My Big Mistake at the Big Firm, Part Three

It is probably best to wait until I get some kind of readership before doing these multi-part posts. It is like making a series of movies that no one wants to see.
Oh well, hopefully by the time people start really looking at this I will have several other posts at the top so maybe they will interested enough in what I'm doing to read all this.

I freely admit a lot of the problems at the Big Firm were of my own making. I am a bad networker. I suppose I feel that if I wanted to be a salesperson, I would have gone into sales. But I’ve learned the hard way that a lot of life involves sales in one sense or another. All I really can do is be friendly and treat people with respect. Being outgoing, well, that is a stretch. Not impossible, but not something that comes naturally. And not something that I am able to do regularly. I had a list of nine or ten people that I felt comfortable asking for work. It has to be said that most of the work I did get involved clerical tasks such as copying, putting together documents, and so on. That’s fine. I hate when people have the attitude that they are too good for something.

What was frustrating was that none of this work ever seemed to develop into anything more substantial. It was seven months into my job before I actually got involved in putting together a tax return, and unfortunately I just didn’t have a good idea about what to do. Intellectually I knew how it worked, but had a hard time navigating the various software packages, etc. They had a training, but it was just that, one training. Their way of doing things is basically, we’ll give a training but after that you are expected to more or less know how to do something. You’re allowed maybe one or two slip-ups, but after that you better show immediate improvement or that’s it. I usually need a lot of repetition in order to learn anything, and a lot of time work was really intermittent, so I took too long to improve. Business is not like school and I understand that you can't sacrifice the project for the sake of employee development, but I found it really difficult.

I made the classic rookie mistake of not asking for help. Towards the end of *my* busy season [I was not really involved in the process after mid-March since they didn’t really trust me any longer] I improved somewhat, but I guess it wasn’t enough. I’m hoping that is a lesson I can take to my next job, whenever that might be. Ask for help! You don’t have to go to someone every single time there’s an issue, but stay in contact. Maybe have a list of questions so you can get everything answered in an efficient manner.

I think that is something I would have had to learn no matter where I worked, but I do think had I worked someplace else I might have been given more of a chance to put what I had learned into action. Seniors apparently got tired of dealing with me, and a lot of my work was given to, yep, interns.

I spent roughly the last four months of my job not being assigned to anything. I knew I was in trouble, but my various inquiries regarding work went unanswered. My days were spent surfing the Web and doing technical trainings online. It got extremely boring after a while. Some people like the idea of a job where they don't really do anything, but I found it very demoralizing.

I began saving e-mails and documents in case I had to defend an unemployment claim [ALWAYS save everything that might help you with this. Pay stubs, e-mails from leadership about how things are going, e-mails regarding your performance, anything else that you can use in case they say you were fired due to misconduct.] Of course, if you are in a state where you can’t get unemployment if you’re terminated, you’re probably out of luck. Thankfully, in California you can get unemployment if they let you go for being bad at your job. We would have been in even bigger trouble otherwise, and most likely I would be writing this from my parents' home because we would have been in foreclosure by now.

The last few weeks were very odd. I knew that something was going to happen soon, and as I went into the month of June I often thought to myself, I am in the final days of my being here. All of the paperwork for the year-end reviews had been submitted. They had a committee who reviewed each employee’s file to determine how well they did. My lease was up at the end of June and I asked my coach if I could learn the results of the review as soon as I could so I could give notice to my landlord in case the result was not a good one [I did not say this, but I was operating under the assumption that it would not be.] The last day of the month began like my usual day...