City Hall

There are times where if you see or hear someone react a certain way, you can figure out a lot of what they might or might not know. A common refrain that I’ve heard is that (in general terms) government is too big/powerful/cumbersome, etc and that government (in general terms) needs to be smaller. From someone who thinks this, I infer a few things:

1. There are two powerful entities the US has: government and corporations. If you want one to shrink, government, you are essentially saying that you want corporations to be more powerful.

2. By corporations I only mean the biggest of businesses; if you own a small business you most likely wouldn’t be getting more power with smaller government.

3. The individual has even less of a say if government gets smaller. At least in theory, anyone can run for government and change with they don’t like. For corporations if you’re not on the board of shareholders you’re not going anywhere, or at least the average Joe Cool on the street can’t vote you out.

4. If you think less government somehow means less taxes, whatever services the government doesn’t provide would be picked up by corporations, whose purpose is only to make money. It’s possible and probable the corporation would make you pay more in the long run.

My musings aside, I have a personal tale to tell and it’s mostly concerning the third point I brought up. Allow me to tell a story:

My leaving the Air Force in late 2014 was a chaotic, wild ride. I had about four and a half months to transition from what I had done all of my adult life, 15 years, to the civilian sector. I was very angry and frustrated with the Air Force about this and like anyone has to do in adult life, I swallowed that and enlisted the help of a transition service to help me find a job on the outside. I was considered way old for the type of military officer they normally help but they made an exception for me, largely due to my positive attitude about my situation (or my ability to fake it, they will never know!). Long story short, I wound up landing a job doing procurement for a chemical plant in Victoria, TX. I’ll also add that the corporation who owns this chemical plant are billionaires.

I was brought on to replace the person who would become my boss. This person promised me that before he transitioned to his new job in Houston he would make sure I would get a healthy transition into my new job. Let’s be tactful say this didn’t really happen. To add, my boss did not reveal that he’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer before he hired me; it was not even a month after being on the job that he was gone for prolonged stretches at a time. I was left mostly alone to figure out how to do a job I’d never done before for a chemical plant owned by billionaires who have a code for increasing value.

I do think this is where having a military background helped. Adapt and overcome, right? I attended the meetings I was told to attend. I realized that the plant needed a culture shift in how it viewed procurement. The last guy who ran the show, my absent boss, was seen mostly as a blowhard who did not listen to the lead engineers of the plant, instead relying on his decades of experience to tell them what they needed as opposed to listening to what they wanted. Between me reading the room and being completely inexperienced I came into the room humbly and told everyone “I’m here to help”. I did my best to listen to the lead engineers and if I didn’t know how to help I went to get help from the procurement team. I would bring the procurement team to the site and hold meetings so the engineers could literally see the team and know they are real people who were there to help.As with anything, I’m certain this wasn’t perfect and I definitely had my successes, failures, and warts but I feel like I was doing some good things.

My boss came back after about a year from his cancer battle and maybe he saw things differently. He treated me as if I were on day 1 as opposed to day 366 and that caused friction between he and I. A couple of months later I had my first and only annual review, which came back with no major complaints. At some point, he discussed with me that he sent me an e-mail at 4 in the afternoon which I didn’t answer until the next day but not only was no paperwork generated from that he also mentioned a while back that if an issue was important enough that he’d always call. This is particularly important because I was told from the beginning how my job was a 24-7 job so my cell phone number was known to everyone on site as well as my boss. Regardless, by mid-July my boss showed up to the site and at the end of a very awkward and confusing day, I was fired and told to remove my things from the site immediately. The reason given was I did not have enough hours logged through the gate on site.

Is the amount of onsite hours important to a 24-7 job? I’d say no. At the most critical I’d say inconclusive, because the nature of the job involved talking and meeting with vendors off site as well as working from home, working on vacation, etc. I certainly wouldn’t say I “stole time”, which is the reason my former company gave to Texas Workforce Commission as their reason for why they fired me. This also doubled as my former company’s reason for denying me unemployment benefits, which, I dunno, is a thing someone might need if their job, the main source of income for your family, was suddenly taken away. The Commission actually sided with me over the company for receipt of benefits, but there is a Texas provision that anyone out of the military for 2 years or less can’t receive unemployment. So either way, the company didn’t have to pay for unemployment. The company never offered a severance of any kind. I went from having a well-paying job one day to unemployed the next, which pays $0 an hour. 

