Later that that week, I had one last last Friday co-worker lunch with my former co-workers. Found out from them that “Fuggin’ Chuck” had been demoted. No psychological response at all from me, though I believe I was supposed to feel some sort of justice-has-been-served feeling at the news, but I felt nothing. I also remember when “Little Girl” wanted us all to stay in touch -- for me to join them on Fridays for the usual co-worker lunch -- so I looked at my former co-worker douche bags and waited for a response. They didn’t even look up from there freaking bacon cheeseburgers, just like the time I tried to explain to them about that one occasion where the managers were writing fake and slanted profiles for each of us. They knew what was going on, how I was being railroaded by the inept and cheating management, and how the were all given good to fantastic career breaks by the same fucking managers that falsely ruined my career.
These pigs didn’t want to find justice and fairness in the way StorageTek/Sun Microsystem did things, they instead wanted to enjoy the great things the lying managers had granted them and they certainly weren’t going to jeopardize all that for me. They’re intentionally blank looks told me that they wanted no hassles from me and wished I would just disappear -- forever. I said no to the re-occuring lunch offer and everybody else finally moved and took a very quiet and releived bite of their cheeseburgers. I left after that lunch and that was the last time I saw any of the greedy creeps ever again.
For the next several months, there were attempts to get me back. One time I went to a visit to the Natural History Museum. On the way out I was spotted by the "Second New Guy" and he tried to flag me over. I just smiled and kept going. I knew he wanted talk to me about the Control Bus/PCI work I had at one timed proposed and I had this feeling they had classified this project so it would not go forward unless I was there. “Shifty Cliffy” had some how made it mandatory that I had to be there or this shitty little project would never ever even start. Needless to say, I bet it got cancelled. And also needless to say, it was blamed on me, not on the fucking managers where the blame really belonged. (That's why I hated my brainless co-workers so badly...insipid, selfish goons.) The people I had been working with were too stupid to understand how all this worked and it was easier and safer for them to blame me instead of guilty-as-hell management — they were as gutless as gutless wonders could be.
Another example: “Shifty Cliffy” put in a job requisition at Monster.com for somebody who did a lot of what I had been doing while I was "working" there and it made for one of the longest written job requisitions I've ever seen — everything but the main work of a HW engineer. I declined of course. Then he did something that pissed me off so much I punched the flat monitor of my wife’s computer so hard I broke the plastic frame around it and cut myself and started bleeding all over the place. Seems he had put in a plea on one of the job board for someone in particular to come (back) to Sun Microsystems and with their “training”, would educate them to be a useful HW engineer...that Monster requisition, of course, was for me. I hated, (and still hate) the moronic assumption I needed to be “trained” in something I had done for the last 23 years and done on more than a dozen products plus helped in all those others. He worded it that way because he had to keep pretending I had no hardware experience. (This is where I came to understand to what extent management had gone to ruin me -- complete elimination of my entire HW past, training and skills.) I declined that one too.
(There have been other attempts in those early months, but I missed them or don't remember anymore.)
During one particular episode, I sent my resume to a recruiter, who got right back to me. Seems he also knew "Shifty Cliffy", to which I said "so..?" To that he said "never mind..." He then asked me if I knew what my problems were in getting a job, to which I said "I don't know...bad economy, no desired skills, no security clearance?" His response was a bit reserved and very cryptic, "Sure.." he said "...that's it". (Now that I know more, I believe he had talked to "Shifty Cliffy" who had told him up-front that he was personally controlling my rehire by blacklisting me, which is why he was asking in the first place.) The guy did try to get me employment though, but didn't try all that hard. It all fell by the wayside, as they say. A few months later he sent me, of all things, an email with a little home made, streaming cartoon enclosed within. He said this did not apply to me, but in reality it did. It was about this guy, who been out of work a couple of years, sitting in front of a HR person claiming he was deserving of full salary despite his couple years of non-work, while she was saying he'd more or less have to start over at a lower pay scale. This was definitely a message from "Shifty Cliffy", saying if he was going to get me work, I'd have to pretty much start over on the pay scale. Screw that...he and "Fuggin' Chuck" were the bastards that caused my miserable job situation in the first place...and I wasn't going to take a pay hit just to give them a reason to celebrate.
After some time I was getting antsy, so I decided to look like I was busy doing something digital, like pursuing a masters degree in Computer Information Systems. This degree, I reckoned, kind of split the digital workload between understanding the greater parts of information systems (HW) with programming (SW); a little of both I suppose, and it did include lots of Java programming. (I'm guessing this all started sometime around late summer, early fall of 2010.) So I put this fact on my resume and started sending that one out, hoping it would gain some traction. Didn't seem to work -- though when "Shifty Cliffy" caught wind of my post college education efforts, he came up with a different kind of offer, explained in the next paragraph.
