North Carolina Chronicles, Chapter 5: Job #2

How to earn a paycheck three months after you've been fired.

Jul 18, 2023

Two notes: 1) this is the last chapter of North Carolina Chronicles, and 2) this chapter is a true story in which the names have been changed out of respect for people’s privacy.

Introduction: The Job

This chapter isn’t about Job #2. That’s the title of the chapter, yes, but the job itself is unimportant.

It was a public sector planning job that I started in June 2022, about four months after I left Job #1. I won’t name the organization directly but it’s important to note that their office was in Durham and I lived in Raleigh at the time.1 The hiring process leading up to it was a mess that went on for about three months and included three rounds of interviews for no good reason. Once I had actually received the offer, they pushed my start date back twice because HR took forever to process the paperwork.

The job wasn’t everything I wanted, but I made the most of it. It wasn’t particularly focused on transportation, but I figured this could be an opportunity to expand my skillset. They required me to commute an hour roundtrip to the office every Wednesday, but there are certainly worse commuter situations to be in, plus it’d give me a nice hour to myself to jam out in the car. Most of my colleagues were significantly older than me, but we still found some common ground: we shared music recs, I joined the office fantasy football league, and they introduced me to some great lunch joints in downtown Durham. I knew I couldn’t see myself with the organization long-term, but I also knew that failing to treat the experience seriously would be unhelpful for everyone involved, so I made do.

And I was good at it. My supervisor, Sherrie, kinda held my hand through my onboarding and training, but she also pushed me to leave my comfort zone and reveled in my early successes when I did so. The organization had been understaffed before I was brought on, so Sherrie was glad to be able to utilize my talents to clear work backlogs and put out other fires earlier than she thought she could. Whenever another team member was unavailable, it was I who shouldered their workload, as all of the more senior team members were already eating off a full plate.

The training schedule included a performance review meeting with Sherrie after my first three months. At this meeting in mid-September, I was met with almost nothing but glowing praise; she said she was giving me the “highest possible marks”.

But you’ve read the subtitle to this chapter. I get fired somewhere in this story. How’d that happen?

The Wreck

Well, the very week after that performance review meeting, I got rear-ended on I-40 during my commute. It was stop-and-go traffic, as I-40 usually is during rush hour, so the speeds were low and nobody sustained any injuries, but my car was obviously not safe to drive (despite the reporting highway patrol officer saying otherwise). I turned around and worked from home that day, my team understanding of the situation and allowing me the time and space to process the accident and make appointments for necessary repairs.

I lugged my car into the body shop the next week for the repair estimate: about $7900. Not enough damage to total the car out but definitely enough to require extensive work and expensive, hard-to-find parts. They told me it was easily doable, but I wouldn’t get the car back until early December, a little over two months away.

In theory, I had the option to get a rental car during this downtime. I did not, for three reasons. First, I was still two months shy of my 25th birthday, and rental cars are arbitrarily significantly more expensive if you haven’t existed on this Earth for a quarter-century. I’d been driving since I was 14 and had over a decade of experience during which I’d driven at least a hundred thousand miles, but nope; the only thing that matters is the birthdate. Second, my insurance did not cover the cost of a rental and it wasn’t clear that the other party’s did either, especially if I was going to need it for over a month at the boosted young adult price.

Third…I didn’t need a rental car. We still had Leah’s2 car. She and I lived in a rare walkable area of Raleigh and she worked from home full-time, so our only regular use for the car was to satisfy our cravings for Cook Out and Bojangles. I could use her car to commute until mine was ready.

Except…

(sigh)

The Second Wreck

So, y’know how the NFL plays a few games a year in London these days? Well, they put my beloved Minnesota Vikings in one of them last year: Week 4 against the Saints. The game was on October 2, just ten days after I’d been rear-ended on the interstate. I never wake up early on weekends—it’s rare to see me out of bed before noon—but these London games always start at 9:30am Eastern so they can fit the game in before the full 1pm slate. I could make an exception for the Vikes.

Leah and I routinely got Cook Out for dinner on Sundays, but I figured that since I was already awake, this week I could get it early for a brunch of sorts. It wasn’t quite close enough for me to make it there and back during the halftime break, but I figured I’d probably only miss the first series of the third quarter.

I missed the next quarter and a half.

A bad driver illegally cuts in front of me to make a left turn from the center lane, causing a collision.

I was okay but Leah’s car wasn’t. The airbags deployed, the front bumper came almost completely detached, and there were fluids leaking everywhere. The car was done-zo. The cops cited the other driver for multiple violations at the scene. Two wrecks in ten days, neither of them my fault.

At least I made it back to the apartment in time to see the Saints double-doink a field goal that would have tied the game as time expired.

What Now?

I ended up working from home again on the ensuing Wednesday. During our weekly team meeting, I apologized for the inconvenience and asked for everyone’s patience and understanding as I figured out how to move forward. They genuinely just seemed glad I was okay, though one of my colleagues, Leroy, insinuated I should take a defensive driving course in a joking-not-joking manner that I really didn’t need to hear at the time.

Then, in my weekly one-on-one with Sherrie that Friday, she told me that I needed to find a way to commute to the office every Wednesday as soon as possible. The timing of this demand blindsided me, to say the least; the second wreck wasn’t even a week old at this point, and there wasn’t anything that I specifically needed to do at the office for the foreseeable future. In fact, there never was. Every now and then, a planner would need to physically sign off on completed plan sheets, but it didn’t have to be me, and I was far from the only planner in the office on Wednesdays. I wasn’t trying to shrug off my responsibilities but our schedule absolutely allowed for wiggle room in times of emergency and I’d filled in for my colleagues in similar scenarios before.

