Contractors Sacked
This article, about contractors sacked, was posted as comments after one of our articles.
Technical Sackings
Before I ever worked in IT I had the proud record of getting the sack from every job I ever had.
Some of these were technical sackings in that they dished them out after I walked. On one occasion I actually needed to get the sack (in order to ensure that the DHSS would cover my mortgage payments) and the job was so bad, the employers so exploitative, that I actually had to work quite hard to get them to sack me.
Hilariously when the sacking finally came, the general manager thought I was going to hit him so he got one of the big guys from the office to stand behind him as some kind of a bouncer.
Fools, the pair of them.
Since working in IT (in which I’ve never had a permie role btw) I haven’t had the sack from once.
I’ve handed my notice in a few times, had a few notices given, and walked off a job in disgust twice.
Couple of Sackings
I have seen contractors sacked at several places:
A) A guy promises that he will lead the team for the weekend work at a remote site abroad. Saturday morning six engineers are waiting at site for him to turn up with the keys to the IT room.
He doesn’t.
When they call him he’s still at home and says he decided he didn’t want to work the weekend after all.
Six people flown abroad were not able to access the IT room and had a nice expenses paying weekend break. They sacked him first thing Monday morning.
B) A Freelancer is on board two months and demands a rate rise “or else” and refuses to do any more work until they resolve the “issue”.
They resolved it promptly by security marching him from the premises.
Later the same day he sends an email to the group mailing list from an internet cafe in Amsterdam slagging off the manager for being an idiot.
Technical Sacking of IT Contractor
C) Sort of a technical sacking this one. Some toff from London, boasting about how his parents bought him a Ferrari on his 21st birthday.
He stopped boasting when the local cops came into the office, arrested him, and marched him out in handcuffs.
Three days later we learn from his agent that they deported him back to the UK.
Apparently they deported him a couple of years before for crashing the aforementioned Ferrari into a parked car and leaving the scene of the accident (along with a half-snorted bag of Charlie next to the gear stick).
To get the current job he submitted a copy of his passport and work permit that he took before the first deportation stupidly thinking the authorities don’t check these things.
D) Sacked by phone in the middle of the night while on-site in the US. Phone call was made in European working hours, so she got it at 3AM local time:
“Don’t come into the office tomorrow you’re, job i over. Security cleared your desk and will send your personal belongings to your hotel”.
Never found out what the sacking was for, but this particular individual had a long and illustrious record of putting peoples noses out of joint.
Those are the contractors sacked that I’ve seen.
Have you seen any contractors sacked? Use the comments section below to tell us.
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A contractor did very well in a technical interview but the guy who turned up was an absolute do-nut. Came to realise quickly that they were different people though for reasons, it was decided to let him work out his notice of 1 week. However, when given copy paste type grunt work (for which he was on a very good day rate), looked shocked and disgusted. He was also having a bad day, his under aged sister just told him that she was pregnant as she heard it was the best way to get a council house and it was then reported to the manager that he was not doing the work, he was then summoned into a room and let go with immediate effect.
A guy of ‘African origin’ (yes it’s relevant, bear with) on the consultancy team I was with was dismissed one afternoon without warning. He’d been spending most of his days upstairs from us in the Citibank Tower working on test plans relating to a fixed income application used on that floor. By coincidence, he knew someone there so it all seemed legitimate, perhaps a bit cosy.
Within five minutes of being escorted off the premises, the boss received a call from this guy’s solicitor advising that he was going to sue and take us to court for racial discrimination. Our boss said to go ahead and in turn he’d provide log printouts demonstrating that his client had been spending six hours a day surfing on the internet. We heard nothing further.
Turned up for a contract one Monday morning. The Team Leader was an odd little fellow but I bore with him. A couple of hours into the day I get a call asking me to leave the site. Upon enquiring about the reason why, apparently it was because ‘I didn’t have an extrovert enough personality’. Let’s see you wriggle out of that one at an Employment Tribunal. Anyway, I didn’t contest it, I was just glad to leave. The worst part was that I didn’t get paid.