I live in an older building and there are parts of it that need some patching. I didn't realize just how much though until a bat woke me up in my sleep. Normally bats aren't a big deal, small and fly about the ceiling. This bat however was large and flew aggressively & attacked. This is a big sign of rabies (abnormally aggressive behavior).
I left the apartment to stay in a hotel then went to the emergency room the next day to get rabies treatment. I'm a bit of a wimp, I must admit. I was unwilling to return to my apartment in fear of both the bat and the fact that it was not secure. It took a week for the landlord to get someone in to patch the potential entry ways for further animals & whatnot.
I'm a game developer. During this time my company was in crunch due to an approaching investor deadline. When I came back to work, my colleague out of the blue asked what work I had done the week before the attack. I gave him the list w/ a day-by-day breakdown. In my opinion, the amount of work was not just meeting expectations, but was above & beyond (I even was sick 2 days and rather than calling in I worked to help with the deadline).
Then about an hour later I got a call from the hiring company saying that I was being let go. They said that the team did a “forensic analysis” of my work and found that they couldn't justify the amount of hours it was taking me. They were completely disingenuous and claimed things like “You took a day to adjust a font”. The colleague that reached out to me about those tasks also said that I showed “Trouble communicating” because I couldn't do voice just text that morning (the maintenance guys were plugging the animal holes in my apartment & being loud in the background). It makes no sense for a one-off inability to do voice to constitute my months there as being “trouble communicating” unless they were reaching for justification.
Apparently the hiring company had not been told (and I made sure to tell them), that “Not doing enough / high enough quality” work was the reason 4/6 of the entire engineering force was let go over the course of the last 2 months. So either everyone is suddenly incompetent or the company has become unreasonable due to investor pressure and didn't want to call it lay offs. I'll take my guess.
This after they knew I had brand new medical bills from the rabies treatment (No employer-provided health insurance btw). I told the hiring company it wasn't a coincidence that I worked there for months and suddenly the last 2 weeks when the deadline got pushed and investor pressure mounted that I suddenly wasn't good enough. And with no notice. I think they were also upset that I spent a whole week of their crunch deadline time unable to work.
During that week that I was gone they didn't even pretend to care, the day I told them it was the next sentence “Damn that sucks. So when are you back to work?”.
I don't frequent this sub, I don't dislike capitalism. But it's clear to me American work culture is wrong and unsustainable. Sometimes I wish I took up the lower-pay interview with a Czech company…