Randy was a trucker until he got a couple texts notifying him otherwise, South Carolina’s WTLX reports.
Randy tells WTLX he found the insensitive fate befell a colleague before the digital guillotine severed his neck:
He jokingly and with serious note to it said if that load was going to Alabama, that he was going to take the load and kick my (expletive) just so he could get home for Christmas,” said (Randy).Only after getting two text messages a short while later did (Randy) realize he was out of a job.
This sort of thing makes the firing-by-webcam motif of the movie Up in the Air seem downright warm.
What’s the rudest way you were ever fired?
Columbia Trucker Laid Off Through Text Message [WLTX, via AOL]
(Thanks, NORMLgirl!)
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I worked at a company where sales had been down (do to a 20% increase in price across the board by the execs but they said it had nothing to do with that although sales dropped 70% three months after the price increase was announced) and one day the boss brings in all the employees and says not to worry that we were going to recover soon and there would be no layoffs.
Next day – 45% layed off. About a week later another 10%. When the owner promised me personally that my job would be safe, I knew it was time to start looking. My youngest had just been born so thankfully a great opportunity opened up right away.
My husband worked in safety for a trucking company. One of his collegues fired a truck driver and my husband was asked to accompany the fired truck driver to the company’s truck to make sure he cleaned out without damaging it. My husband stood outside the truck as the driver cleaned it out when suddenly the driver jumped down and punched him in the face. He was okay but the police were called. Policy was changed after that so two people had to accompany a fired driver to his truck.
I was always a little scared that one day a driver would lose it and pull a gun on my husband. My husband said that a lot of drivers carry weapons combined with the fact that a lot of drivers use drugs (my husband was responsible for getting the drivers drug tested- new hires and randoms). I can understand why they may have fired them via text message.
Man, it seems like lots of people have HORRIBLE bosses.
I’ve only worked under three seriously assholish policies. One, at a college outlet of a major national bookstore chain, where workers were made to enter and exit through a separate entrance so security could go through our bags. It was a real invasion of privacy and I was never really comfortable working there, so I quit after a few months. Another was at a charitable telemarketing firm that I worked at for a few months when I was desperate for money in college. Basically all the policies sucked there and I left as soon as I could. Final one was at an archives where I used to work – condescending, cold bosses with limited social skills. The 10 or so grad/undergrad assistants (myself included) were treated like trash – our computers had the internet disabled except for the few sites we needed for work because “we couldn’t be trusted” and we were all expected, including the women, to do heavy lifting outside the job description we were hired for. Worst, the bosses would have catered birthday and office parties. Not only were assistants not invited, but they would throw out leftover food. Ugh, I hated those people.
Good planning, firing an employee out-of-state with a trailer load of your belongings. His (evil) choices are park the truck, leave it unlocked and hitch back home, or open the back and start selling door-to-door.
I was let go in a voicemail once. Not a “hey, I need you to come in for a meeting”, but an actual “I’m taking you off the schedule immediately, call me if you want to talk about it.”
It was a shock to me, apparently I was let go for working the hours (including overtime) listed on a weekly published schedule. I think it had more to do with being a week or two away from eligibility for paid vacation.
This isn’t a “fired” story, but a funny (to me) “quitting” story.
I was working at a crappy job at a crappy tiny little place, working for a crappy boss who was paying crappy wages. The boss/owner was in the process of expanding the business, and he’d leased the space next door, tore down the wall, and was going to install additional equipment and hire another person to run it.
One afternoon, as he was chewing us out he told us that if we didn’t want to work there we shouldn’t come back. So… I didn’t. Apparently the next morning, he told my coworker that if I didn’t come back I’d be fired. And since it was such a crappy job, my co-worker quit too, about a week before the expansion “went live.”
A few days later, I saw a want ad in the paper for replacements, so I called up the paper and cancelled the ad.
This is Arrow trucking, who “informed” all of their drivers they were fired by shutting off their gas cards, stranding them hundreds (possible thousands) of miles from home, in freezing temps (in some areas), with no notice a few days before Christmas. When they called to check on their gas cards, they were informed that they no longer had a job and were instructed to turn their trucks in to the nearest dealership. A Facebook page sprang up to coordinate efforts among other truckers to get them home. Drivers were eventually offered bus tickets home or $200 for fuel (which, I imagine, wouldn’t get you very far in those behemoths), though I saw no mention of help getting their belongings that were in their trucks home as well.
http://www.landlinemag.com/Special_Reports/2009/Dec09/122309-trucking-community.htm
And a lawsuit’s already in the works:
http://www.landlinemag.com/todays_news/Daily/2009/Dec09/122809/123009-02.htm
They can sue all they want. They weren’t “laid off” – they were fired. The company shut down. Out of business. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Notagonnadeliveryourstuffanymore. So sue away – there’s bubkus! And guaranteed, these guys have already moved all their personal assets into irrevocable trusts.
Forget it – move on. Get a new job before the other 1400 guys try to do the same thing.
