This was my grievance letter I sent to my union.
On September 20th, I was terminated by the management from my employment as a telecommunications operator with the (provincial government) Communication Center located at the (old crappy government building) My dismissal was due to not being “successful” in my probationary period. It is my contention that I was not given enough training by management, provided the materials I requested to assist in my training, was refused assistance by coworkers, and was discriminated by management and staff due to age and gender. I offer the following narrative to support these claims.
The training period for the position was eight days of 12 hours. During these eight days I was bombarded with waves of information that were crucial to success in the center. Each day I went home mentally exhausted from trying to take in, digest and conceptualize this information. It was challenging even with my prior training as an (police service) telecommunications officer. The information is vast, it changes depending on which area of the province one is in, the information is not up to date for some areas and sites, and it is not well organized. The team recognizes this and accepts it because it does not appear to be a priority to fix. Daily I got increasingly confident that I was able to use this information in an effective way to assist officers in the field. Despite this, I was still struggling with some aspects.
I made an error one night and sent officers to a call in the wrong location. This caused them to burst into a room and upset a client and family that had nothing to do with the original call. I had a coaching session with, the manager, the next day I came into work. The first thing she did was launch into a tirade of how I upset the team by talking about how I wanted to do this job until I retired. She dramatically put her feet up on a chair and said that this is what the team thought I was going to do, that I was going to just relax until retirement and not work hard. This was further from the truth, and I thought an overreaction from her and the team. Nobody on the team had said anything to me prior to this. This is the first indication of age discrimination that I saw. The team is much younger than I am. Her next statement was that I was not accepting criticism from the team or their assistance. This time she put up her hand at me like she was telling me to stop. I stated again that I never did that. She then proceeded to do the same gesture three more times, even though I made it clear that I had never done it even once. We also talked about the volume of talking in the center. I found it to be very loud and at times obnoxious and not proper etiquette for a public safety communications center. I was told by TL (team lead) that she enjoyed this social aspect of working there and yes, it does get loud. The suggestion was that I ask the team to lower the volume of their conversations or ask a team lead. As it turns out, this just caused the team to get louder, especially the schedulers who seemed to delight in being as loud as possible and disruptive. My hearing is excellent but trying to develop my “radio ear” was near impossible given the loudness of the conversations about cats and the Barbie movie. These loud and intrusive conversations have consequences. Radio calls are missed often and officers in the field constantly called in on the phone to update their status. This is a major safety issue. I am older and I do not learn as quickly as I used to, but as the team leads who did my interview told one of my references when she told them I would bring maturity to the center, that that is what they needed. During my coaching, the new team lead was present, and I did not have a union representative, nor was I given the opportunity to ask for one. Keep in mind that this “coaching” session was just criticism and all the negatives of what had happened so far. The manager did not offer any encouragement or positives.
The next day I returned to work with an action plan to help with my continued success in the form of bullet points I needed to follow. I printed a couple of copies and asked for my team lead and a senior team member if they could help with this and monitor my progress. I was told by Ms. Sackett that the team would help me when asked. They were agreeable to this at the time, but we will see that this changed later. I used the coaching session to help with focusing on what I needed to do, but the tone of the room towards me changed. I was frozen out of conversations (still loud) and had my break requests ignored or bypassed by team leads and acting team leads. I had another coaching session and this time I was upbraided because when a caller was describing an eloping client and described them as 6-foot-tall woman, I remarked that they would stand out and be easier to see. The caller took exception to this statement and made a complaint. I was also told that I was being too familiar with other callers and was heard to ask one “what is the name of their dogs”. I do come from a customer service background, and this does creep in to calls that are not urgent in nature. These calls are 90% of the calls we take. I did not remember that call, but it does sound like something I would say. I was also criticized for asking my team lead and senior team member to help me after I handed them my bullet point page. Ms. Sackett had one of the copies to show me. I realized at this point that the team leaders I was working with and some of the team were not going to assist me in becoming one of them and that I was on my own. I did not know who I could trust, and it turns out it may not have been any of them. Again, I did not have a union representative, nor was I given the opportunity to ask for one. Both meetings were surprises.
There are members of the team who discuss their ADHD daily and bring in fidget toys for themselves and others. One of these toys was a squishy banana. The team members were squeezing this fake banana and the conversation turned to how phallus like it was, how it felt familiar to squeeze it and so on. They then started to smash this “banana phallus” on to the floor of the center and exclaimed how satisfying it was to do this to the “banana phallus”. As the only male (I think) in the room, I felt isolated and insulted. As the team lead was participating in this phallus smashing, I did not feel I could say anything and be heard and did not want to suffer their ridicule. I was also subjected too daily, discussions around me (still trying to listen to the radios) that men were dirt, bad, idiots etc. I have never in my life been so isolated at a work site. I have worked with the roughest of oil workers and never heard such topics. Again, I did not feel that my complaints would be listened to, so I suffered through it. I also heard members discuss how stupid the nurses were and that Paladin and Garda security “sucks” in their words.
After another difficult night with the (site specific) alarm system, I asked for additional training and materials. I suggested that screenshots of various alarms from this system as well as a glossary of terms used would be helpful. I was told by team leads and senior staff that no such materials exist and although Lenel is not a good alarm system and everyone hates it, it is what we have. It was extremely difficult to learn how to use it when I only got to work on it one night out of four and only had one alarm to dispatch. They use short forms and acronyms to describe the location of alarms and this vital information could be in one of four separate locations in the panel. In an emergency, the dispatcher must decipher quickly which line has the information and what each shortform means. It also is not updated as it should be. I found errors in the descriptions of what the steps are in case of an emergency that could have had grave consequences if followed to letter. Instead of getting additional training and materials that I could use to help understand the Lenel alarm system, I was told by manager by email that I was being terminated.
Overall, this has been the worse work experience I have ever had. Except for a short time at the beginning of my training, I felt that I was ostracized by the team members and was never going to be allowed to part of the center. My concerns about the working environment were ignored or diminished by the manager and I was denied the training and materials I requested. I was discriminated against for my age when I discussed my future retirement plans and had to witness, in a professional work environment, blatantly sexist actions and talk by my team leads and other team members. The comments I heard concerning the stakeholders of AHS were also disturbing. For the sake of the (stakeholders) in the field, this situation must improve.
What do you think? I know I was struggling, but I feel that despite my requests to get help, I was not going to get it.
On the bright side I was more relived than upset at being fire.