Return of the weeb

[Moonface]

@ the spoiler content above:

I know this is stating the obvious but man, that's rough. Did your mother get the back injury at the job itself? I assume not since if she had it would've presumably been covered by her at the time job, and either way if that happened before they terminated you it seems pretty shit on their part to go straight to termination when they would've had some degree of knowledge on things happening around you outside of work. My immediate coworker had her brother pass away this past Spring, and I know if someone in the store dared to make a negative remark to her about it that there's no way she wouldn't retaliate even though she shouldn't under policy, and if the store fired her for that I'd find that ridiculous since yeah, it might break policy but there are circumstances where the human element will take priority over it because people do have limits. My old job in England like pretty much any place doesn't allow employees to physically fight customers, but one time a group of four dudes chased and cornered an employee into the back, which attracted the attention of a few other employees in the back who then physically got involved and helped fight them off the outnumbered employee. Nobody got in trouble for it even though on paper they should because there's an understandable reason the policy wasn't followed. On the slight bright side, if they terminated you then it at least should've meant you could file for unemployment so you could at least maintain some degree of income for a time, compared to just quitting which means you're entirely on your own in terms of money.

I don't really have anything in the way of advice, and I feel this is a pointless thing to ask about because I highly doubt you didn't already consider it, but while I don't know anything of their situation I do recall you having at least one sister (I forget if there's more than the one sibling) so is there anything they've been able to help with?

[ShiraNoMai]

Okay I mean this in the most sincere way possible: I'm happy for you (to see you come back) and I'm sorry that happened to you (your spoilered content).

Genuinely though, I'm sorry to hear it's been quite a time for you over the past year. That's not a stress I wish on anyone, and do hope to hear things improve in the near future. If there's anything we can provide you with, don't hesitate to reach out to Moony or I. It's a rough time for lots of folk right now, and I want to do everything within my power to make things easier for the folks I can reach out to.

[Dragon Lord]

@ the spoiler content above:

I know this is stating the obvious but man, that's rough. Did your mother get the back injury at the job itself? I assume not since if she had it would've presumably been covered by her at the time job, and either way if that happened before they terminated you it seems pretty shit on their part to go straight to termination when they would've had some degree of knowledge on things happening around you outside of work. My immediate coworker had her brother pass away this past Spring, and I know if someone in the store dared to make a negative remark to her about it that there's no way she wouldn't retaliate even though she shouldn't under policy, and if the store fired her for that I'd find that ridiculous since yeah, it might break policy but there are circumstances where the human element will take priority over it because people do have limits. My old job in England like pretty much any place doesn't allow employees to physically fight customers, but one time a group of four dudes chased and cornered an employee into the back, which attracted the attention of a few other employees in the back who then physically got involved and helped fight them off the outnumbered employee. Nobody got in trouble for it even though on paper they should because there's an understandable reason the policy wasn't followed. On the slight bright side, if they terminated you then it at least should've meant you could file for unemployment so you could at least maintain some degree of income for a time, compared to just quitting which means you're entirely on your own in terms of money.

I don't really have anything in the way of advice, and I feel this is a pointless thing to ask about because I highly doubt you didn't already consider it, but while I don't know anything of their situation I do recall you having at least one sister (I forget if there's more than the one sibling) so is there anything they've been able to help with?

