When we deal with bad managers in life, it’s usually not so impossible to at least understand why they’re doing the things we hate.
For instance, we can acknowledge that it’s short-sighted and in some cases illegal to try and force employees to come in while they’re sick, but we know what they’re trying to accomplish by doing that. And while it’s horrible when a company tries to cheat employees out of pensions by firing them for petty reasons, it’s also obvious that they don’t want to pay those pensions out.
But sometimes, it’s impossible to see how the unethical decisions of a company’s management even benefit the company itself. And that was definitely true in one bizarre story that saw one woman’s bosses play themselves in a major way.
From day one, one event co-ordinator who goes by Cranne on Reddit could tell she was working for a terrible company.
As she explained in a post , she was the only person at this firm who coordinated speakers for the large conferences her company held and she received absolutely no training or onboarding to do that.
And when she sought help from her manager when she ran into a problem, this was complicated by the fact that English wasn’t the manager’s first language and she had neither proficiency in it nor willingness to help.
For instance, one request for help saw the manager respond with, “No cranne. Self skills is a must. I am bird without head.”
Despite all this, she was able to do her job in a way that the speakers approved of and she received every indication that she was peforming well.
That’s why it came as such a surprise when she was pulled into a meeting with her manager, HR, and the company’s legal representative four months into her role and told she was fired effective immediately.
Why? Apparently, her manager found the fact that she responded to emails within an average of 10 minutes after receiving them too slow.
As Cranne wrote, “If you don’t like me personally, fine but don’t try and make this seem like I was a bad employee. To be honest, I was furious.”
But whatever the manager’s real reason was, it would come back to haunt the company when they conducted an exit interview.
Since the employee was working remotely, the HR representative asked her to send over any documents she had and asked where she was with regards to their next event and its speakers.
It’s worth noting that by the time they fired her, that event was 17 days away.
And it seemed that timeline was about to get uncomfortable for them because the woman said, “This employer’s NDA had a clause in it that worked to my advantage.”
As she relayed, “I am not to discuss intimate details or share documents relating to this position with any employer- past or future.”
And since her sudden firing made the company a former employer, she pointed out that she could be sued if she told them anything about the upcoming event or showed the documents they wanted.
And while the HR person tried to fight this, the legal representative admitted that she was correct once the employee showed them exactly how the clause was written.
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Since the company didn’t have the time to start from scratch, the event turned out to be a disaster and over half of the speakers pulled out once communication broke down.
As a result, the manager’s decision to fire the woman for “taking too long to answer emails” almost cost her her own job.
h/t: Reddit | cranne
