so you just got fired—now what?
Well, no. I got fired yesterday after coming in late to my soul-sucking, tedious, menial office job. And I am the happiest that I have been in so long.
No, really. Getting fired from my $20 an hour front desk office job is the greatest, most calming thing that I have experienced in the last two years. Obviously, I know that getting fired is not a good thing. No one wants to get fired, no one likes losing their job. But you haven’t worked for my boss. Maybe you’ve worked for someone like him. In which case, I’m not telling you to get yourself fired. Quit. Put in your two-week notice. Flee. Never go back. Go home, hug your pet(s), and check your application status on indeed.com over a glass of wine.
But I got fired. Blindsided completely, totally didn’t expect to be called into the boss’s office to get fired—fired. There were two mistakes made the night before: 1. I turned the phones off at 5:55pm instead of 6:00pm. 2. A man—who’s at least forty years older than me, hey, what’s up, asshole?—lied to my boss and said I hung up on him. No. You just didn’t the appointment that you wanted because —shocker, our schedules don’t revolve around yours and you’re not entitled to immediate attention and service just because you’ve been coming here for years and years. Neither of these reasons warrants being fired, but they fired me with an “Okay, you can go.”
I was just fired. I was so fired. They fired the shit out of me.
I know the way I left the office left a tasteless impression and frankly, I'll be surprised if I ever work at an office again because I couldn't stop smiling. I think this is the happiest I've been in the last two months. Sure, it was a walk of shame. But for me, it was a walk of freedom.
My boss is inclined to believe anything that his patients tell him about me just as he’s welcome to agree with them. The truth of the matter is that I had nothing left to say not because I don't care about this practice or that I don't respect him and the other providers. It's the fact that I know nothing I say would have mattered.
It's a lot like cutting off an infected limb that has long been infected. I could keep taking the antibiotics. I could keep trying to live my life with it constantly being dragged around and causing me pain. And I could just keep living with it. That's what working at this office has been for the last two weeks.
Did I want to get fired? Absolutely not. But I did want to leave. And I kept putting it off because I didn't want to just go. I know what it was like working by myself at the front desk at a medical practice with more than one medical provider. A receptionist here did everything except take patients and prescribe medication. I talked to the always delightful insurance companies to make sure patients could get medications that weren’t medically necessary and radiology procedures that weren’t medically necessary on top of answering the phones as fucking peachy keenly as possible because the clientele are used to a certain level of care, which is code for “entitled rich assholes who would sell their pet Milani poodles before shelling out money to cover their medical bills”. I didn't want to put my coworker through that. But now I just don't care.
Because being at this office is like being in a time warp. You're there and it's a loop of being told that you need to be faster and you need to do better. So you try to be faster and be better. But then you did this wrong. And you're also not allowed to do this. So you should be doing this. Because that's what you should have been doing to begin with.
Being at the office was an ever-present reminder that nothing you said or did or felt matters. My boss and I both know that I wasn't trained well. Or at least if he didn’t, I hope that me saying so doesn't come as a surprise. Everything I learned, I learned from a coworker who only came in once a week to train me because she’d been working here for nearly 7 years and after having the youth literally sucked out of her, has mentally clocked out for the last 2. Everything else fell on the office manager who’s never working at the front desk and another girl who’s got, at most, 7 months more experience than I had.
So I'm three months into the job still not really knowing how to work this job. And then five. Then six. Seven. And finally eight. And it's so hard working for people because when I make a mistake, they make sure that I feel like an idiot. Or that I'm worthless. But I know neither of which is true. I've never once "half-assed" this job.
But oh, I turned the phones off at 5:55pm. And before that, oh, I had to be berated by a man older than my father because he couldn't be accommodated right away when it suited him best. I was told I was incompetent. I was blamed for the things completely out of my control. Because my boss doesn’t want to work anymore and yet, he does. He keeps coming to the office and taking new patients while never taking accountability or responsibility for his ever-overbooked schedule. He lets his OG patients—actually, no, he lets all his patients (new, old, young, ancient, blue, green, yellow, red) treat his staff like trash because when he doesn’t want to see people anymore, it’s our fault. We are incompetent, we don’t know how to accommodate his schedule, we don’t know how to schedule patients, etc. etc. Excuse after excuse after excuse because if there’s one thing a grown ass man who’s been practicing for more than thirty years still doesn’t know how to fucking hold himself accountable for his own greed.
Of course, I should have been used to it by now considering his patients I was as an employee no matter what I've tried to do or improve to show that I'm capable and competent. Not that it matters anymore, but the point I'm trying to make here is that it is impossible to please everyone. And it is even less possible to work for someone who doesn't have sympathy or compassion for their staff.
He’d always told me that he welcomed criticism or feedback.
Well, here it is.
My boss spoke to me like I was either, again, an idiot or worthless. How can someone possibly improve here? There's no understanding or emotional support or even the sliver of an indication that he cared if one of—most of—his patients treated me like trash. Maybe he learned it from them. Or perhaps he taught them very well.
Because even when I actively made the efforts to do better and try not to make the same mistakes, I was already making another and 3 out of 5 of my mistakes were made not knowing that I either shouldn't have done something or was not allowed. I was not told or taught until he took it upon himself to "teach" me.
I wasn't doing a half-assed job. My training was half-assed. The feedback I got from you all was half-assed. And despite it all, I chose to give it my best with half of what I was given. Because the money was good. The money was fucking great for my first full-time job, are you kidding? I was getting $600 every week, more when I got that OT coin. It felt like the world was my oyster. I could save up for grad school, I could plan a trip, I could buy a pound of cocaine if that’s what I wanted to do.
But about two months ago, the money wasn’t even worth it anymore. The wounds that kept festering finally showed themselves.
Of course I have made plenty of mistakes here. I have monumentally fucked up so many times and have been treated like a monumental fuckup to match each one. And every single time a patient made me feel like trash, without fail, I hoped that my boss would be sympathetic. If one of the other providers made me feel like an idiot, I hoped he would be willing to listen. I wanted to feel like I had a place there and would be supported, but I didn't and I wasn't.
And there is no more left to say because this has been one of the best paying jobs I have ever had and the most rewarding experience I have had learning about other people and I thank him for that, but it is one of the worst experiences I've put myself through. And I thank the doctor for that.
A spiteful side of me hopes this finds him well. I hope it offers some insight. So that maybe he can hire new staff that lasts longer than a healthy pregnancy.