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Take my Thursday--please
Jul. 22nd, 2005 02:55 pmI have never liked Thursday--they have always been the Bad Day in my week--possibly from my days in grade school, when it was sandwiched between Brownies/Girl Scouts and Fridays. This one's going in the record books.
First, I let myself get incensed enough about something I'd read that I ended up starting (and continuing, unfortunately) a Dramatic Episode in an online community. *hangs head in shame* I really do know better, but that didn't stop me; in fact, it simply seemed to fuel the fire of my indignation, so that I rushed my original shit-disturbing response before I lost my nerve. *headdesk*
As that was entertaining folks around the world (well, one presumes people were reading from every corner of our fair globe), I got a call from HR at the med school where I work: The world-famous surgeon* who hired me last January to be his one and only laboratory person, and then dumped me three weeks ago because I didn't meet his standards for said position , advised the departmental HR liaison that I should be looking at Tech I positions because I'm not a good candidate for jobs needing more responsibility and independence, which means either of the two higher levels of Research Tech at the university. We are to realize the fact that I've been successfully doing what I do for over three decades, with never a poor employee evaluation (quite the contrary, in most cases) is some kind of inexplicable fluke.
Mind you, he had spent all of perhaps ten hours face-to-face with me in the five months I worked for him**, no more than a couple of those hours (max! Yeah. Really.) actually observing my work and no time at all giving me feedback about how he thought I was doing, but that slowed him down not one bit. I was failing, and it was "better for both of us" if I pursued the proverbial "other opportunities." He did ask if my previous boss (upon whose saintly head may a multitude of blessings fall!) had any money to support me yet (no such luck)--I think that was supposed to be "concern."
He figures he did me a favor by cutting the cord before I utterly failed and he had to fire me for real. Technically, what he did was invoke the probation period, and since my last job disappeared because the big boss lost his clout, and thus his funding from NIH, to Alzheimers, I will be allowed to try to land another job at the med school. The catch is that I have to actually be IN this hypothetical new lab on or before August 14 or 15***, or I become a new hire, losing months of accumulated sick leave and the dependent tuition benefit for which Wash U is famous (well, around HERE it's famous). That tuition benefit is all the college help I can afford to give my son, and I was excited to find out they'd let the old BJH employees have it based on their years of service at BJ, as well as those at WUMS (which was a change in policy from when we actually "moved" from BJH to WUMS two years ago--normally, you'd have to be there seven years before the dependent benefit takes effect).
Anyway, he's told HR I'm no good at what I've been doing for 35 years. Not that I wasn't a good fit for his actual needs, because he really needed a post-doctoral fellow rather than a technician, not that he didn't have the time to actually run his own lab--that I am incompetent to be considered for anything better than entry level jobs. And in the meantime, my window of possibly opportunity shrinks while they sit on the applications I've already sent in. No lab has seen one yet.
Lovely day, right? Don't worry--it gets better.
About 3 o'clock, one of my husband's supervisors called--he'd fallen and they had paramedics there, getting ready to take him to hospital. Turns out he'd passed out on the dock walking to his office. We did the usual stint in the ER--wait and bleed into little tubes and listen to the machine they had him hooked up to while we wondered what they were learning about why he was there. Turns out that he could have gone home if his kidneys were doing OK (for a value of OK that includes the fact they've been officially failing for over a year, of course). Unfortunately, the numbers came back ugly; probably heat and dehydration (which his current cocktail of meds tends to make worse), but they wanted to be sure, so they kept him to throw fluids in him and check the numbers again in the morning. Poor, poor frog.
Tell me--is it Friday yet?
*No, really! He got his name in the papers a couple months ago as part of a team of doctors treating an international charity patient.
**There was a young, unpaid-for-labwork, MD-PhD actually running things for a while, but he left in June for a clinical rotation in Ireland that will last six months.