Be that as it may, Sherrie said the request wasn’t coming from her, but her boss, assistant director Oliver. I’d met Oliver during the hiring process and he was the one who originally approved my remote work schedule during onboarding, but I otherwise interacted with him basically never. I had no read on him, no idea whether he’d be gracious enough to understand my circumstances and let me continue to work from home for the time being. But I was evidently doing my job very well from home, which I figured would help my case.

I told Sherrie that I’d see what I could do but that getting from Raleigh to Durham isn’t the easiest thing in the world without a car. Then I immediately became consumed by stress. I didn’t get much work done for the rest of Friday and I didn’t sleep well that night either. For the second weekend in a row, I awoke early on a day meant for rest. This time, it was my brain’s fault; I’d spent the previous night tossing, turning, and catastrophizing.

I looked into commute options and, just as I’d suspected, none of them were good. Taking the bus would triple my commute time to three hours roundtrip. Taking rideshare (Uber/Lyft) would be unreasonably expensive,3 as would renting a car (for reasons I’ve already discussed). I could theoretically take Amtrak from Raleigh to Durham, but it left Raleigh at 6:30am and arrived in Durham at 7:02am, so I’d have nothing to do for an hour and a half and I’d have to take a different mode of transit back to Raleigh in the evening. Leah couldn’t just take two hours out of her Wednesday every week to drive me to and from work because she also worked. Not to mention, most of these options would require me to adjust my sleep schedule to wake up much earlier than usual, which would definitely affect the quality of my work—for no reason, I might add, because…again…

Couldn’t I just work from home? It wouldn’t be forever, just until my car was repaired or Leah’s was replaced, so two months, max. That’s only, at most, seven more days I’d be working from home when I was technically supposed to be in the office. That’s not nothing, but these things happen. Leroy, the same colleague who chided my driving in our team meeting that week, had spent basically the same amount of time out of the office that summer because he broke some bones. Another colleague spent three weeks in South Carolina to tend to a family emergency. This wasn’t unheard of.

I messaged most of this to Sherrie that Saturday morning, leaving out the whataboutisms about my colleagues. I wasn’t going to lose that entire weekend to stress. My message wasn’t nearly as pointed as this piece is, but I was stern in my assertion that it would be better for everyone involved that I work from home full-time on a temporary basis until my car situation was resolved. Once I got that off my chest, I felt relaxed. It’d be fine. It’d all be fine.

On Monday, Sherrie responded to my message, saying that she’d run the proposal by Oliver and see where the conversation went.

On Wednesday, I stayed home again. Sherrie asked me if I went into the office. I told the truth and said no.

On Friday, my 10:30am weekly one-on-one with Sherrie was cancelled and replaced with a 1pm “Meeting with Eli”. She told me it was because of a scheduling conflict. Then, at noon, I got logged out of all my organizational accounts. IT told me they were “looking into the issue”. Sherrie asked me to send any necessary files to her in the interim, but I knew what was happening. I was baffled, but I wasn’t quite that naïve.

At the 1pm meeting, Sherrie and Oliver fired me. Sherrie said it was her decision and hers alone. They said my behavior was “gross insubordination” and spouted some nonsense about me not being a team player, about my refusal to come into the office being unfair to my colleagues. When I asked whether they’d received any complaints from my colleagues (because I hadn’t), they both—in unison—said “that’s not relevant”. Sherrie also threw in a bald-faced lie about me not being engaged in a team meeting all the way back in August, impossible to disprove but completely contradictory to the feedback she’d given me in my performance review, which I feel compelled to remind you was just three weeks earlier. When I asked how they could possibly justify giving my workload to my already overworked colleagues, Oliver cut me off and said “the decision’s already been made”.

Share The Low Major

Committing No Mistakes and Still Losing

So it was. I was unemployed. Nine months later, despite my best efforts, I still am.

In December, I got interviews for three separate positions in Raleigh. One of the hiring managers told me straight-up that I had the job if a reference check came back with no issues. I didn’t list anyone from Job #2 as a reference, but they must have contacted them anyway, because I didn’t get the job.

Also in December, I learned that my car—the one in the first wreck—was in worse shape than originally assumed. They found even more damage while they were working on the vehicle and the cost estimate had ballooned to well over $15,000, causing my insurance to total the car. We’d replaced Leah’s car by then, and we had no use for two cars, so I used the insurance check to get by and prepare for a move back to Minneapolis, which we completed in May.

Since the move up, I’ve applied for dozens of jobs, most of them like the ones for which I’d gotten callbacks rather easily in the past. I’ve gotten one interview, which went nowhere. Two wrecks in ten days, neither of them my fault.

Epilogue

But I’m getting ahead of myself. This chapter is about how I received my final paycheck. It wasn’t until three months after I’d been fired and it caught me completely off guard. In fact, it’s probably inaccurate to call this a “North Carolina Chronicle” because I was on vacation in Virginia4 when I got the notification.

“Venmo: <Fantasy Football Commissioner> paid you $300.00 Congrats on your win!”

My fantasy football team, the Biking Vikings, which I had not checked once since being fired in mid-October, snuck into the playoffs with the lowest seed and powered themselves all the way to the championship game. Then they beat Oliver’s team, which had lost two games all year, for the title.

I am the organization’s reigning fantasy football champion.