You're fired!!! in Souls Cannot Be Fooled

No. Not me, silly.

Remember that VP of Idiocy who I yelled at and admonished to wipe that smile off of his face? Yeah. Him. He got his dumb ass fired.

Ding dong, the bitch is dead!

It actually happened over a week ago. I’m a bit behind, but that’s okay because the story came full circle on Thursday of this week.

In the end, the veep had a plan and his plan was to clean house and hire a bunch of kids. He wanted a young impressionable staff that didn’t see through him. Instead he got a couple of veterans who knew exactly how big a fraud he was and how little he actually knew.

So, from the very beginning, he went about the work of trying to make me and the other guy look bad. The email that we confronted him about was just a small piece in larger campaign to make us look bad. It was a mistake. Because while we didn’t know it, his machinations brought about the scrutiny of others. I’ve been under a microscope. My colleague, who has been in this with me, has been with the company for 12 years and made President’s Club this year. They knew he was good. I’m new–so they didn’t. So, unbeknownst to me, people had been paying attention.

Why? They smelled something fishy. They knew my colleague was good but he was being lumped in with me. Was I a bad influence? Was I a problem? They didn’t really think so and my direct report manager had nothing but good to say about me, so by watching me they figured they might find out what kind of fuckery was afoot.

All I did was have an incredible quarter. All I did was prove that I had adapted to the new job, much faster than they had even expected I could or would. All I did was put myself on the leaderboard for next year’s President’s Club and because I didn’t know anyone was watching or paying special attention to me, it meant even more. It’s only now, in retrospect, that certain things come together.

For instance, another VP of another branch of our company that we share space with somehow always knew and could quote my numbers. Daily. He had no cause to be looking or checking on me, but he was–I thought maybe he had eyes on me for coming over to his team at some point. Turns out he was asked to do so–something I learned confidentially, since the firing. And it was more than my numbers. It was how I’d help out the new guy. It was how I’d stay late to make sure an important project got done. It was the reputation I’d quickly earned with my intracompany counterparts and quickly they had come to trust me.

It didn’t add up for him and they already knew the other guy who got accused of being a problem was top notch, so when those claims proved false for me too, the microscope changed slides and now it was the veep who was talking shit about me who was under magnification.

And they learned what an idiot he is. They learned how little respect he had from his team. They learned how little respect he had amongst his peers. They learned about some unethical methods he was employing and how they were reflecting on the company.

So, the President of our entire division came out last Wednesday and told us of the firing. Unfortunately, she also made some other changes at the time. Some of them good, but one of them bad. Another VP of another branch of our location also got fired. With her, it wasn’t about bad performance, it was about restructuring and while I didn’t know it at the time, I guess the writing had been on the wall for a while and it wasn’t entirely unexpected.

To those of us who admired and liked her though, it was a shock. And they announced her dismissal right before they announced my idiot veep’s so it was a bittersweet day, to say the least. Oh, and the two VP’s who had been asked to keep an eye on me? Both were promoted to Senior VP’s and them having a really good opinion of me now, can’t hurt, right?

Skip ahead to Thursday. No one expected it but the fired veep showed up. He still had his key card and just walked in–with his wife–apparently he was there to clean out his office, but my guess is he was there to get a few parting shots in before leaving. His office was essentially bare. He never moved into it. He preferred sitting “in the pit” with the rest of us. No pictures. No personal items. Just a handful of things that could have been mailed to him.

He refused to shake hands with a few of us. He told one of the newly appointed Sr. VP’s that he doesn’t trust him and doesn’t want to shake his hand. And to my colleague and I who he tried so desperately to throw under the bus and get fired. He had this to say, “Funny how things work out huh? I guess you guys won this one, in the end.”

We really couldn’t believe it. These are people’s lives. He was playing them like it was a game. I suppose it’s fitting that he was the one who lost.

I got a lot of advice from a lot of you after I published that entry about the meeting I had with this guy. A lot of you felt I was foolish to act the way I did. A lot of you felt I was putting myself in jeopardy. The truth is I felt empowered. I knew something was up. I didn’t know what, but I knew something was happening. The two, now-Senior VPs were too interested in the outcome of that meeting, making me promise to recap it for them.

I was asked too many times if I was happy. I was told, flat-out, by my direct report manager that no matter how much bullshit I felt going on, that under no circumstances should I do anything about it. “Give me a couple weeks,” was something I kept hearing.

And now…well, it’s all good. The veep? He’s an idiot. He’s a child. And now he’s gone. I’m pretty happy about it.