Job Threat
The next day at work:
When I arrived at the parking garage the next day, my access card didn’t work to allow me to enter the garage and when I went to work I was unable to log into my computer. Returning to my desk, I found my boss going through my papers and I asked him why he was doing that. He told me that he was looking for any documentation about what I’d done in the garage. I said, “What I’d done in the garage?” completely at a loss about what he was referring to. Jebb said to me that I’d better just go home for the day. I went to the owner of the company, Kerry Dietz’s office and asked why I was being told to go home for the day. She told me that I was lucky I wasn’t being arrested after what I had done. I asked Kerry Dietz what I had done. Kerry told me that I had threatened to destroy all the cars in the parking lot. I told her that I did not threaten anything, but that I did have my car damaged and tried to report this to the garage attendant. Kerry Dietz then said she had just gotten off the phone with Sue Morse and she said that I had threatened her at her house. At this I was I was confused. I told Kerry Dietz that I had not threatened Sue Morse at her house but that I did call her at her office and tell her that my vehicle had gotten damaged in the garage and that I asked to get reimbursed. Kerry Dietz told me I should go home.
Over the next few days I was contacted by Dietz and Company Architects and told that I should write my version of what happened in the garage. I wrote a very dispassionate, completely factual description of the events to this point. Later I was told that if I had written a more emotional description of what had gone on, I might have been excused for acting as I did under the circumstances. I felt at this point that I shouldn’t even need to defend myself, because if they were even questioning that I had actually threatened to destroy all the cars in the parking lot, or that I had actually threatened this woman at her house, as far as I was concerned the job was already a loss. If they did not trust me enough to believe my version of events, there was no way they would trust me to manage my department, or it’s budget.
Finally I was called in to Dietz and Company Architects to meet with my boss and the company owner. They told me that the senior staff had had a meeting about me and that I was being dismissed. They said that Massachusetts was an at will employment state, and that it just wasn’t working out any more. In that final meeting Kerry said to me that I was being dismissed because I had threatened to destroy all of the cars in the parking garage. I told her that I had not threatened to destroy the cars the garage, but that my car had been damaged and I had asked the security guard to look at the damage, to which he replied nobody was responsible for damage to cars in the garage. I had asked the rhetorical question “If nobody is responsible for the cars in the parking garage, why couldn’t I destroy all the cars in the garage.” Kerry Dietz replied that it probably wasn’t good judgment to ask a rhetorical question of a garage attendant that probably hadn’t finished high school. I held my tongue from saying “Yes Kerry but you have your masters degree and you are the one firing me on their word.”. At the end of that meeting my boss’s last words to me were “Life isn’t fair.” I would encourage everyone to regularly call Jebb Dennis and tell him “Life isn’t fair.”
When I went back to clean out my desk a few days later, I talked to another one of the senior architects at the firm about the what had gone on at the parking garage. He told me that he would have been angry if that happened to him, and that he was sorry I was being dismissed.
Now what I have is a hole in my resume since I cannot use Dietz and Company Architects as a reference, for no reason that in any way reflects my job performance. As a result of what Kerry Dietz believed I had said, she called as many of my business contacts as she knew outside of the company souring my business relationship with them as well. This resulted in me losing half of my customers at my freelance business in addition to having lost my primary employment at Dietz and Company Architects.
In conclusion, I would urge anyone thinking of working at Dietz and Company Architects to reconsider as they value the word of a parking attendant more than the word one of their own department heads, and further do not consider parking at Springfield Propark, as it could cost you your job or even put your life at risk.
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