride out of them for 6 months.

Tell him to FUCK OFF and report his words to the division of unemployment !POS

Damn, I thought eating boogers out of a dead mans nose and asking for seconds was cold!!!

And these employers like this wonder why people flip and shoot up the office and old co-workers.

Well when he calls you for one of those "Special Projects" just tell him "Fuck you very much but i'm busy then."

Naw, the worst luck goes something like this. You get fired from a job that fired you for getting a 103 temp with blood poisoning, you probably got from their clientele, them being drug addicts and all.

However you planned to leave anyway, so you blow $5000 dollars to go to CDL school, have to wait two months with no income because the companies want an updated Sleep Study. You finally land a job with a company that you are unfortunatlty the only witness to a sexual harrassment situation. so your trainer who has 1.5 million accident free miles has been there for 15 years and invites all the high management types come hunitng at his place every fall.

So this guy with all the right friends in high management says "I know your gonna tell what you know if asked(Which i never once hinted i would) so i'm gogin to make sure you do not make it through training.

Now a dismissal or firing is Bad JuJu on the DAC, the document truckers live or die by as far as getting jobs.

So to keep mine clean and having no other recourse since the fucker was gogin to see i got fired from training i quit to protect my record which was perfect as far as driving and not being terminated.

Just in time for the Economy to shit the bed!! Now i am jobless, can't collect un employment due to quitting, have been so for two months and have to sell guns just to live.

If something does not break on my behalf in the next three weeks or so, i will juts be asking myself "Stainless or Parkerized" for breakfast. Of course that decision might be determined by what ever gun i hadn't sold yet because i will be living in my car which BTW will be immobilized by my insurance lapsing.

Thats bad luck!!!

Typed as i sit here looking at the non existent christmas tree, with the non existent presents i could not get anybody.

The ONLY reason i still have internet is i i need it hoping somebody somewhere will need a driver in the next truck three weeks.