I just recently heard that one of the casual staff I worked with at Next Byte has been ‘let go’, without warning or reason. Now I realise that casual staff have no legal protection and need not be given more than 4 hours notice, but it is still a rude and unkind way to conduct business. Fortunately for a lot of companies there is no law that says “be nice to each other”. The closest we have would be things like the the second commandment “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”, or the edict of Bill and Ted “Be excellent to each other and party on dudes!”
It is possible that I am in some small way responsible for this too, and perhaps I should have know better. For it seems this staff member may well have been fired for comments posted on this site. Yet another underhanded maneuver. I can’t say for sure either way, but the scary thing is I can not rule it out of possibility.
When I was sent home, I spent a good deal of time looking into my legal position, and could easily have taken action with regards to unfair dismissal, underpay for 8 months, poor work place conditions, oh&s, and a number of other options too. But in the end it came down to not wanting to have to spend another 8 months dealing with people that could be so unkind. If I just wanted money I’d be better off selling info to the competition, or the supplier even.
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One response to “Another Ex-Bytee”
Don’t even entertain the thought of thinking you are responsible Dave.
One thing I have learnt from this is that I expect too much from people. Because I respect and value honesty, fairness, abiding by the law, et cetera, it doesn’t mean that the people I interact with at work, or in a social sense have those same values as well. In fact most people don’t value these things, and it’s the people who do who get hurt because they aren’t as cunning or smarmy as everyone else.
I have also learnt that true professionalism just doesn’t exist. As an employee, or even as a customer at such places you expect a certain degree of integrity and professionalism. They make you believe that it is there and act all happy and nice, but in the end we are just their puppets and all they do is think of ways to cut our strings.
It’s not your fault. It’s not even Katharine’s fault. You both just fell victim to people who can’t see the big picture and who don’t know how to respect others (and who will feel the wrath of the karmic forces that be when Apple open a store in Australia)