TL/DR: I worked 40 hours a week and didn't use my personal devices for work after hours, and was fired for “performance issues” and not being a “team player”.
Well, it happened. It finally happened. In the eyes of corporate America, I am part of the problem. I am a quiet quitter and lost my new job because of it…and frankly, the only thing I feel right now is relief.
Not long ago I shared this experience about how my (now former) employer seemed to have no sense of personal boundaries or what a healthy work/life balance looks like. To summarize, management repeatedly would text me on my personal phone after business hours (we're talking sometimes 9pm), demanding that I log onto my work computer to address something in my inbox. This by itself was concerning seeing as I had never disclosed my personal number to anyone outside of my HR paperwork, and certainly never authorized my personal phone as a means of work contact. I keep my work and personal lives separate with a vengeance and don't even have my work email account or anything on my personal devices because they're *personal*. Contacting an employee about work, after hours and on a non-office-related device without their consent, is in my opinion a massive breach of trust and privacy.
Along with this, I would receive highly passive-aggressive chats from the department higher-ups directly telling me how they were “concerned about me” since I wasn't logged in at 10/11pm with the rest of the team voluntarily giving up their nights, and how it was “distressing” that I wasn't actively participating with everyone else as was expected.
Bear in mind, this expectation was not discussed during any of my initial interviews or during orientation training. I only discovered this after I was already a few projects deep after my first couple of weeks in, when it was revealed that it was more just an unspoken expectation that everyone stayed late pulling 80-hour weeks, and when I had the *audacity* to work a 40 hour week and close my laptop at 5pm and enjoy my personal time. They seemed to be under the impression that since we work virtually, that means that all employees, regardless of their role, are expected to be on-call practically 24/7 to respond to emails, chats, and to work on projects all hours of the night.
Cut to this past Friday afternoon.
While I'm at lunch – which I had blocked off on my shared calendar so that people would know I was unavailable – I got a voicemail on my personal cell phone from the department director to let me know that an HR meeting had been scheduled for 2pm (when I return from lunch), and that they were “concerned” because my status was currently offline and they wanted to make sure I would be able to attend. Yes, so sorry that I use my lunch break to take an actual break, right? What a crazy concept.
Rather than responding to the voicemail, I turned my phone on silent and enjoyed the remainder of my lunch in peace, logging back onto my work computer at exactly 2pm as if nothing had happened and only then responded to the meeting invite which had indeed come through while I was away in the middle of my break. I'm immediately pulled into a virtual meeting with the new head of HR who proceeds to inform me that my department directer had expressed some recent “performance issues” as they called it, and that due to their concerns the decision had been made to terminate my employment effective immediately.
It''s a good thing my camera wasn't turned on, because I almost burst out laughing.
I honestly can't say that this came as a surprise. The writing had been on the wall for quite a while, and in fact, with all of the ongoing harassment and management's toxicity, I was planning to leave anyway and had been sending out resumes for the past few weeks already. What I find most ridiculous though is that no one from my team's management ever reached out to actually discuss their concerns with me directly. No form of performance plan or review or proposed education or training or…anything. Rather than directly confronting what they saw as a problem and offering any kind of resources for their employees, they decided it was better and easier to just fire me without even making an attempt at addressing the issue beforehand. All because I chose to set boundaries and refused to budge when an attempt was made to harass and intimidate me into submission and sacrificing more of my life for a company that clearly couldn't care less about its workers.
I don't regret a single thing I did, or didn't do. I value my time and my personal life more than any company. Jobs come and go, but you only have one life to live. You are 100% replaceable at work, but your home is your real life. I was fired because I refused to let go of that perspective…and honestly it's probably for the best.