I’ve been fired from an assortment of jobs in my life.
I was very young the first time. Barely eighteen years old, a wide eyed and callow boy who regarded the world as fair.
I know. Ha. Ha. Ha.
The position was a temporary, and required that I spend two of the three summer months performing data entry for some corporation in the downtown area of my hometown. My original thought was that the temporary job would act as a “foot in the door” for me, as well as being a resume enhancer. But I came to abhor the job after the first few days, and it wasn’t much longer before my disdain was reflected in my performance. The data entry was boring and rote, a sieve for draining the soul of hope and optimism. I often abandoned my work station before my shift ended.
Although a byproduct of substandard training and office ennui, too many data entry errors rankled the nerves of the micromanager who sat just behind me. The cranky, white haired, old bitty boss of three weeks decided against waiting until the position had run its course. She dismissed me as soon as I arrived to work on a Wednesday morning. I wasn’t too fazed by being let go though, as I was on my way to matriculating into Boston University during the upcoming fall.
The next two firings took place in what I consider to be my nascent years of adulthood. They were ten years apart, when I was twenty-three and thirty-three years old respectively. These dismissals were more impactful than the first firing because they’d been executed after I’d graduated from a university — I’ve graduated from three in total — and began life as an adult. I had loans that I needed to repay, rent and mortgage, a car payment, and aging parents to support.
With each firing in adulthood, I had been told that I was a worthless and irredeemable failure who did not belong. The fallout from those experiences were precipitous descents into depression, a dangerous predicament for a man who’d been diagnosed as bipolar. I was fortunate to have had family in the vicinity to cushion the fall.
When I wasn’t being fired from jobs, I was struggling to maintain a tenuous grip on the others. I could attribute the lion’s share of my difficulties in this area to bipolar depression. I’ve had to spend fourteen of my forty-two years on this earth absorbed in a fight against myself, which of course made concentrating on my work tasks more difficult. When overcome by the depression, mania, and paranoia, I ended up quitting jobs without warning or regret.
*****
After I was fired from my job as a sixth-grade math teacher in 2011, I enrolled in graduate school, received my master’s degree in December 2012, and began working at the hospital laboratory in June 2013. My dad was admitted to the hospital a short time later with pernicious lymphoma and kidney disease ailments. And after four years of blissful mental stability, I’d relapsed once again. I remained a diligent worker despite my troubles, was well liked by the other employees, and kept my shadowy side from taking over. However, I struggled to maintain a solid grasp on my job responsibilities because my mind was occupied with destructive thoughts. It wasn’t long — September 2013 — before the supervisor and I had a pivotal sit down.
She smiled and said, “We, the managers, have been talking, and we think that you might be better served in another department. What do you think?”
I exhaled a sigh of relief and gratitude, as I’d been convinced that I was on my way to being fired for the fourth time.
“Oh okay,” I stammered. “Where am I going?”
“Just across the street,” said the supervisor. “Don’t throw away those scrubs. You’ll still be working in the laboratory. Another part of it anyway.”
I let out an imperceptible sigh. I would have preferred to not have to work in another laboratory.
“When do I start?”
“Right away actually. You’ll be working with Denise and her crew down. They are a nice group of people. Hard working. I think you’ll fit.”
I went down to Denise’s office a few days later to begin my orientation.
“I’m so excited that you’re down here,” Denise said.
I looked at Denise sideways. I’d heard the same spiel from the principal of the charter school about three years before. I’m so excited for you and for us, is what she’d said during orientation in the middle of July 2010. Three weeks later I was sitting in her office, being fired by the CEO of the school. The principal had been sitting in the chair next to me, tears sliding down her face. She didn’t say a word as the sociopath belittled me by insulting my intelligence.
“And I’m ready to get started,” I said.
Dad was admitted into the hospital again near the end of September, where he stayed for observation and treatment. His kidneys were failing him, and the cancer was increasing its rate of consumption of healthy blood cells. In October, after cycling through all of their options for treatment, the doctors approached my mother and me with a plan. They were going to flood my dad’s system with what the doctor described as a “nuclear bomb”, a shit ton of chemotherapy fluid that would be funneled into his body through a tube.
Dad was wheezing when he called me the next morning because his lungs were filled with fluid. He was transferred to another hospital unit, where he suffered a massive heart attack. Dad was interred a few days in the ICU, and then transferred to another hospital, the last in which he would ever stay.
By late October I was visiting my father at the hospital in the evenings, went home to sleep for a few hours, and then drove to work at 7:00 the next morning. Rinse. Lather. Repeat. Though my mind was occupied by my father’s health troubles while also being thrown askew by my psychosis, I continued to do my best at the job. The other technicians — all of whom were below age twenty-five — knew that I was working hard. But this section of the laboratory was chaotic; the training was distilled into chasing down more experienced workers to ask questions, and I didn’t get along to well with my boss — she literally shouted at me once after I let her know that I was ending my shift.
My dad died of cancer and kidney failure the day after my middle sister’s birthday.
Not too long after my father passed, I began visiting the client services department, an area of the hospital that was comprised of five women of color. The gregarious ladies seemed to welcome my lumbering presence and we became more than just work acquaintances. In February 2014, a position opened up in the department and I was encouraged by the client services supervisor to apply. I did and was hired.