***not quite sure if they start counting the 30 days on the last day I was officially working (he spotted me two weeks--wasn't that sweet of him?) or the last day of the pay period, which is a Saturday.
The drama llama comes to call
First, I let myself get incensed enough about something I'd read that I ended up starting (and continuing, unfortunately) a Dramatic Episode in an online community. *hangs head in shame* I really do know better, but that didn't stop me; in fact, it simply seemed to fuel the fire of my indignation, so that I rushed my original shit-disturbing response before I lost my nerve. *headdesk*
Fun and games with job loss
As that was entertaining folks around the world (well, one presumes people were reading from every corner of our fair globe), I got a call from HR at the med school where I work: The world-famous surgeon* who hired me last January to be his one and only laboratory person, and then dumped me three weeks ago because I didn't meet his standards for said position , advised the departmental HR liaison that I should be looking at Tech I positions because I'm not a good candidate for jobs needing more responsibility and independence, which means either of the two higher levels of Research Tech at the university. We are to realize the fact that I've been successfully doing what I do for over three decades, with never a poor employee evaluation (quite the contrary, in most cases) is some kind of inexplicable fluke.
Mind you, he had spent all of perhaps ten hours face-to-face with me in the five months I worked for him**, no more than a couple of those hours (max! Yeah. Really.) actually observing my work and no time at all giving me feedback about how he thought I was doing, but that slowed him down not one bit. I was failing, and it was "better for both of us" if I pursued the proverbial "other opportunities." He did ask if my previous boss (upon whose saintly head may a multitude of blessings fall!) had any money to support me yet (no such luck)--I think that was supposed to be "concern."
He figures he did me a favor by cutting the cord before I utterly failed and he had to fire me for real. Technically, what he did was invoke the probation period, and since my last job disappeared because the big boss lost his clout, and thus his funding from NIH, to Alzheimers, I will be allowed to try to land another job at the med school. The catch is that I have to actually be IN this hypothetical new lab on or before August 14 or 15***, or I become a new hire, losing months of accumulated sick leave and the dependent tuition benefit for which Wash U is famous (well, around HERE it's famous). That tuition benefit is all the college help I can afford to give my son, and I was excited to find out they'd let the old BJH employees have it based on their years of service at BJ, as well as those at WUMS (which was a change in policy from when we actually "moved" from BJH to WUMS two years ago--normally, you'd have to be there seven years before the dependent benefit takes effect).
Anyway, he's told HR I'm no good at what I've been doing for 35 years. Not that I wasn't a good fit for his actual needs, because he really needed a post-doctoral fellow rather than a technician, not that he didn't have the time to actually run his own lab--that I am incompetent to be considered for anything better than entry level jobs. And in the meantime, my window of possibly opportunity shrinks while they sit on the applications I've already sent in. No lab has seen one yet.
Lovely day, right? Don't worry--it gets better.
Excitement of a froggy kind
About 3 o'clock, one of my husband's supervisors called--he'd fallen and they had paramedics there, getting ready to take him to hospital. Turns out he'd passed out on the dock walking to his office. We did the usual stint in the ER--wait and bleed into little tubes and listen to the machine they had him hooked up to while we wondered what they were learning about why he was there. Turns out that he could have gone home if his kidneys were doing OK (for a value of OK that includes the fact they've been officially failing for over a year, of course). Unfortunately, the numbers came back ugly; probably heat and dehydration (which his current cocktail of meds tends to make worse), but they wanted to be sure, so they kept him to throw fluids in him and check the numbers again in the morning. Poor, poor frog.
Tell me--is it Friday yet?
*No, really! He got his name in the papers a couple months ago as part of a team of doctors treating an international charity patient.
**There was a young, unpaid-for-labwork, MD-PhD actually running things for a while, but he left in June for a clinical rotation in Ireland that will last six months.
***not quite sure if they start counting the 30 days on the last day I was officially working (he spotted me two weeks--wasn't that sweet of him?) or the last day of the pay period, which is a Saturday.
