YOU'RE FIRED!

I've never gone into the specifics for what happened to me when I was working for one of the biggest medical facilities in southern California. I really had thought that my life had finally taken a turn for the better and that finally God had smiled on me and heard my prayers. Everything was just falling right in line I had even bought my first car off the lot by myself. I was coasting on the fumes of success when bam, I got thrown headfirst into the wall of dashed hopes and dreams.

I was in my third month and I was coming in to train in one of the more problematic departments I remember I got there and put my lunch that I had just purchased from the grocery store in the fridge in one of the common eating areas for the employees. Then I reported to my station when one of the secretaries tells me that HR had called down and I was to report upstairs immediately now if you know like I know anytime they tell you to report upstairs immediately before you can even log in it means trouble. So I get on the elevator and go upstairs and the door to HR is wide open and there is the main HR lady and then her flunky the main HR lady tells me to come in and sit down and then she ask me if I had already signed my union card, I tell her no and she breathed a huge sign of relief then she tells me she needs my ID card and my parking access card which were both hanging around my neck. Then she tells me that she is letting me go.

The whole time I am trying to come up with why I am getting fired when everyone that has trained me up until the present point said I was a quick learner and that I was efficient in my job and that they had heard good things about me. Furthermore I was never written up, never reprimanded, never given a warning, no evaluation of performance NOTHING! And to top it all off the supervisor over my department wasn't even stationed on the medical campus that I was working on. I had called her, paged her several times asking her when I was going to get my access code so that I could use my DAR and check patients in but I never got an answer, needless to say anything else from her. So as I'm sitting there with my face cracked and my mind scrambling grasping for answers I manage to stammer out well what did I do? The HR lady was exasperated at this point she was like well when we hired you we told you that we had the highest expectations of Customer Service and you failed to meet that, I was like okay is there a specific incident that you can give me, at this point she just wants me to leave she then says well I don't have to give you specifics you just failed to meet our standards. At this point I am still frozen and in disbelief, fired for no damned concrete reason I look from the HR lady to her flunky and her flunky is clearly the bouncer if I get out of hand or emotional.

They are both looking at me like bitch will you please leave, so I take my final check sign my exit paperwork and talk that long walk of shame out to the parking lot which I have to find a fucking guard to let me out of because they have taken my parking pass. As soon as I drive out the parking lot I call my mother and just burst into tears, her first response was well what did you do? I was like I don't know they didn't give me a specific incident or anything they just said I failed to meet their high expectation of customer service. I was in a panic because I had just gotten a car and of course a car note. I didn't have any other job prospects lined up because I didn't even know I was on my way out and I had left a job to take this dream position so I thought.

To compound matters I called around to see if I could apply at a different location but because I had been fired I was banned from ever applying at the company again! WTF, I don't even know why I was fired in the first place, but not to be able to ever apply to the same company again ever in life what the hell. I even tried to see my employee file to see if there was something in there about that would explain why I was fired, and I ordered it from the record department I set up an appointment to review my record, and I got there and waited for two hours just so the lady that was in possession of my record could tell me she possibly had misplaced it, or shredded it and she would have to send for it again, then she asked me why I wanted to see it. I told her I simply wanted closure I wanted to know why I was fired specifically, and why I could never again apply to the hospital again. She was trying to softball me and say well maybe it was just a case of over hire I was like yea I don't think so. She said she would order my employee file again and call me when she had it. She ended up calling me later that evening and telling me that because I was no longer employed with the hospital that I wasn't allowed to see the records because they were now company property and that I since I no longer worked for them then I wasn't allowed to see the records.

That was four years ago which if you think about it wasn't a long time ago I was almost there, to the top of that hill of adulthood when the rug was pulled out from under my feet and I still haven't managed to recover. I was almost there I could have tasted it, I was going to build a foundation I was going to finally be able to feel like a real adult. Sigh, this must be how people end up living on the streets it really just takes one day to be knocked on your ass and have your whole world turned upside down with no regard for your well being. But shrugs no one in this lifetime gives a shit, its a dog eat dog world.