We're not sure when or why her injury occurred. I believe it was due to the job, because there was a night when a cutting board fell off of a high shelf and hit her right in the back. The cutting board there were not light either, they were quite heavy. Unfortunately though she did not request to go see a doctor when it happened, which I had told her she needed to do, but she didn't want to "rock the boat" so to speak. But I tried pleading with her that she needed to so it'd be on record because if something bigger comes out of it, then she needed it to be recorded for her own sake. But unfortunately there is no way to prove if that's where her issues originated, but I have a very strong belief that it is. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to avoid accountability for my part in the whole thing. It was not a good move to blow up at my co-worker like I did. I'm not trying to use everything going on in the last year as an excuse for doing it, but rather as the reason as to why I ended up having that moment of weakness that allowed me to do that. Though immediate termination after four years of never getting into any sort of trouble did seem a little overkill to me. I don't see why a written warning wouldn't have sufficed, especially as again, it was not a normal thing for me to do. Unfortunately corporations (at least in America) don't care about the "human" element. You're not a human to them, you're supposed to be a machine whose only purpose in life is to make more money for the already rich owners of the company. Although several people think that they just used that as the cover up to fire me, and that the real reason they fired me was because of health issues I was having the last few months with my back, which caused me to miss some significant time from work. I also tired to get workman's comp from them for the injury because it occurred while on the job and my chiropractor believed that it was caused by the conditions of the job. To explain: We had been short staffed for the better part of two years, and most nights we ended up working with only two overnight workers, which means one of us had to do the kitchen by ourselves. Which mean we had to not only keep the hot food stocked up all night, but also had to prepare the entirety of the bakery as well, and have that done by 4 AM at the latest (shift started at 10PM). Now if it was a busy night, trying to frost, box and prepare up to 200-300 donuts was not exactly easy while also keeping their expectations for hot food out all night, and it meant you pretty much had to non-stop run around the kitchen all night in a hurry and a lot of nights we weren't able to take breaks because of this. They also expected use to miraculously get all of the dishes washed as well by 6 AM (which normally included 70% of the dishes from the other two shifts because they rarely ever did their dishes). So this meant a lot of fast turning and twisting, and my chiropractor said that's exactly what caused my back injury. I ended up missing two weeks of work at the time of the injury (ordered off by my chiropractor) and also continued to miss a day here and there when my back was hurting too much. So of course I was like, well I just missed two weeks of work plus had to spend like $300 on appointments, due to an injury caused by working conditions, so I'll submit for worker's comp. Of course it got denied because a company is going to do everything in their power to not take responsibility for anything that happens to their workers. 

Anyways, it might be a bit conspiracy theory-ish, but one of my friends who used to manage for 7-11 (same type of store as I worked at) said that he doesn't believe they fired me for what they say they did, and that it was a cover up to fire me for my health issues/possible retaliation for trying to go after them for worker's comp, and they just conveniently had a "legit" reason to fire me to cover it up. But in the end it doesn't matter because it all comes back to why the hell did I react the way that I did when I never reacted that way to a co-worker trying to harass/taunt me before? That's the most frustrating part of all of this, because I have no idea what came over me in that moment.

The management team there has a history of making light of injuries though. Another incident my mother had happen to her was that she actually got a really bad shock/electrocution from an extension cord that wasn't properly maintained in the kitchen. She ended up having to go to the ER because it effected her heart rate and they (the EMTs) were really concerned about what could happen to her, so they wanted her to get monitored for a few hours by a doctor. The next day she worked after this incident, the first thing the Store Leader says to her when he sees her is, "Good morning, Sparky!" One of your employees almost gets electrocuted by the negligence of your maintenance man (who never got it trouble for this, by the way) and you make a god damn joke out of it? In another incident, a daytime worker in the kitchen who worked the chicken station (who had a history of temper tantrums at work) kicked a knife towards another co-worker, which got lodged in her shoe, and nothing ever happened to that worker though. So there's definitely a lot of favoritism that went on there and I obviously wasn't on the list of favorites, haha.

Though like I said multiple times already, no matter how shitty the management was, regardless of anything else that happened, it all goes back to that one momentary lapse in judgement on my part. If that one split second didn't happen, nothing else would have happened. But I guess to be kind of easy on myself (which is hard for me to do), a human can only take so much bullshit in life before something eventually snaps. Unfortunately for me, my moment of snapping came at the wrong time in the wrong place.

