Remember the letter-writer asking whether there was anything they could do about their nightmare workload? The first update was here, and here’s the resolution.
Well, I certainly wasn’t planning to have another update after a week and a half, but I am no longer at this job! Things deteriorated really, really quickly.
Last Monday, my coworker and I realized our bosses were planning to fire her. After they found the new hire we knew they were looking for, they kept the posting up and continued the search — there were poorly disguised interviews all over the office schedule, with timestamps clearly indicating they were added after the new hire accepted the offer. At that point, I was done. It would have been bad enough for her to quit, but the idea that they were going to proactively get rid of my only coworker just when I had room to breathe for the first time in a year and a half … it was the point of no return. The only reasons I didn’t give my notice that day: I wanted to give my coworker space to figure out her own next move, and I didn’t want to burn the bridge until I had my April retention bonus in hand.
Tuesday my coworker gave her notice. They told her they didn’t need her two weeks — she could just wrap up the next day. They broke the news to me on Wednesday morning and told me it was for the best. Even though I knew it was coming and had been heated up about it all week, I still wasn’t really prepared for how it felt. Once she left it was like the past year and a half all came down on me at once, which was pretty crushing. Thursday and Friday I was standoffish with my bosses. I kept to myself — no pleasantries, a couple of petty little silences, and for the most part I sent emails for things I usually would have popped into their offices to discuss.
Monday was mostly back to normal, and then at the end of the day was my annual review. They acknowledged I’d done a lot of great work, but the focus of the conversation was my professionalism and attitude, and that I should really think about whether the company was a good fit for me if I couldn’t be comfortable with change. (There was also a section about how I needed to work on time management and prioritization, because I could “appear to get flustered and overwhelmed.”) I said we should go our separate ways and offered a little more than two weeks notice — I was about to take a few days off, so two weeks starting from my first day back. In the interest of getting a clean break and getting me out before the new hire started, they said they only needed one more day from me. (I do wonder what she’ll think, showing up for her first day only to find both of the team members she was introduced to are gone.)
So now I’m out! The last few weeks have been an emotional rollercoaster, but I’m weirdly happy this is how it shook out. My (former) coworker’s relieved to be out, I got the bonus, I didn’t have to stress myself out about how to break the news I was leaving, and one day was such a laughably short handover period that I barely thought about the million things I would have wanted to tie up if I’d had more time. Most importantly, I think I always would have believed on some level that if only I had done things differently, everything could have worked out. This made it really clear that it would have gone absolutely horribly if I’d ever tried to intervene on my coworker’s behalf, and there was never any salvaging this.
I’ll be applying to new positions here and there if they look really good, but I’ve been chanting “summer off, SUMMER OFF” in my head for a little over a week, so the real plan right now is just to enjoy a nice long break.