I was told later that the person who replaced me on the job was a 20 year company guy without a definitive job; my position was never opened up for requisition and instead simply given to the company guy. That’s not really ethical and it certainly lends fuel to the fact that I was fired without legitimate cause in order to make sure company guy was put in my place.  It definitely lends fuel to the fact that my former boss didn’t exactly want me on his Christmas card list. I was effectively out of work for a year which had a tremendous effect of the money situation of the household.

I fought as best as I could. I filed an EEOC (equal opportunity) complaint about Nov/Dec 2016. In Apr. 2019 (not a typo), I was told by EEOC they couldn’t find evidence of wrongdoing but I could declare a right to sue. The person I talked to from EEOC could not even accurately summarize the reason why I filed a complaint in the first place so I suppose by preserving the right to sue I was being done a favor. This led me to talk to a lawyer who wanted $350 to ultimately tell me that the absolute most I would ever receive from the company that dumped me was the salary I missed before I found the job I have currently, basically about a year’s worth of pay. That would be minus attorney’s fees and the company, of course, would make sure to drag this out in the courts for as long as they could, to include an attempt to make me appear in court each time in Texas as opposed to where I live currently. Basically, the juice would not be worth the squeeze. For a conversation in which the attorney showed up nearly 15 minutes late for and barely talked 20 minutes his firm made sure to charge me that entire $350. Because, of course they did.

That’s the end of the story. I am beyond blessed in many ways. I received a retirement from the Air Force when I left, that plus veteran’s benefits plus my wife’s salary kept us afloat until I could find employment. It took a while to find a job again. The way that whole thing works is, if you have a job while looking for another job, you’re ok. If you do not have a job and you’re looking for a job, the business of which you’re applying for a job immediately assume something is wrong with you and begins to ask questions in which they have no legal right to ask you but if I’m making any point here it’s that big business can break laws or be thiiiis close to doing so and no one bats an eye these days. It’s somehow worse if you have a good resume. Companies get paranoid that you’re not planning on being there for 20 years and would jump for the next opportunity immediately. They’re worried about loyalty while most businesses show over and over they’ll first and foremost lay off or fire people as a cost savings measure every single time. 

But what about my military service? Companies LOVE hiring vets, right? Well, it’s my experience that’s a thing that companies say. Most companies, unless your skill set from the military directly aligns with what they do, don’t understand what a military person has done while in the military. Now, I worked with a military to civilian life transition team. They got me the job with the billionaires. I spent a lot of time making sure my military resume looked as “civilian” as possible. One problem with that is “civilian” means many things to many people. It’s possible that a military guy or girl can “civilianize” their resume to the point where the impact of their accomplishments are diminished. It’s also possible that same person could civilianize their resume and the person who reads it still doesn’t understand what is being said. Either way the result is a discarded resume or the military person never even gets a call back telling them why. 

The main reason I got the job I did was LinkedIn. That’s a story in itself but due to billionaire company firing me unceremoniously my wife and I, at considerable expense, had to move halfway across the country for an opportunity to begin prospering again monetarily. Again, I’m blessed. Things could be so much worse. But I don’t know if I’ll ever quite get over the cruelty of one man and a company deciding to end my livelihood just because, the bulliest of bully moves, and knowing that the way the law is set up I am the one who is most likely to run out of money trying to stand up for myself against something I know was wrong.

This is adult life. I fully understand that and have to accept it and move on. If I could ask anyone reading this to take anything away it would be to have empathy for anyone fired from a job and for anyone who is searching for a job. Even larger, have empathy for people in bad situations in which you think you may never be in yourself. Life comes at you fast.