I was too honest in my quarterly review.
It's more of a "why should you have been fired from your job?", but I hope you'll forgive me.

I worked for a now-bankrupt part of the Public-Private Partnership responsible for cocking up London's Underground network. Let's call them Metro... Web.

It was a terrible, terrible place. Two floors of very high-up office tower were entirely devoted to creating files, counting files, pushing around files, amalgamating files and filing files on all the bits of the underground that didn't work: knackered bridges, tunnels about to cave in, rickety platforms, leaky sewers, loose rails... you get the picture. There were probably about 50 people devoted to this task, and around 30 000 files (yes, there are _that_ many problems with the underground infrastructure).

This was balanced by about 8 people whose actual job it was to get down the tunnels at night (when the tube stops running and they turn the power off), inspect said problems and oversee the repairs. They were horribly underpaid and seen by a lot of the office staff as the lowest rung on the ladder: after all they had to get their hands dirty. It was a classic management-heavy case of too many chiefs and not enough indians.

While at first I thought my job there was a cushy number - I was actually told to sit at my desk and try and look busy for my first week while they tried to think of something for me to do - after a while, it was truly awful. Morale was depressingly low; there's only so much bureaucracy a claustrophobic office can tolerate, even if it's self-generated. Any email or internet access was closely watched, even though there was painfully little else to do while at one's desk.

I tried: I came up with more efficient ways of dealing with reports, I actually read the files and started eliminating duplicates; I worked overtime to archive old files and I even found a way to more or less automate my given job by creating a couple of very fancy Excel files.

My first quarterly review finally came around, five months after I'd started working there. I was given a couple of sheets of paper with the usual banal "how have you progressed" questions and asked to scan them and email them to HR once done.

(Another example of how the place worked: HR was on the floor below, where they would print out my scanned, emailed forms and pore over them before giving them to a data entry clerk to read and type my responses into a spreadsheet.)

I was pretty fed up with working there, it had been a bad week and I rather foolishly gave some truthful answers to their questions. I described in a lot of detail how I'd contributed to the company while I worked there; I highlighted some areas in which I felt I needed training; I pinpointed parts of the department that could be improved - all well so far. Unfortunately I also let slip that I'd spent my first week trying to "look busy" and explained just how much of my day job was now completely automated by a self-written chunk of Visual Basic Excel geekery.

Two days later, when called to discuss my responses with a dense, cheap-suit-clad manager and two very humourless HR drones, I realised I'd shot myself in the foot. By the end of the meeting I knew I'd be leaving that day: I was asked what my favourite part of the job was and, after a long think while looking out of the window, I could only reply "the view."

I was told I was no longer required later that week.


Length? From the 34th floor, by my repeated, desperate calculations it would have taken about 3.9 seconds...
( sanityclause is waiting until, Thu 9 Aug 2007, 20:01, Reply)