A little info: So I work an offices job at a doctors office in Germany. In Germany when you start a new job you have a probation period in from 1-6 months, but the average is 3 months. Within this period you can be terminated without a reason with a 2 weeks notice. You can also quit with a 2 weeks notice. After this time you have to give at least a months notice to quit and your employer has to as well, plus he needs to give a valid reason on why you’re being terminated. If you have less then 6 months of probation, both sides can technically prolong the period to up to 6 months of needed. There’s more to it but that’s the gist of it.
So in June we hired a new nurse S. She has a probation period of 3 months, which are up by the end of the month. Now she is a very sweet person, but to be blunt she’s not good at her job. She’s not focused, likes to talk all day long, tells all of us her personal business with her kids and ex and court and whatever else. She can’t do anything by herself. We constantly have to clean up her mistakes, which are pretty bad at times. As you can imagine we handle a lot of sensitive issues and data and she’s simply careless. That goes from putting info in the wrong file to giving the wrong info on bloodwork to the lab to putting the data of said bloodwork in the wrong patient file because she’s not paying the proper attention when putting in the numbers to sort the bloodwork to the right file. So suddenly someone who just comes in for regular check up gets the bloodwork of a chronically ill patient and all hell breaks lose.
Luckily we’ve managed to correct these mistakes without the patients really noticing so nothing bad has happened yet. But at this point she’s a liability and frankly we want her gone because she’s just causing more work for us instead of being actually helpful. But we thought maybe if Our doctor B as her boss gives her a proper talking to she’ll get it together. B asked us several times how it’s going and we tell her the good and the bad, but she doesn’t actively talk to S to get it together.
So my coworker J and I brought it up with our boss B several times that she needs to talk to her and tell her to get it together. She still doesn’t do anything. We talked to S ourselves a few times when she made mistakes to tell her to please be more focused to avoid these mistakes, but to no avail. And it’s also not our job or place to actually reprimand her.
So yesterday our boss was finally going to talk to S . We were told she was going to fire her since her probation period is over next week. We told B maybe prolong her probation period for a month because you never really talked to her and gave her a warning, so it feels kind of unfair to us to fire her with no warning. But B is dead set on firing her.
Now imagine my surprise when I walked in this morning to S being there, chipper and happy and not looking like someone who was fired yesterday. J had no clue what was going on either. So about 20 minutes after I arrive S comes into my office asking to talk to me. She proceeds to tell me she wasn’t fired and instead B prolonged her probation period. And then drops the bomb. B put all the blame on J and me. Tells her we actively came to her to basically tattle all of S mistakes to her and what each of us said to her exactly. All of these things were said after B explicitly asked us what happening and we told them to her in the faith that she would handle it like a boss should. But instead she actively threw J and me under the bus, shifting the blame for S‘s prolonged probation period completely on us, tells her she doesn’t want to do this but after what we told her she has no other choice.
I confronted her when she came in and her first reaction was being pissed that S told us, because this was a „private matter“. She did halfheartedly apologize with big puppy eyes after realizing just how pissed off I am and tells maybe she could’ve have handled it better and to please not be mad at her. I told her that ship has sailed because I’m furious and that the team spirit is now in shambles thanks to her inability to be an actual boss and handle things as such. She just snaps back „well I can’t change it now so there’s no need to be mad at me.“
I left after that be suse there were patients waiting and now I’m in my office seething. Fuck this shit.