This next attempt to get me hired was actually one of the best, and I almost (almost...) regret not taking it. He had offered to employ me for the "night shift" from 3 PM to midnight, and I don't know how he communicated it, but I think he insinuated I could pursue my advanced degree while I was there. He also said right-out that I would have to endure the surly attitudes of my former co-workers. Seems that either my resistance to go back there and work had killed the rumours of some existing product re-design which made them very angry, or maybe it was because I just pissed of my co-workers in general -- but I didn't care. I had the money saved up to continue on the way I was currently living plus enough to pay for my master's program, and there was still a lot if fish in the sea as far as companies were concerned. The thought of working in back in StorageTek/Sun Microsystems under any circumstances was revolting to me and I couldn't just "go back". I deserved better I thought. (Still, I had no inkling that "Shifty Cliffy" was "guiding" my re-hiring through the corporate C.A.N.T.s and possibly other unknown mechanisms at the time.)
I quickly became absorbed in my master's program, starting off with a couple of quarters of Java coding and a mathematics course designed for someone preparing to code for the rest of their lives. It went superbly well, until I was informed that my wife's brother and family had all gotten their Visa applications approved and were coming to America from Iran within the next year. They had no insurance or any real means of financial support, so I decided to cut back on my classwork and look for a job. I of course went with my chosen career with it's mandatory skills and looked for either HW or SW jobs -- no luck however. And me with my damn vision problems did not make it any easier, since I couldn't take jobs that involved a long, hard drive and was restricted to places like the northern suburbs of Denver, Broomfield, Boulder or Longmont. Still, no luck.
Soon after my in-laws arrived, my sister-in-law developed breast cancer -- stage four at the time they found it. This put me, my wife, my unemployed brother-in-law and every one else into a spin. My wife tried to find solutions to our new medical problems. (BTW, my sister-in-law passed a full physical before she came over...just FYI.) We were looking everywhere for some kind of solution. Fortunately, my wife and her brother found some people who had charitable intentions enough to cover most of the costs, and best part, bring her into remission. (It didn't cover everything, but it covered most everything). Two or Three years later my brother-in-law got a job in Houston (he was part of the oil and gas business) and that's where they moved ASAP. A few years later she fell out of remission and died.
(One of the things that created such a deep and enduring hatred for "Shifty Cliffy", "Fuggin' Chuck" and assholes like "BMOC" or "Brainless Brian" was there never-ending game playing, which at this point they had to keep on playing it up or risk possibly lose their job or reputation. If I had been allowed to do what I had been trained for and naturally could do, and not seen any input or interference from these gutless dicks, I would have been happily working with no strings attached somewhere, but I didn't get that...I got a face full of their tricks, insecurities and bullshit.)
Time passed and I got my degree in August 2013. I hit the job boards again like a fever, but still no interest from anybody. For almost a year no interest. My wife noticed the effect on me and the effect it had on our relationship. So she made me go see a psychiatrist, who diagnosed me with severe depression for which Prozac was suggested. I passed on the it. As long as knew what was bothering me, I would beat it on my own.
One day in the early summer of 2014, I saw a job opening for someone exactly like me on the job boards by a bunch who called themselves Spectra Logic working out of the Boulder's Gun Barrel area. I applied that early afternoon and by late afternoon they said I was in for an interview! Wow! (Its like they were waiting for me to apply or something...you think?) So I made plans to see them. One of the interviewers was a manager I'll call "Teedle Dee" and the other interviewer was an engineer I'll label "Tweedle Dum". When I arrived, the first person I saw was "Tweedle Dee". "Tweedle Dee" asked a bunch of the usual, except for this gem: "Would you go against the express instructions of your manager if you knew your manager was wrong?" I'm serious. The question was "...if I KNEW the manager was wrong..." Naturally I gave some crap answer to fit with that crap question "...I am confident enough with my talents and skills that I am positive I could make him see the truth right away..." Geeezzz...what a schmuck.
