I had worked for a locally owned and operated company who specialized in flow art gear (space whips, poi sets, diffraction glasses, etc. your basic rave and EDM community items) for about 3 years. I had worked up from a basic production worker to a supervisor over the entire production department.
Flash toward to about 1 1/2 years ago and the company got sold to a venture capitalist out of Texas (about 1000+ miles away) and in that span of horrible decisions (his goal was/is to take down Amazon) he managed to alienate all the old employees even board members who all left within 6 months and brought in his own people who turned a really good company that valued employees and customers equally and who’s goal was to be the industry-leader in flow arts into another generic mass production company that went from focusing on flow arts to chasing the dollar with white sage mass-packaging. Bad wages, no leadership, no benefits, constant understaffing, a general clusterfuck of a company
I turned in my notice to leave at the first of January this year after my duties kept being drawn back for zero reason and other issues. I’ve never missed a deadline or had a write-up and I had worked closely with the old owner. So the owner begged me to stay and even offered me a severance package to stick around until March 1st because everyone was jumping ship due to the ineptitude of the new owner and he was worried about training new people. I agreed but our contract had a clause of where if I find a job before then, I can’t claim the severance package. No big deal, we both agreed. Well the university I applied to as a staff member couldn’t wait that long so I opted out and everything was fine. Or so I thought
A few days before I was going to officially leave on a Friday, I had a meeting with the director of operations (the guy in charge) and he and the owner told me that instead of leaving on Friday, to leave Wednesday afternoon after my party and call it my last day but I would get paid for the remainder of that day plus the days I was supposed to remain. I said I didn’t want to do that because I wanted to say bye to people and finish setting up for the person replacing me and I was told it’s not optional. Fine. Whatever. You don’t want me there then so be it, I’ll come and hang out with coworkers with whom I’ve gotten close with and I’ll eat my pizza and go.
The morning of my going away party, HR meets me in the parking lot with a box of my stuff from my desk and says they don’t want me to come inside and I was officially barred. She gave me no reason