Dumbest Reason I Was Ever Fired

You know, in my life, I've had quite a few jobs. Some were good. Some were bad. And from most of them, I was unceremoniously "let go" for one reason or another. Most of the time, it was something absolutely stupid, or I messed up in some way that they just sacked me over. However, for no reason in particular today, my mind wandered to what I consider to be one of the dumbest reasons I was ever fired.

For the Queen's sanity, I will note that my present job in not in the remotest bit of jeopardy.

Anyway, at the time in question, I had applied for a job via a temp agency and landed me a not half bad data entry position. At the time, it was a pretty decent job, so I was content enough to have gotten it. On my second day there, some kind of discussion started over jobs and such, and however the discussion got there, I remarked that there has to be a reason to fire you. Employers can't just up and fire you for no reason.

To prove they certainly could, they up and fired me for no reason. Seriously. The person from the temp agency asked what happened, and I told her about the discussion, and she said that as a temp, they could decide not to keep and basically fire me on a whim. So they did. Just to prove a point.

Obviously, the take away from this experience was never tell your employer what they can or can't do. They'll show you exactly just how much power they possess. I suppose it didn't help that I'd only been there a day when that discussion happened.

I promise you it never happened again. That's for sure.

How to Completely Derail a Problem Discussion

So, you're in a situation be it via email or conference call discussing some kind of problem which has arisen. The issue has been established, and people are working to get to the heart of the matter by attempting to sort out what needs to be done and who needs to do it. Somewhere, someone returns to the source of the original information in an attempt to figure out the intent or perhaps the mindset behind some level of advisement.

Then, out of no where, someone asks why, but it's a why something happened that can only be speculation and its answer has no bearing on the actual problem or its solution. It usually amounts to a bit of the blame game when it happens because someone asks why you asked so-n-so, or why someone did that thing they did. Where most questions to that point had flowed in a completely logical fashion, the right-field "why" kinks it all, and since no one wants to admit that they don't care, the conversation ends up completely derailed with guesswork and speculation.

When I'm looking to solve a problem, I keep it simple: what did you want it to do, or what sort of solution are you looking for? Never have I asked why they did it or why someone was bothered about it. Sometimes I wonder, but I know that it just comes off as accusatory and most of the time, it adds far more time to any discussion that I can spend doing something else.

The most recent eyeroller had to do with a discussion over how something worked, and really, it wasn't my specialty anyway. They had possibly misunderstood the original info and added the original people onto the email. The original person derailed the entire conversation by asking why the asker asked my group instead of, you know, just answering their question to him. Then the email string went off the deep end never returning to its original topic.

Seriously, there are questions with irrelevant answers. Some say there are no stupid questions, but I assure you there are. They are just trying to spark discussion when they say that. In fact, there are hosts of stupid, pointless and irrelevant questions that should never be asked in a group setting. If you are about to ask a question that will not, in any way, benefit the group, don't ask it. If you are asking a question that you are throwing out for the direct purpose of blaming someone else for something, don't ask it. If you feel like you have to lead the question with an apology, don't ask it. And finally, if you think your questions requires a disclaimer, either don't ask it or don't provide the disclaimer. Seriously, no one cares.

And finally, to clear up another fallacy: the customer is not always right. Ask anyone in technical support.

The Turning Of A Page

You ever get something that is somewhat mundane in nature, and yet for reasons unexplained, the creators of said object have placed an inordinate amount of work into some feature that provides no real value or functionality? When you look at most things, everything serves some kind of purpose, even colors which provide some aesthetic value. Most of the time, companies won't waste their time in tossing in stuff that is completely pointless.

Today, I saw an email that contained a link to our annual benefits novel, which was provided as an online doc rather than cutting down a forest to send it to everyone (which I'm sure they've done anyway). It opened up in this e-reader, similar to what I've seen used by store ads online. I'm sure you've seen these before. You hover your mouse in the lower corner of the "page", the page reacts and you can drag it over like you're turning a real page (you know, instead of clicking the little right arrow at the bottom of the screen like a sane user).

I caught the sound out of the tinny speaker in the CPU (since I really don't care about sound on my work computer; that's what headphones are for). Yeah, in this benefits document that 90% of the users will read at work, they bothered to take the extra time and expense to include a page turning sound. I can't even imagine how many man-hours went into this extremely minor and utterly pointless detail. I suppose that's my insurance premiums at work.

Every since then, I've been looking for something to compare how absolutely pointless that sound is, and I got nothing. There is literally nothing I can think of off the top of my head that would hold less consumer value than the sound of a turning page in an online benefits manual. There's a new simile for you.

That's as useless as the sound of a turning page in an ebook. And yet, that page turn sound will still be more pointless than whatever you compared it to.