Dumb
10th May 2011, 01:36
On my job, that is.
The company I work for has grown very rapidly over the last couple years. My department is overworked and overcrowded; as a result, I was the first person in the history of my department who was expected to learn the job without even working in the same office as the rest of the department. For my first five months with the company, the supervisor who was supposed to train me would see me maybe once a week if I was lucky. Not that it's the supervisor's fault; she was just always slammed with work (and still is).
However, unsurprisingly, it's taken me longer to learn the job than it took for past employees who've: (a) been in the same office, (b) had somebody work with them on a regular basis, and (c) were already familiar with the company database from working in other departments. Dissatisfied with my progress, my supervisor and the department manager started holding biweekly closed-door meetings with me to go over every mistake I'd made over the preceding weeks. (Bear in mind that this started in February, after five months and zero job feedback).
I immediately cut back on errors, and the report for March was literally 100% perfect - not a single error. April wasn't as good as March, but it was better than any other month. Working on about two or three assignments per day, I made errors on five items. Three were ticky-tack things that involved paperwork, and were easily corrected (the type of thing that other employees get away with routinely because the paperwork errors were that inconsequential). Another error was a mistake I made while the department was rushing to beat a deadline; the last arose because a buyer in the company gave me the wrong information.
After that - my best two months of work, in which one month was perfect even by my manager's standards - the department manager gave me a written warning for "decline in performance." In this company, a written warning comes right before a final warning (and after a verbal warning, which the manager skipped over).
Frustrating, to say the least.
The message I get is two-fold: (a) my best isn't good enough, so there's no point in trying; and (b) the manager has lost patience with me, and is trying to get rid of me. I say point (a) because I'm getting ready to leave anyway (I could read the writing on the wall as early as February); I say point B because of a few statements the manager has made that contradict what others have told me, and that contradict what she herself told me before - and in every instance, what she's saying now makes me sound worse.
It's crap like this that made me become a Marxist.
The company I work for has grown very rapidly over the last couple years. My department is overworked and overcrowded; as a result, I was the first person in the history of my department who was expected to learn the job without even working in the same office as the rest of the department. For my first five months with the company, the supervisor who was supposed to train me would see me maybe once a week if I was lucky. Not that it's the supervisor's fault; she was just always slammed with work (and still is).
However, unsurprisingly, it's taken me longer to learn the job than it took for past employees who've: (a) been in the same office, (b) had somebody work with them on a regular basis, and (c) were already familiar with the company database from working in other departments. Dissatisfied with my progress, my supervisor and the department manager started holding biweekly closed-door meetings with me to go over every mistake I'd made over the preceding weeks. (Bear in mind that this started in February, after five months and zero job feedback).
I immediately cut back on errors, and the report for March was literally 100% perfect - not a single error. April wasn't as good as March, but it was better than any other month. Working on about two or three assignments per day, I made errors on five items. Three were ticky-tack things that involved paperwork, and were easily corrected (the type of thing that other employees get away with routinely because the paperwork errors were that inconsequential). Another error was a mistake I made while the department was rushing to beat a deadline; the last arose because a buyer in the company gave me the wrong information.
After that - my best two months of work, in which one month was perfect even by my manager's standards - the department manager gave me a written warning for "decline in performance." In this company, a written warning comes right before a final warning (and after a verbal warning, which the manager skipped over).
Frustrating, to say the least.
The message I get is two-fold: (a) my best isn't good enough, so there's no point in trying; and (b) the manager has lost patience with me, and is trying to get rid of me. I say point (a) because I'm getting ready to leave anyway (I could read the writing on the wall as early as February); I say point B because of a few statements the manager has made that contradict what others have told me, and that contradict what she herself told me before - and in every instance, what she's saying now makes me sound worse.
It's crap like this that made me become a Marxist.