My twenty-five year old granddaughter FaceTimed me last night. I was thrilled to see she was calling. That is until I accepted the call.
She was crying. This can’t be good.
The first words out of her mouth were, “I got fired.”
I’m thinking to myself, how do you get fired from a job that you just started a week ago?
Bella is my oldest grandchild, is married, and lives in a very small town a couple of hours away. She is very articulate, artistic, tenacious, and private.
Her previous job was in a city about a half-hour from her home and recent management changes encouraged her to look for another job.
This new position was about two minutes from her home. It was in the medical field, she went through several phases of interviews, and was thrilled when they offered her the job.
The salary was the same, PTO was non-existent, she’d have to work for a year to get any type of vacation days, no benefits but her husband has her covered, and she has Fridays off.
I left her alone last week, meaning I didn’t call her to see how things were going, but I did send a text message wishing her luck and telling her to contact me when she can.
One of her concerns was learning medical coding but she found a book online that would help her. It was $200.
Now, if you only knew how frugal Bella is, she would never buy that book.
So instead she was writing down the codes every day at work and in the evenings she was making ‘flash cards’ to take to work to learn the medical codes.
She also read their company handbook cover to cover so there would be no surprises. Example: the company handbook stated that there can be no visible tattoos and because she has some, she went to buy new clothes to make sure they were always covered.
During our conversation last night she was telling me through tears that she liked the job, thought she was doing a great job, everybody seemed friendly, etc. Then out of the blue on Monday night she receives an email from her boss telling her they are going in another direction and are letting her go.
Her husband came home from his second-shift job and found her crying. She cried herself to sleep and the next morning her husband went to the clinic to retrieve a couple of items Bella left at work and proceeded to tell her boss that he needs to provide her with a better reason than ‘you’re going in another direction’.
So yesterday afternoon she received another email stating that they are a family type office and that she didn’t fit in. I don’t know the exact wording but he also said that she appeared to not be interested in sharing things about herself when the other gals asked her.
Bella explained to me that they asked her lots of questions and at one point one of the questions was if she was planning on having children.
Personally I think that’s gray area but it didn’t come from management, it was girl talk…the other girls in the office chatting and trying to find out about their new co-worker.
Her reply was that it was a personal question and she keeps her personal life private. Apparently they didn’t like that answer, reported back to her boss that she ‘wasn’t sharing’, and he mentioned that in his ‘cowards-way-out’ email explaining why they were letting her go.
I understand co-workers wanting to find out about the ‘new kid on the block’, but Bella said she felt that they were firing too many questions at her and she wanted to keep her nose to the grindstone and learn this new job. That’s what I love about my over-achieving granddaughter!
Trying to stay neutral while listening to her story through lots of tears, I mentioned that she may have come across a little snobby when she told them that she preferred to keep her personal life private. She said it was said in a very professional manner. I knew no matter what I said after this, she was going to stick to her guns and not admit that just maybe she had a little part in how she was being perceived by her co-workers.
So her first day of unemployment was spent crying, sleeping on and off, searching online for another job, getting two appointments for interviews in totally unrelated fields than she’s ever worked, and with my encouragement to put this behind her and move forward. I’d be willing to bet my 401k that she stayed up all night, cried, she scoured the internet for another job.
I love that girl to death and wish I could help her in some way, but she has to work this out for herself.
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