[Mr 5 0]

tb163:

A very sad story all around, but of course I have no sympathy at all for the (ex) District Manager. I find it ironic that he did the company's bidding in harrassing your former bosss into an early grave, and now he's unemployed for his trouble.

A sort of justice, I suppose.

When a man (or woman) devotes a working lifetime to one place of business and does well with it then sees it all torn down in an instant by some stranger with a title who threatens not only everything he's built up and polished and takes justified pride in but his own livelihood threatened too, well, that's hard to simply shrug off at 47. By then you usually have financial responsibilities and people depending on you, not to mention your own self-esteem being shattered.

Of course none of that is worth one's life, but I can see the despair that could drive a middle-aged man to view his life as wasted and the future looking grim in this situation. Most men take pride in what they do and to have your life's work spit on and then told that you're fired if you don't totally change it overnight is stressful beyond compare on many different levels.

The fact that all this was probably just a corporate ploy to screw the man out of his retirement is not surprising at all. I've seen it happen before. Sometimes it's to due to a pending retirement, sometimes they just want you out for some other reason so the 'Big Boss' suddenly finds you the worst employee they ever had (never mind that you were doing fine for years before this) compiles a 'paper trail' (bad job performance reviews, warnings, etc) and then when they have enough 'proof' that you're incompetent - by their subjective reasoning - you're fired 'for cause'.

It stinks and it's partly why - almost without exception - there is no company/employee loyalty anymore, anywhere. Retail probably is one of the worst offenders but I've seen plenty of other business that pulled the same thing on good employees that they felt were no longer needed - or wanted.

Unit 5302 is correct about your former boss filing a lawsuit against the company, but you have to be fired first (just treating you harshly isn't really grounds for a lawsuit, otherwise we could ALL sue our bosses). Meanwhile, the poor guy has no job, probably no unemployment insurance (remember, he would have been fired for 'cause'; 'poor job performance' - and his prospect of finding a similar meat managers job would be harmed by the fact that - you guessed it - he was fired for 'cause'). Tough deal. Of course, if he could find a good-enough job to keep him going financially until the suit was heard he might survive, but the very fact that he was fired for cause then filed a lawsuit would make him poison to other stores who would now be very wary of him. They would fear that he might perform poorly for them, then sue if they let him go. Who wants to deal with that? Add to all that; he's pushing 50.
Now you can see why - assuming your former boss knew all this - he was in deep despair to the point of seeing no hope and ending it all.

A tragic story and one that happens all too often.

Like most folks, I've had jobs I loved, jobs I liked and jobs that I loathed but I never felt that what I did for a living determined my worth as a human being. The job was what I did - not who I was (or still am for that matter). If it went badly and I lost that job, I would find another. I quickly learned that getting screwed over by bosses was quite routine in the working world but could often be avoided (which I have) and that being fired was not really the end of the world.

This whole story is, as I said (boldly stating the obvious) tragic, but a lesson in life for some and an example of how 'what goes around - comes around'. One good man died, another creep - who precipitated the whole sad situation - is fired.
Not really much 'justice' there, but sometimes in life, we have to take what we can get.