Unemployed for 48 Hours

Santa came through! I quit my job at PlxxxCo yesterday and I start with a new company on Monday. PlxxxCo’s going down like a sinking ship, and when someone tosses you a lifesaver, you grab it!

There is an outstanding article here at EWeek that talks about the 15 reasons why people quit their jobs in the IT field, and to my surprise, about 8 of them were reasons I quit.  So below are my 15 reasons why I quit PlxxxCo.  The first 8 are from the article.  The last seven are my own.

1. Bad Cultural Fit Yeah, I was a bad cultural fit.  I am very results oriented and the company was not.  Plus they had outsourced so many of the jobs, I was a white man among a bunch of Indians.
2. On the Road to Nowhere I had a management job dangled at me as if it was a ball of yarn and I was a cat.  But upper management did not make any moves to put me in that slot, but they had the expectation I would do much of the role of that job for the same pay.
3. No Coaching, No Feedback The company outsourced its IT staff and were planning to cut more headcount.  They were going to allow attrition to make up for the inability of management to make a decision on who should stay and who should go.  A good way to promote attrition is to stop acting like you care for your employees.
4. You’ve Been Frozen Yep.  No bounses; no raises.  I got lots of beer on the company dime though, so that counts for something, I suppose.
5. Loss of Confidence in Senior Leaders The CEO was clueless and the company’s stock has been declining steadily for years.  And the board never held him accountable.
6. Shocker Occurred PlxxxCo outsourced all of their IT to another company.  Everyone was still doing the same lousy job, but drawing a paycheck from somebody else.
7. Doing the Work of Two I wasn’t the first to leave the team.  Others were leaving as well, and work was piling up with no end in sight.  I didn’t sign on for that kind of madness.
8. No Work-Life Balance I often worked way into the night-  mostly because the west coast was the primary HQ, and the long hours were beginning to put a drag on my homelife.
9. Crackheads stole my Computer Chair.  I had a nice Aeron chair.  I worked from home for three days straight and some asshole stole it.  I leave everyone else’s stuff alone and expect others to leave my stuff alone too.
10. It took 6 months to install a simple security solution.  After taking too long to plan and design the solution, the security architechts couldn’t find anyone to actually install the devices on the network.
11. My cubicle neighbor just wouldn’t shut the hell up.  He was loud, boorish, and tried to crack jokes, but he lacked the necessary sense of humor and the wit to do it correctly.  He reminded me of Michael Scott from The Office, but without the intelligence, charm and approachability.
12. Nobody could get their servers patched.  They could come up with some great excuses though.
13. I was getting at least one mass email per week about corporate efforts to “go green.”
14. Despite the efforts of several persons, laptops were never encrypted.  Data loss was just not a priority for the company.
15. They swiped my phone number.  They were paying for my phone, but when it came time for me to leave, they turned off my service and made it too difficult to get my own number back so I could port it to my new phone.  I sent them a notice 4 days prior to my last day that I would be leaving and to turn off the number on Friday.  They cut me off on Tuesday.  That was my only phone since I’m one of those people who don’t use a land line.  I was supposed to have an exit interview with my supervisor, but without a phone, what was I supposed to do?

I didn’t have a local supervisor at my field office, so there was no one to take my badge, laptop, and dead cellphone.  So I quit to the lady in the mail room by having her ship all my equipment to my ex-boss on the West Coast.

I do have a new phone now- a shiny iPhone.  Yes, I have gone over to the “dark side,” but I can save that for another post.  I have a new phone number now, but that number apparently was last used by a Latina woman who ran out on her bills.  I keep getting calls from her collection agencies.  So I give those bill collectors a new number for the deadbeat Latina-  and that’s the number that really belongs to the lady at PlxxxCo who botched my cellphone switchover. Oops.