Then I got a bunch of the usual questions you'd expect from a manager until he made a comment about my being laid off seven years earlier. I told him I was laid off because my stupid manager ("Fuggin' Chuck") at the time was forced to lay me off because he falsified my corporate profile and it wasn't a good profile. I also told him that second level manager tried to hire me back but only if I played up to those awful shortcomings of my falsified profile, and I wouldn't do that for some stupid job working at that place, or any other job for that matter. Then I told him that was seven years in my past and didn't want to talk about it, "...just forget it and lets talk about this place," was my response. But he really didn't listen -- he wanted to know more. So I reluctantly moved on to all the scamming and cheating people like "Shifty Cliffy" and "Fuggin' Chuck" and what they had done to me and many of the people of StorageTek/Sun Microsystem, as well as to the project itself. He was eating it up as fast as I could tell it. When I told him about the stupid trick where you lay someone off but hire them back again under different pretenses, he said he knew that trick. Turns out he should, "Big John", former Director of Engineering at StorageTek/Sun Microsystems had just a month or two earlier assumed the role of General Manager for Spectra Logic, and I'm sure he was the same great guy there as he was for StorageTek/Sun Microsystems. We ended the conversation with all the usual talk about pay and the like, and he handed me off to "Tweedle Dum". Personally, I felt this place wasn't going to work out at all.
"Tweedle Dum" was introduced to me as possibly the smartest engineer I would ever meet. Sorry "Tweedle Dee", he wasn't. What he wanted to do was check my technical skills. I didn't particularly like this approach because I hadn't done any real engineering work in the last six years, and any question he'd ask I would have had to roll my eyeballs at as I tried to remember all that dry, non-memorable information.
He was bit exasperated, but basically agreed. Then I told what I believed was the equation for the speed of light in a vacuum but gave him the formula for impedance instead. I knew at that moment I was dead wrong but when I tried to correct himself, he gave an equation that was even more wrong than mine, but then he said mine was OK -- I was close. (I love it when your test giver gets the answer more wrong than you do, and then forgives you for your bad answer because he feels it's good but not as good as his even worse answer...lovely)
Next he says he is going to draw something that he said I probably studied in my physics classes in college. So he draws what looks like a windmill next to a box with hair sprouting out of it. WTF is that I asked. (We never studied anything like this in college, much less a physics class.) It seems he was asking me how to hook up a digital motor to it's IC controller, which is what the windmill and box with hair was all about. I said I knew nothing of digital motors or how they were represented in schematics or how their customary signals were labeled. (Read my resume, you idiot.) Again, he was pissed off at somebody, I guess that was me.
He keeps going: what is the "Programmers Reference Manual" -- or whatever he called it -- used for. I looked puzzled (because I was). Is it an ANSI or IEEE publication I ask? He gets more pissed and finally says skip it. (On the way home, I've come to believe what he was talking about was the programmer's user manual that comes with every processor ever produced...you know...that thing that instructs you on how to program the microprocessor and is the companion document to the HW specification sheet.)
Now he wants me to solve a silly little equation written in C++. Problem was I haven't worked with C++ in almost ten years. (I say as much in my resume.) I'm also in desperate need of readers (glasses), as I couldn't see anything on that screen. Found a spare in my suit jacket, luckily (or so I thought I was lucky). The computer was filthy. And I mean filthy. It was a flat black color (like the spare parts from Darth Vader's uniform) and covered with this Vaseline-like bottom layer and the top layer was filthy dead skin cells that made the whole thing look like it was covered in gray velvet. The dead skin cells I kind of understood, but what was he doing with his hands to aerosolize that greasy layer underneath and what was that greasy layer and how did he spread it in a even layer all over that poor laptop? Good god...And the buttons all looked like they had a miniature port-hole windows made of the clearest material ever centered in the middle of the button while around the button the Vaseline layer had cratered up with each strike of the finger on the keyboard...ewww. And each time I touched that little red button next to the touch sensor pad that machine would make this feminine moaning sound that left me just spooked...it acted as if it liked being touched there! And the equation I had to solve was made up of a single line of about 30 or so unary, binary and tertiary operators that was so long it had to be word wrapped three times...it looked liked someone had tipped over a Jenga tower. Needless to say I didn't pass that test, as as much as anything I did not want to touch that computer ever again -- not for any job anywhere.
There were some more uncomfortable questions, one of which I actually screwed up, (about lightweight processing) but that was gratefully the end. I left with no ambitions or ideas of ever working there.
Soon after my fiasco with Spectra logic, I read a magazine article about Human Resources/Talent Acquisition running a scam called "blacklisting"...I was beginning to wonder...now I was emerging into the "know".