A federal lawsuit has been filed based on a law that mandates that employers “with at least 100 employees give them 60 days’ notice before a plant closing or mass layoff.”: This includes plant closings (perhaps the legel the equivalent of Arrow closing up shop). The legal issue is going to be whether Arrow execs had warning that they were going to have to shut down or if an unforseen, sudden issue caused their demise.
“The suit will also address other violations of state and local laws that Arrow employees have alleged, including bounced paychecks, unpaid medical premium payments, and nonreimbursement of out-of-pocket expenses”.
Even if they are found not guity on the whole 60 days notice issue, you still have to pay your people for time worked. Likely, they’ll use bankruptcy court to try to avoid giving employees the paychecks they are still due.
I’m not a trucker and I don’t personally know anyone who is, but this is a sad situation. Many truckers live out of their trucks and even have pets that live with them. With no notice of the closure, many probably had to abandon their belongings or pay out of pocket (if they had it or were able to arrange it on short notice) to ship their personal belongings somewhere when they suddenly had to turn their trucks in. Many itmes, like TVs, might not be cost effective to ship and were likely left behind.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Money/new-economy/2009/1228/Stranded-by-Arrow-Trucking-employees-strike-back-with-lawsuit
Ellen, I’m glad someone is detailing more on this. Apparently Arrow and leasers offered reward money for those who turned in Arrow drivers and trucks – people are afraid to get food or get some sleep lest everything they own in their cab get stolen right under them.
One of my friends is a trucker and I haven’t heard from him in a while. I am praying he didn’t work for Arrow.
Two coworkers on my team were allowed to sit through an intensive three-hour introduction to our new computer system at the beginning of their shift before they were called in and laid off.
Another coworker was laid off in the same round, and she was allowed to start her design project for the day in Indesign. The computer crashed on her, and while she was rebooting she was called in to be laid off. She was rehired six months later and logged into the same computer — only to see her recovery file load in Indesign from the project she started six months earlier.
We had employee who we found out was skimming credit cards, so with evidence the owner called the cops. They hid in back. An excuse then made up for him to come in to work – he wanted the hours. The cops took him away never to be seen again.
This goes back a while, but at the Sheriff’s Office I used to work for during the 1980′s, the preceeding Sheriff before my time used to be in love with his inter-office teletype network. Yes, it was actually a punch-tape driven teletype network serving two Sheriff’s substations and the Communications Center (72 mile long county in Florida).
Deputies who would feel the fickle finger of fate would come into work and find a teletype taped to their locker(s) terminating them (this was in the days when employment was basically “at-will”, no unions or job protection) with absolutely no advance notice. Their squad supervisors would have a copy of the teletype and would then disarm them (take their guns) if they were using County weapons, remove their badges and ID cards, and make them go home, change, and bring back the uniforms. Now THIS was the 1970′s version of impersonal firing!!
The problem, as I see it, with the whole ‘escorted from the building’ phenomenon is that some lawyers/staff counsel convinced some execs that there would be hell to pay if someone was laid off and it lead to a violent incident in the workplace. I can’t entirely blame the lawyers, after all it’s their job to think up worst-case scenarios and avoid liability for them. Sadly, the result is treating people like trash for no good reason. The impression I get from the news is that if people are inclined to shoot up their workplace they go home, pack up their arsenal, and return to the workplace days or weeks later.
In the end, the practice of treating laid-off employees as would-be homicidal maniacs is bad for the employer themselves. There is one local employer in my field who laid off a lot of people in the early 90′s and were especially insensitive and callous about it. Here it is over 15 years later and people still talk about it! The way they handled one year of bad business has been dogging their reputation in the field for the better part of two decades. How much do you think that has hurt hiring and retention?
A while ago, I had a temporary job working for Verizon. I worked there for one day. I got a call at 5 AM, three hours before my shift was supposed to start, telling me I was fired for wearing “the wrong shoes”, even though they didn’t tell me anything about their dress code.
I showed up anyway, and the real reason I was fired: “you’re an AT&T subscriber”.
In 1999 I was fired via FedEx after I politely told the badgering HR Dragon Lady that I would not be permanently relocating to China. Sure yeah, with a 100% expat raise and housing allowance which they refused, but not on the shitty pay I got that wouldn’t let me rent a crumbling hutong.
I mean I was fired by overnighted letter signed by the CEO, not, you know, by FedEx.
Six years ago my company outsourced the IT department to IBM. We were all hired by IBM and had jobs for at least six months. Three monthe later IBM sent out about 50 notices saying they were losing their jobs in three months. In a big meeting about three days after the letters they told us “IBM dosen’t hire people just to fire them”. The fired people had to train their replacements, all of whom were in India. We eventually found out that in my group of about 90 there were going to be 15 people onsite and the rest in India.
More recently a friend of mine was called into her bosses office at the end of the day because “I have some good news for you”. The good news was that she was fired as of right now. It took her several weeks to get her personal belongings.
About 40 years ago a coworker went away on vacation and came home to find a pink slip in her mail.