Although I was the less experienced male in the department, I was quickly able to prove my worth to my new teammates. My arrival was like slipping a hand into a perfect form fitting glove. The onboarding period — there was a training period! — was deliberate and organized, the supervisor asked for my input on how to improve the department, and everyone made sure that I was included in all decisions that were made. With the help of a new health regimen, my paranoia and anxiety began to dissipate. Moreover, my experience as a laboratory technician contributed to my becoming an immediate point of reference for the other members of the team.
******
When people think of the typical customer service representative, they picture an irascible, disinterested, low skilled individual with very little education. That is of course an untrue generalization of the profession. Of the five individuals who comprised our client services department, all had at least some college education; two had bachelor’s degrees, one had a cosmetology certification, and I had a master’s degree in health services. One of my goals in becoming a client services representative was to change the hospital’s perception of our team.
The problem for us was that we hadn’t been immersed in science and laboratory environments before we started at the hospital, while our overarching responsibility was to answer laboratory inquiries. Knowing this fact, I decided that I was going to perform a research project. I scoured the laboratory websites for information on the seven esoteric laboratories that we were responsible for supporting, and then created a curriculum for current and incoming employees.
As the subsequent years passed, members of the department would resign before being replaced with fresh faces. None of these new employees had a scientific or laboratory background, which didn’t matter, because they received comprehensive training from me — my goal in training new employees is to make sure that no new member of the team is unprepared to answer a phone call from a patient or a client. Using verbiage that fooled clients into thinking that they were talking to laboratory technicians, the new representatives were competent enough to respond to the phone calls in record time. The bosses noticed the improvement of the department, and I was rewarded with my first real promotion at the ripe old age of forty.
As I signed my name on the dotted line I whispered, “Finally.”
******
In late summer 2018, the end of the fiscal year, the hospital implemented a traumatic and stealth culling of a significant percentage of poor souls — new employees, managers, directors, etc. — from all across the hospital. I came away from the bloodshed with my head still intact, although frightened for what seemed to be an uncertain future for the hospital. The executives tried to assure the remaining employees that they were safe, but I would not relax until I was given verifiable proof of the company’s stability. So, I would perform a lukewarm search for new employment in the meantime.
Exactly one year after the carnage, I was provided the reassurance I needed. The hospital was“in the black” once again, a prompt for me to end my lackadaisical search for new employment. Two weeks later I was sitting thorough an event celebrating tenured employees, luxuriating in sweet comfort.
*****
There are thousands of advice columns in which the authors say to leave a job if you become too comfortable. It’s salient advice for people who’ve never been fired from job, quit a job due to harassment, or navigated through life while suffering with a mental illness. Before I started working at the hospital in 2013, the longest I’d spent working for an employer during my first thirty-six years of life was eighteen months at the pharmaceutical company in New Jersey. It was an interminable temporary job. I never was offered healthcare, nor allowed a whiff of a permanent position.
After I was ran off from the pharmaceutical company in late 2003, I bounced around to more than a dozen companies in the ensuing ten years; an itinerant professional existence. Apart from the teaching job at the charter school from which I was fired in summer 2010, I’d resigned from every single employer in the span of those ten years. When in the act of resigning from a company, I was polite, deferential, and dishonest. I couldn’t tell the employer I was leaving because I never felt secure within the environs of the company.
I even quit my first teaching job after receiving word from the principal — she’d threatened to fire me at the beginning of the school year — of my license renewal.
“Congratulations on completing a successful first year of teaching,” the principal wrote.
Yeah, that’s right.
I had proof of my success in writing, but I opted for resigning my position from the elementary school because I was afraid that the principal who’d threatened to fire me at the beginning of the previous school year would make good on her threat during the next school year.
I’d also been handed the receipts by the charter school principal, and assumed that I was safe for the next school year. That was until I was called into the CEO’s office a week after I’d stuffed the evaluations, almost all of which attested to my skills as a teacher, into my desk drawer.
The trauma from the charter school stayed with me in the months after I’d been thrown to the curb, forgotten like I was last week’s garbage. The failure was like a stench, and it would take a while for it to rub off of me. At age thirty-three, I knew I needed a break from working, and enrolled in graduate school, with the knowledge that I would be incurring an additional mountain of debt that I would need to repay.
*****
It’s been six years since I started a perilous journey as a hospital laboratory employee. I now know the job almost too well, as I am able to juggle an assortment of responsibilities without having to exert too much cognitive effort. So, I am able to work on my memoirs for about an hour during the work day, usually during my lunch breaks and at the end of the shift when the phones are slow. And I’m pulling in more than fifty-thousand dollars a year, the most money I’ve ever made in my life, while fulfilling my father’s dreams for me. I sport untucked shirts and wear tennis shoes to work every day, and I know that I won’t get any shit from my boss — he’s new and he needs me to help him look good.
Should I put more effort into finding a job that affords me more salary and stature? I am in possession of three separate degrees/certifications; experienced teaching students in a traditional classroom and facilitating onboarding sessions for adults in the corporate world; and I can rely on references from co-workers who could vouch for my character and intellect.
However, switching jobs could lead to changes that I’m not ready to confront. What if I have to switch health insurance carriers? I’d have to severe my relationship with my current psychiatrist, a woman with whom I’ve spent four long years building a rapport and trust. How long would it take to cultivate productive relationships with skeptical co-workers? What if I come to despise the employer and my co-workers, and vice versa? And what happens if my employer, perhaps a sociopath who is cognizant of at-will employment laws, decides that he/she wants to fire me for a flimsy reason? How would I react to the firing?
My pulse rate increases as I cycle through all of the above scenarios in my mind.
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