Later in the summer of 2014, I applied for another "Verification and Validation Engineer" for this contract company in New Jersey called CTG. Low and behold they were interested! But as I got more involved with the application, I realized it wasn't a true "verification" role that I had become accustomed to as a computer hardware engineer -- it was for a non-college educated, high school kid who would come to work for CTG as a Quality Assurance engineer (basically a technician). But CTG was interested and I hadn't worked for seven painful years and everything in my personal and professional life was going to shit so I took the job. The company I was working for would be Ricoh, also in the Gun Barrel region of Boulder and right down the highway from Spectra Logic.
(Side note: the job was contract work, so for the first time in my adult life I had to track the hours I worked. As I did, I discovered that by Friday noon -- if not earlier -- I was done with my forty hours...weird how I never really knew how long and hard I used to work when I was an exempt employee and how hard it was to unlearn those rules.)
Things went as well as could be expected at Ricoh. Sometime around after the new year, my manager made a permanent play for my full time employment at Ricoh. I noticed the advertisement for the job, based largely on what I had been actively doing there, for quite a while. Then I decided -- fuck it -- I'll do it. So mid-spring or so I applied, using the automated Human Resource program that was employed by Ricoh to enter in my application. (They did not have a proper Human Resource/Talent Acquisition, so the executive aides pretty much handled the personal requests for work using the Human Resources SW.) I heard nothing from my manager for the next three months or so. One day I sent him an email and asked him, "...have you seen my application yet?" He emailed back -- "no". I had saved the email I had filled out when I applied for the job and sent it to him as proof I had indeed applied. He took it and went looking for my missing application. When I stopped into his office to find out what he had found out, I asked him out loud and plainly -- were the aides that oversaw the hiring process guilty of blacklisting me? He didn't say no, he didn't say yes. He just sat there and stewed. I had my answer.
Soon after that I was working in my cube when one day I decided I needed a new pen as my old pen had dried up. At the time I was about the only occupied cube in that area, so I just got up and began scanning the empty cubes around me looking for a pen somebody hopefully left behind. I happened to be in the cube across the hallway where I couldn't be seen from my cube when these two (or three -- couldn't exactly tell) women stopped by to look...well...at me. (I thought it was to gaze upon my cuteness, but I guess not.) One said to the other "There's his name, right there." and the other said "uh-huh". They later left my hiding spot and I returned to my cube, not at all puzzled as to what they were up to (I knew...I could tell). Then, a short time later, I heard a woman's footsteps coming down my lonely aisle and all of sudden there she was, looking at me through her ear drums as she passed. Boy -- a real live sighting of a genuine C.A.N.T! How rare (not really)...I'm guessing she wanted to see a "real loser" in his natural habitat! Yep, she must have been one of the corporate C.A.N.T.s protecting her company from the likes of garbage like me!
For this idiotic and stupid job, the VP of Engineering wanted to have a look at me first. Why? No VP of Engineering would waste their time on a bottom-rung-type of job interview like this? Why then? Because I was special! I had been selected by the C.A.N.T.s to be that once-in-a-life-time special person that a V.P. such as this massive fat ass could look over and judge for himself. My manager asked me before I went and interviewed with this monster fat ass that I should look "excited" at the prospect of getting the job, so I looked as "excited" as I could get. I went into his immaculately clean office, and he basically toyed with me like a cat does with a wounded or trapped mouse. I didn't hear anything until a couple of days before my last day of contract work, when my manager caught me in the middle of a job and took me to the nearest empty room and told me I didn't get the job. Not because I failed the interviews, but because management -- get this -- was taking the job into a new direction and by god, I wasn't that "direction". A couple of days later after I had departed, there it was, the exact same job I supposedly wasn't qualified to do but in fact was qualified to do because the job description was patterned after my own work output, listed right there clearly on the job boards. (My manager had lied to me! Who would have believed it? Managers lying? No way!....)
That last day I worked my contract job at Ricoh, I had a traditional lunch date with my CTG representative. She was really hoping my manager would be wanting to hire me back so CTG could do the contract thing again. I told her about my "blacklisting" experiences with Ricoh and how it had kept me from getting full time employment with them. She said that she has seen that happen before with another person she had been contracting out to Ricoh. I think that CTG C.A.N.T. took that information and told it to her CTG superiors who then "honored" the blacklisting because they broke connections with me and went into radio silence immediately. Never heard anything from CTG ever again.
On that same, last day a recruiter from New York was offering me a job opportunity she had in New York. Wasn't interested (and I don't think the job offer was real to begin with). Every 10 days or so I'd get a new job opportunity just a few states closer. Finally, I got one from Fort Collins, I believe, and to this one I responded. I told the recruiter I was blacklisted and pissed off to be on the god damn list. I told him I knew who did it and why. The guy answered back with some gibberish response but I left it at that. I had let "Shifty Cliffy" I knew what was wrong with me all those years trying to get work and who was responsible for it. It did not end.
