Absolute Vindication Over Absolute Vindictiveness
A client repeatedly sent me emails over a week, and I hadn’t responded to any of them. This went up to the Chief Operations Officer, and I was sitting in a termination meeting when our system administrator discovered the reason.
System Administrator: “She’s been sending them to Phillip, and since that’s not his email name, they’ve all ended up in the system’s dead letter folder.”
I couldn’t tell if the Chief Operations Officer wanted to kill me just because, or the system administrator for not having the foresight to alias my name to alternate spellings. He dismissed me with a:
Chief Operations Officer: “We’ll deal with the client from here on.”
An hour later, I was back in the Chief Operations Officer’s office, and once again, my manager and someone from human resources were there.
Chief Operations Officer: “Sorry to say, she’s levied another complaint against you. She claims that either you’re mentally challenged or lying about your name.”
Me: “Uh… what?”
He hands me a printout of an email:
Chief Operations Officer: “As you can see from this email, she makes clear that “No one’s parents would spell their name Philip.” Therefore, either you’re mentally slow, or you’re lying.”
I read the email. She goes on to say that out of the mentally slow or lying, it likely was the latter, and that I used this nasty scheme to get out of work.
She concluded her email with:
Client: “Have you not noticed that he never gets any email and so never has to work? I’ll consider letting this go only if he is fired with proof that he was, in fact, fired, and not just allowed to quit. I also expected the company to blackball him from the industry.”
Chief Operations Officer: “What in God’s name did you ever do to this woman?”
Me: “Unless we met in a prior lifetime, nothing. She’s a new client; we’ve never met, and I wasn’t the one who did her setup. We’ve never spoken on the phone, and her name rings no bells.”
Chief Operations Officer: “Okay. Obviously, we’re not firing you, but stay far, far away from her.”
A few weeks later my special status with this client was no longer a mystery. She behaved this way with every employee whom she perceived had slighted her in the most minor way. The choices we ended up with were, keep her on as a client but fire and blackball the ENTIRE team, or lose her as a client. Guess which option we went with?
