How did this all happen?

I figure many of you are probably wondering how I ended up unemployed.  To put it simply, I made a few mistakes.

Not the mistakes they fired me for though, the other mistakes.  The ones they really fired me for.

I didn't hide law school.


"What?" you say.  "How does that make any difference?"

Well, it makes a difference because of the way the HR associates at a certain large insurance company in a certain small Midwestern city are compensated and evaluated.  You see, when a person gets hired at my former company, that's a measurable statistic, and the HR person's performance is evaluated by it.

So why don't they hire anyone with a pulse regardless of how good for the company they will be?  Retention rates.  HR is judged in part by how many of all those measurable statistics they hired are still around after a given amount of time.

Of course, some people can't be saved and some you don't want to save.  That's me.  Or rather, that's what they turned me into.  The actual "reason" I was fired was that I was chatting when I was supposed to be working.

More specifically, when I have my phone set to a certain status, I won't get any phone calls.  This status (called after-call work, or ACW) should really only be used for business purposes since it's not a "ready" state where customers can reach me.  The quality department where I worked saw me (with screen capture software) chatting with friends about law school when I technically should have been in available and ready to take a call.

Well then,I deserved it, right?

Not exactly.  You see, chatting in ACW, surfing the web in ACW, even getting up and going to another floor to chat with friends in person in ACW is a very common practice at this particular company.  So common, that I know of some people who have been given warnings for doing this too much and they're still with the company.

What happened?  All I can tell you is what I think, but because I was chatting about law school, and because there was a copy of Acing Your First Year of Law School on my desk (Noyes and Noyes, great book that I highly recommend), HR made the (correct) assumption that I wasn't planning to stay for very long.  In fact, I was planning on staying another seven months, and I was doing pretty well.

They fired me because they didn't want to have to count me as someone who quit.  Because I was doing well, they didn't think that I would mess up again before choosing to leave.  So they fired me now.

Let's just hope the unemployment goes through.