Hey kids!
There are many reasons to stay at a job, and many reasons to leave. I've had my fair share of reasons to leave, many of them I didn't act on. This is a story that I thought I would share because at a point, I knew there was no coming back since trust had neem lost. I made the decision to leave the company amicably, giving a 3 week notice and stayed available for questions for several months for the person who took over my work.
First thing's first, the company I worked for was pretty decent. I really liked all my immediate coworkers on my tech team, all the 'stakeholders' I worked with to create the solutions they needed, except 1 guy, he yelled at me when I asked requirement questions. Needless to say, I did not make an effort to get things done for him after that. Surprisingly, the management were all great as well .... except 1 guy. He was my boss's boss. I had little interaction with him, but when I did, he was very structured and business-only. He did not like jokes ..... unfortunately I made jokes lol 😆
So!! A little background on 'the incident'. One of our projects was to integrate a homegrown system with a third party vendor. We had to connect to the API of the third party vendor to pull data and show if the client was eligible for some services we offered. We had a difficult time getting responses from our technical contact at the third party vendor when the API testing wasn't working. We went back through the documentation sent by the technical contact and our code was doing as they asked, but we were still getting errors in the response. I sent several email asking for help that went unanswered. Other team members in the integration team sent email, also unanswered. Finally, our Director sent an email and included the third party vendor's CEO asking for help. We finally got a meeting request to find out what the problem was.
The technical guy and several of his team and boss were in the conference room meeting with me, my team, and our bosses. When I started explaining that I'm missing some piece of the request string or a key or something that's causing an error, the technical guy from the third party vendor yelled and said he gave me that info and this is my problem, not his. So the entire call got very quiet. Someone else began talking and I really didn't say a lot after that, stunned at how that guy just spoke to the entire team. The rest of the team figured out what details we were missing and asked that he forward the email he sent with that detail in it by the end of the day. We all knew he hadn't sent an email, but we just wanted to finish the integration. Needless to say, the details were sent in a new email with everyone cc'ed so both companies knew he hadn't sent it.
A few weeks later, my boss came to me and said that his boss had gotten word that I was irate and yelling on the conference call I discussed above. That the CEO of the third party vendor had complained to the Director of our company that I had yelled at the technical guy in the third party company and that it was unacceptable and I was in the wrong. I pleaded my case and said I did not do any such thing, I named the people in the call that could vouch for me and was pretty distraught that I had even been accused of being so unprofessional. My punishment for said crimes was that I was to cc my boss's boss on EVERY email I sent from then on, as well as not ever be on a call without others. With anyone, for any reason. He did not talk to anyone else in that call to confirm the story before making that determination. He assumed I was guilty. At that point, I knew that the trust was gone. He didn't trust me and assumed third party guy was telling the truth.
Unfortunately for third party guy and my boss's boss - we record all phone calls since it was a call center of sorts. So the conference room we had the meeting in records all calls. My coworker looked up the call and listened to it, made a copy and sent it to my boss's boss. It proved the technical guy from the third party vendor was yelling, not me. I'm not sure how far that recording went, I'm not sure if it was sent to the third party CEO, but everyone in my company heard it. But, the restrictions to copy boss's boss on all emails and add him to all calls wasn't lifted. I had been exonerated but it didn't matter. The trust was gone and I knew it. 😢
That's the day I contacted my recruiters and started looking for another job. When I put in my notice, I gave a 3 week notice because I knew I did a lot there and didn't want them to have problems when I left. They asked what it would take to get me to stay, and to be honest - nothing they offered could have made me stay knowing I wasn't trusted. In my exit interview with boss's boss, he told me I do excellent work, but I should work and stop joking and being sarcastic. That no one likes that. I beg to differ sir, many like my snark and shenanigans ... just not you 😊
It truly is a shame, I really liked working there, I liked the people. I still talk to some here and there today via email, LinkedIn, and Facebook. So that, dear readers, is a story about why I left a job I liked. Sometimes, you have to admit defeat, surrender, and move on. I couldn't be happier at my current job, so I consider this a lesson learned and stepping stone to where I truly belong ... where they think I'm quite funny 🤪😆🤘🏻
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