Also about the unemployment, unfortunately for me Minnesota has a statute that if you are terminated under a "violation of company policy", you are automatically denied unemployment. Luckily I did have a decent amount of money in my 401K that I was able to withdraw to keep me afloat for a while, so I am okay financially for now. Which is good because it's proving to be really difficult to reverse my sleep schedule and taking a lot longer than I had hoped, because I'm going to need to be able to get up early in the morning for any job that I can get around here right now (plus it's allowed me to take some time just to get myself back into a decent mindset as well). But in the end this has all been a very harsh reminder that corporations don't care about you, they aren't your friends and all it takes is one little mistake for them to act like you're a stain on their image and to throw you away like yesterday's trash. I busted my ass off there for four years, majority of it under some really awful conditions, and in the end none of that mattered. So for anyone else working for a corporation, just remember to never give them more than the bare minimum of your job, because anything more than that will never be appreciated and won't matter to them in the slightest. Never go above and beyond for them (unless you plan to move up into management, in which case I wish the best for you). 

Okay I mean this in the most sincere way possible: I'm happy for you (to see you come back) and I'm sorry that happened to you (your spoilered content).

Genuinely though, I'm sorry to hear it's been quite a time for you over the past year. That's not a stress I wish on anyone, and do hope to hear things improve in the near future. If there's anything we can provide you with, don't hesitate to reach out to Moony or I. It's a rough time for lots of folk right now, and I want to do everything within my power to make things easier for the folks I can reach out to.

Thank you for the kind words. It's been a bit of a wild year, but it's nice to come back on here and post a bit again. I will be okay in the end. I just needed to vent and it was nice to be able to do that here. I appreciate the kind words from the two of you as well, again, thank you. Unfortunately you are right that it's a rough time for a lot of people, and the job market is absolutely terrible. Even for people who have developed skills and college degrees, finding work is almost impossible. I've spent a considerable amount of time looking through Reddit posts of people looking for work in their fields and seeing IT people who have been unemployed for 18+ months not able to get any jobs in their fields. These people spent years working on their skills, going to college, etc., and now most of them are stuck working dead-end retail jobs because they can't find anything else. 

I've been trying to... find a path in life, because I never went to college and I don't have any developed skills that could get me into any careers. Which is probably been the worst thing coming from this experience -- the realization that I'm stuck where I'm at in life right now. My only options are dead-end, soul-sucking retail jobs, but I don't want to be that 60-year old guy working at Walmart for my 25th year. No offense to people who do work at Walmart, obviously you gotta take a job no matter what it is, and hell I might end up there myself pretty soon. But I would like to do something more with my life than I have thus far, and even though at 35 it's a lot harder to get started some where, I'd like to try. So I've spent a lot of time looking into different fields, seeing what kind of work I'd like to do (and also what kind of work would be worth doing) and that's how I ended up looking into the status of the IT field. But boy did it just make me feel even more hopeless than I already felt. People who have been doing IT work since college in their 20s, now being in their mid to late 30s, being unemployed for the last year or two and are panicking because they are running out of money and can't find work.

Obviously being 35 doesn't mean it's too late to find my calling in life/my path, but man the... plague of AI is sure making a lot of career fields look like dead-end traps right now. Entry level  IT workers, artists and some others are just being completely wiped out by AI. Hell, even fast food is looking towards AI/automation to take over jobs there. If that automated McDonald's in Texas they are testing out proves to be a major success, I expect we can see them changing all of the stores to be that way by... I don't know, 2035 or 2040? And while that store still has people making the food in back, it's only a matter of time until they find a way to fully automate the process of making the food too.

You know, it's funny, back in the early 2000s, tech jobs were the go-to. Everyone was telling you to learn to code, learn to do IT, get into the tech industry, it's the best future you can make for yourself. But now with AI in the picture, a lot of people are saying the trade jobs (Carpenter, Electrician, Plumber, etc.) are the safest careers to follow if you want a high paying job that can't be overtaken by AI. Remember when technology was supposed to improve life and make everyone able to live for comfortably? Good times, good times.