(In late August, I made arrangements to see a Miami vision specialist who said he could fix my vision problems. So I went and he in fact pretty much did just that; cost $5000 bucks though, but it was worth it. Wasn't perfect but it was good enough to last most of the day (late in the wearing time they had a habit of turning into wax paper...but at least I got most of the day from those contact lens. Plus it widened the selection of the places I could drive to. Deplorable vision, from July 1993 to September 2015 -- 22 screwed up years I suffered with that shit.)
Over the course of the next year or so, "Shifty Cliffy" would arrange a some sort of work (or possible work) for me. Some of it I actually applied for and -- bubkus. At least part of the problem was that I wasn't giving him the reassurances he wanted from me that I would work the situation to his comfort. I even started telling some of the recruiters I was blacklisted -- just to see what they would do. Every one acted neither surprised nor ignorant of the fact. Almost everyone said -- "for what?" Evidently, blacklisting, in one form or another, is a dirty, rotten method of hiring control practised by.... everyone!
(One time I did this, a sweet little lady C.A.N.T. from Oracle named April sent me a message saying "Oracle will no longer be offering job opportunities for me in hardware design!" -- really? Just hardware? Wonder who made that decision.
Later, I went shopping during the middle of the day at the local King Sooper next to my house. As I move to the exit, I see this guy who is tall, with closed cropped hair and goatee standing there like a Ken doll with a little pot belly. I don't know who it is so I just walk by. He follows me out to the parking lot and he calls my name; I still don't recognize him. I don't think he understands my lack of recognition with him and he spins away, clearly upset, and walks back to his truck. Just at that point I know who it is -- it's "Shifty Cliffy"! He didn't look like that when I last saw him nearly 8 years ago. He didn't stick around long and he left in a huff. I'm given the impression he doesn't like confrontation very much, and his weak ass attempt to confront me directly seems to have borne that out.
This all got tiring after a while, so started to ignore all the beginner and bottom-feeding jobs dreamed up by "Shifty Cliffy" for me. So on LinkedIn I openly described myself as being blacklisted and told a very short story about how all that had happened. Was like that for a couple of years. (I was still getting job opportunities from recruiters outside the state at a rate of about one per week....I even tried a few. But once more information was revealed they pretty much dumped me like a hot potato.)
Sometime in 2016 I began learning Swift code and began doing apps for all kinds of iOS stuff. Took a bunch of courses. In May of 2018, I put my first app/game into the Apple store. Not much luck there either.
Last year my wife had enough and forced me back to the job boards. I took off all the stuff about blacklisting on LinkedIn and replaced with job-getting bull. I replied to every technical or reasonably paying non-technical job out there. About ten to thirty job applications per day for several months. I tried Costco and Walmart and Home Depot...no luck at all. (There is also the issue of age discrimination -- I am 59 years old...which doesn't help much.) Finally my wife realized we had enough to retire on (not really...but...) and let it go.
Then last January, I was contacted by Lockheed Martin and their Human Resource person whom I'll label "Kitty-Corner". She wanted to talk to me about a senior position working for them as an FPGA designer, but first I had to pass a pre-interview phone call with the hiring gang. Seemed they were on the up-and-up so I agreed. When they called I talked and when it was done they decided it was time for the next step -- an actual face-to-face conversation with them and other hiring folk. I said "Great!" "Kitty-Corner" said she'd put together something the next week and I would be interviewed. A couple of days later she emailed me, but not exactly what I expected. Said that something had come up and she couldn't put together the meeting that week, but that they were still interested in me, so don't worry. But then she told me to not "pass up any good job opportunities" that might come by..."Shifty Cliffy" was clearly sticking his nose and face where they did not belong and all this hell was happening to me all over again...bastard.
I did as she instructed and went and looked at the job posts in LinkedIn -- there were two that I noticed, and both were for "test engineers" -- really nothing more than over-sold, and under paying jobs for engineers who want to do technician work. One was from Spectra Logic (remember them?) and one was from Seagate ("BMOCs" newest employer -- remember him?) Seems "Shifty Cliffy" was calling out all favors to get me a really, really shitty job working for at least one of those two clown schools...Naw "Shifty Cliffy"...you should relax -- you've done enough for me, please, please stop now.
No comments:
Post a Comment