BerthaBlog

Not that I think I’m in danger of being laid off—but I didn’t think so at the last job, either. I figure once I pass the six-month mark (which is how long I worked at the last place) I’ll stop feeling so paranoid that unemployment is imminent.

I don’t know if New Guy will be there tomorrow; I suspect he won’t. Friday my supervisor didn’t want to give him any more accounts, so she gave him boxes of statements and receipts to organize (seriously, some clients apparently just throw all their paperwork into a box and bring it to us).

I left early for a doctor’s appointment, so I don’t know if he did get laid off or not. But an hour or so before I left, New Guy came over to me and drew his finger across his throat.

“I don’t know for sure,” he said, “but I think they’re going to let me go.”

So I guess I’ll find out tomorrow, but I suspect he won’t be there. The slow pace and the mistakes were bad enough, but I think the real nail in his coffin happened Tuesday: around four o’clock he had (finally) finished with the account he was working on, and came to our supervisor for something else to do. She was swamped with a job that needed finishing, and didn’t have time to go through the accounts to find an easy one for him to work on, so she told him to just head home and she’d have something for him to work on the next morning.

He didn’t go home. He went back to the office where he’d been working, and hung around for another hour until it was five o’clock. He’d been working on the other side of the office suite, so we didn’t notice he was still there until it was almost five. I don’t know what he was doing over there, but my supervisor was not impressed.