Sometimes it IS personal.

Yeah, I’m still processing being fired. How I could go from such success in my most recent job at Callaway County and with my Army MOB to Ft. Hood, TX to being such a seemingly abysmal failure here seems incongruous to me.  I’m in no way saying that I didn’t make mistakes…. Hey! Human!  I wish those mistakes hadn’t happened, but if I were perfect I would be a robot.  I have only been fired from two jobs, the previous one truly wasn’t personal, it was situational… but I feel this firing had a lot of personal elements to it.

So of course the fault lies somewhere in the middle of this whole thing…. Some theirs, some mine. Fair enough.  To try and press the point that my poop don’t stink and is made of solid gold… well no flight on that goose. However, in retrospect, I still stand by my gut intuition that says there was a personality conflict with my direct supervisors very early on and that combined with me tipping my hand early on about being nervous about the situation working out since there was so much riding on it was my downfall.  They smelled blood in the water and took advantage.

I just got early on that they really didn’t “get” me… my sense of humor, my personality, my Army service, any of it… nor do I think they really wanted to try. They were put off early on, which sealed my fate.  Usually just being myself will ease situations and initial personality conflicts smooth themsleves over. Sadly, I think I was prejudged. In retrospect, I was bullied too.

Perhaps these statements sound paranoid, but please keep on, it will make sense as you go on.

First off, I moved 2000 miles for this job and have been the main support for my entire family for a long while now.  Those stressors alone were extraordinary.  Then I chose to uproot to a new city, new job, new everything… alone.  This was way different than the MOB to Ft. Hood… there I had the support and familiarity of my Army unit… though not my family, they were friends who knew me and people I could talk to since we were all in the same boat.  It wasn’t easy but it was a cake walk in comparison to what the last few months have been here in Washington.

So, I landed at the job on my 3^rd full day in Washington.  Everything seemed fine.  I tried to crack some jokes and be myself but the chilly reception was apparent to me.  I was given a checklist of things that stated at the bottom that they expected me to be able to do by 6 months into the job.  So I am concerned because of the niggle in my gut, but not too worried.  However, I did express my concern and was told everything was fine.  Hand was tipped, weakness shown, blood in the water.

So I had my 6 month checklist and was working diligently on it. I was being given different diseases to work on, but there was always something wrong and positive feedback was limited or eclipsed by the negative.  It was really difficult to go to work on a daily basis with any confidence when any gains you feel you are making are constantly being undermined by the “Yes… but…”  So I had a check-in meeting with a higher level supervisor and aired my need for solid benchmarks and more frequent feedback.  I felt like I wasn’t really being trained, but more being expected to know everything upfront and then being excoriated for making mistakes.  I also felt belittled and stupid. 

So the meeting with the supervisor was helpful for a few weeks, it did get some benchmarks and a training plan. However, at the next training meeting I was told that my meeting of one of the benchmarks really didn’t count… which pretty put me back at square one.  I accepted it and didn’t report it higher (and probably should have) because I was trying to move on in my training anyway.  I really didn’t think about it much.

However I think the fact that I talked to the upper management put me on the radar and also inadvertently exacerbated a turf war between the new upper management and the old guard middle management.

In these training meetings all the way through, I was told my telephone interviewing skills weren’t right, they needed work. I was not allowed to make calls. We worked on my phone skills; I gained confidence as they wanted me too.  I was never told that my skills are good or adequate, just that they were “better”. Goal was never achieved…I was given lots of tips and pointers... and I worked to put them into practice, but I still got the "it is getting better"... with no direction past a certain point. In one meeting I was told (paraphrasing here) that Public Health messaging always has to be right (no argument there) and “flat”, so to speak.  I’m guessing that meant no personality or at least not my personality.  I was told not to use any colorful language because it might confuse people, this was after I had been dealing with a facility that had an outbreak and I said, “Norovirus can spread like a fire in a dry Kansas summer.’  Okay, yeah, I could have said “wildfire”… but if it had just been a message of “tame your metaphors”… no sweat, but they had to add “People here wouldn’t understand that. It must be a Missouri thing.”  The other piece that came out of that same meeting was criticism for using the military alphabet to help someone spell my last name “Sierra-Charlie-Hotel-Mike-India-Delta-Tango”.  I was told not to use military slang since it might offend people. They did not want to turn off the public since “most people in Washington didn’t support the war”.  If their reason was “use something more people will understand”, again, no sweat… but there was a veiled assumption about my military service and how I felt about the current conflicts our country is involved in.  So yeah, it was personal.

I have also come across some information that has validated my experience.  One nurse admitted she takes Pepto Bismol every day, another told me that in her first few weeks there, she would end up on her living room floor sobbing in a fetal position and that an MD stationed there (via the CDC) spent her early days wondering what she was going to get yelled at about each day.  I also spoke to the union rep who said that my experience wasn’t unusual and that the lack of clear training, and that it's not uncommon for former employees to have PTSD.

In the end, I cannot argue that it was not a good fit. I am honestly glad to be out of there. Strangely, the stress of being unemployed is less than the stress of going to work sick everyday.  I am not proud about how I let them made me feel. I am sorry I tipped my hand so early. But I am proud that I stood up for my needs.

I have learned a lot. And those lessons will go forward with me.