*updated*
Who’da thought you’d get fired for keeping a weblog? (And no, it wasn’t me … at least, not yet anyway!) Tonight I ripped Shawn’s blog down and replaced the entries with a message to just e-mail him for updates. Then we restored it, minus the offensive entries.
This just sucks. Really sucks. He even took in banana bread this morning for his colleagues. He came in to a note from one of the bosses that asked him to stop by for a brief chat before their staff luncheon. The chat, unfortunately, took up his last moments there at that job. The fuckers couldn’t even feed him lunch. 🙂
He’s in good spirits. For now, anyway. The hours weren’t agreeing with him, and per the offensive entries, the job seemed to employ someone almost as illiterate than the Incoherent Twit I used to supervise at my old job. As always, there’s a company skipping the progressive discipline policy and just eliminating someone based on their thoughts and personal writings … someone who is far more talented than the employee in question. Not to mention, that same employee threatened Shawn only days ago — shouldn’t the firing have been of the other person?
I guess, once again, here’s another employer choosing political correctness over talent. And Shawn took great care to not link to the employer nor refer to anyone by actual name or place. It’s called plausible deniability, for crying out loud. But we wondered if the employers thought of his entries as veiled threats, even though Shawn and I use phrases like “just fucking die already” in everyday conversation. It doesn’t mean we’re gonna shoot up the workplace — it just means that we write about other people’s idiocy to get it out of our system. Sure beats bitchslapping them on company property. 😉
Bleah. At any rate, that instilled some minor amount of fear in me, and I ripped down two recent Veggie Patch postings in his honor.
I already knew this day was a doomed one, as I only slept two hours and when I got up for my near-daily run to Mickey D’s, I was told by the driver behind me that I had a flat tire. Gaaah! I went to the gas station to fill it with air, and I am so infamous at that gas station that my regular mechanic came over and asked if it were the same tire that he’s already fixed five times. Surprisingly, it wasn’t. He offered to check it for me for free, but I was 15 minutes late for my Veggie goodness fix of the day. So he asked me to keep an eye on it and bring it in if it deflates within the next day or so.
Shawn and I had a long talk about how much growing we continue to do as we continue to age — and we thought about how much our forked career paths have changed us. He’s got a good plan — to take a break from the writing/editing for awhile, as he is truly burned out — and he’ll start seeking some other jobs that, while they may not pay what he needs them to pay, they will give him some skills that he’s always wanted to acquire. Which is consistent with my theory whereby sometimes you’ve just got to take a step backward before you can move forward. That’s what happened to me when I moved here — I took a huge nosedive in pay, but I got the promotion that brought me back almost to where I was before I got here. And this isn’t a stopping point but more of a rest stop in my own journey.
I don’t know. How many of us are truly where we thought we’d be at the ages we’re at? I figured I’d either be a CEO or a single mother. I am neither. Nor do I really want to be either one. But it’ll be interesting to watch Shawn make a fresh start — and something tells me, he is going to find his vocational happiness this time around. And nobody will be more proud of him than I when that day finally comes. 🙂