The whole sordid chapter.

With $CURRENT_EMPLOYER introduced, I should probably let $FORMER_EMPLOYER exit into the orchestra pit at this point. They were not, as certain of my "friends" thrilled to suggest, a "spam company". They were (and are, despite certain changes) a direct marketer, but that mostly meant print mail. The vast majority of computer stuff was for tracking people's response and purchasing histories, not for contacting them directly. It turns out you can't both be an above-board company and (directly--you can certainly pay other people to do it) outright spam; there are way too many political and legal repercussions.

They fired me because I am an asshole.

That's leaving out a lot of details, and some relevant causes, but it's true. Especially towards the end there, I was arrogant, self-assured, and (absurd, subconsciously, though if I had half a clue I'd have known it consciously) didn't want to be there any more. So I continued to support their systems, fulfill their requests, and recommend spending money on technology and my (never others'; I'm not a manager of people and I don't want to be) time on projects that would make their business run more smoothly.

Then bam, two days after my birthday, I was called, unexpectedly, into the conference room. I legitimately thought, until I entered the room, that this was yet another meeting with IBM about a storage solution we probably weren't going to buy, but that I needed to be involved in to pick through the vendor slime and recognize the bits that we might actually need. But no. It was my boss's boss (formerly my boss, more on that in a moment) and Miss HR, and that was the end. And it was refreshing.

I was lucky enough to be liked by this manager, so I received support totally out of keeping with my length of employment, which turned out to be just a little bit more time than I needed to find something else. This was contrary to the wishes of my supervisor, who had (most of the time I was there) been my org-chart equivalent, and who had been promoted to a position for which she was not, really, qualified (managing people) and which, I don't think, she actually wanted (whether she knows that or not). At the very least, she only really knows Windows (and doesn't Know that the way that I Know Unix, which isn't inherently an indictment), but she was made to be supervisor over both Windows and Unix systems. She understood the Unix systems only in the ways in which they were similar to the Windows systems. Some times (buying disk storage or backup systems, for instance), that was just fine. Other times (understanding client/server application behavior, hardware requirements for software products, capabilities of hardware for an application based on OS) it was catastrophic.

I was not, to put it lightly, political about my disagreement. I just didn't care. I knew I was Right (and I actually was; I took the time to consider whether I was before I stopped bothering to care about reactions to my expression of this), and I said so. I was Wrong to do that. Not because it cost me the job, but because it actually made it less likely that the Right thing I wanted to have happen happened. I was hurting the company but failing to at least play lip service to bureaucracy. It's not that I didn't follow Procedures, it's that I followed them with a sneer. That did no one any good.

There's plenty of blame to place on $FORMER_EMPLOYER. Though certain members of management recognized how good I was at what I do, they opted to get as much as possible from me for as little as possible, rather than showing a bit of appreciation in the only way that could for a young, single male (money). They could easily have done this for less than replacing me, but (for a few years, anyway) they didn't need to. This was true not just for me, but for quite a few talented people, a majority of whom are No Longer with the Company, some of whom put up with it longer (or played The Game better) than I did. They repeatedly put me (and the rest of the "open systems" portion of IT) under managers who were, alternately, not competent to manage all of the types of systems necessary for business continuance or to weak-willed to shape the department to what they knew was right. They gave me (especially, but again, other people in the IT department) both more power and more responsibility than was really safe (overworked employees make mistakes, and overly empowered employees grow arrogant; arrogant employees who make mistakes are Very Bad).

But it doesn't matter, to me, really. I saw this happening, and I did not do one of the only two Right things to do:

• refuse to get either (or both) of burned out or arrogant;
  
• or leave on my own power.

The ego-further-inflating portion to all of this is that, several weeks ago, I was called, at $CURRENT_EMPLOYER, on my cell phone. Because hardware that was too old to be safe when I started, that I'd been stating regularly needed to be replaced (and provided budgeting and project planning to phase in replacements for the whole time) had failed, again. Backups? Yes, the backup & recovery system I'd put in place was there, and it had the data that had been sent to it, but at client (internal customer) insistence, backups happened once a month, and recovering to then meant redoing two weeks of work, which would definitely mean missing a "mail date". So, I worked, at an absurd mutliplier of my former effective hourly rate (especially taking into account that my weeks were seldom shorter than sixty hours) Friday on through the weekend, and a couple of evenings the following week, and got them back on their feet.

I've learned my lesson. I was very careful to be professional about this process. I was very careful, when at all possible, to work through the person (a friend of mine, who I had effectively directed, despite disclaiming managment of People, who'd been left there after I was gone without my having had anywhere near enough time to share minds with him) on whom responsibility for this mess now devolved. This means that those people there, who may well be elsewhere eventually, who I had any chance of leaving with a positive impression have it. The sour taste of having fired me is, as much as it can be, gone.

It's not impossible that they'll call again, but it's not likely. It would, actually be in their best interest, since their backup system needs fixing that I know now how to do but did not then (and had not yet had time to learn when I was dismissed). But there is no chance that they'd try to hire me again. And if elected I would not serve.