Hiring and Firing...or Not Firing

Holy crap, just let me GO.

Every single morning I wake up, praying for God - who might not even believe that I exist anymore - to be laid off. I know, it sounds like an awful and counterintuitive thing to wish, considering how impossible it is to find work nowadays. But at this point, my job has assaulted and ravaged my psyche so much that I wonder if spending so many of my waking hours at this greedscheme has caused the parts of me that make me a viable human being to start dying.

But one the sickest things about the Best Company Ever is that they kind of avoid firing people. They'd rather just rather screw with ouur heads until we wave the white flag and quit. Their hiring is also freakish. Basically, it's run the way a kid picks and rejects friends at recess, lacking any sense of logic, ethics, morals, thought...

Something that will haunt me forever is that I interviewed for this job a year before they hired me. And I was rejected. Then they changed their management structure completely. I applied on a Wednesday. I interviewed on a Thursday. By 5:00 that day, they made me an offer. I started the following Monday. It happened so quickly that I forgot I was starting a job while at my friend's wedding that Sunday. I remembered while drinking my third or fourth glass of wine. My first day at this company, I was hungover. How appropriate.

Another killer - I had interviewed for another job the same week. A far superior position at a far superior organization. But they were too slow to get back to me. I couldn't wait a couple more days. I had to take the job at the place that rejected me.

Wow, this really is like an abusive relationship, isn't it? I stick with the place that didn't want me, but then they were all, "No, baby, listen. I was just being an asshole. Give me another chance. I won't let you down. Look - I can give you everything you want right now." And the other job was like this really nice person who was kind of shy and was really busy being awesome, so they just couldn't get back to me right away. Plus they were letting other people down easy before letting me know I'd be perfect for them, which they ultimately did. But no. I chose cheap, dirty, short-term satisfaction with this asshole. And we've been together almost two years now.

Sorry, but I'm just going to wallow in regret and self-loathing for a moment.

Okay. Anyway, less than a month after I was hired, we moved to another building and they fired half my department after assuring everyone that no one was being fired. Later that year, we moved again and they hired about six more people. Then they fired half of them. Then we moved again, and...I've officially lost track in my head. But they hired a bunch of people a couple of months ago and another move is being planned.

After we move again, my department will have been moved five times since I started working there less than two years ago. We are not employees. We are an old box of Xmas decorations that they wish they could just get rid of. But they can't. Not because of sentimental attachment, but because they might need the boxes to prop something up or something.

So, what they do now is make us sit around wondering whether or not we're going to be fired, threaten us with being fired for doing something completely inconsequential, let us assume we're going to be fired until 4:50 on Friday...and then not fire us. Pretty much every week. It's kind of like "Deal or No Deal," except instead of opening suitcases that may or may not contain large/small amounts of money and making deals with Howie Mandell, it's walking into work where you may or may not be fired/merely treated like shit and making deals with HR! Is it wrong to want to open that suitcase and just find an unemployment check?