Professional Darwinism: Update to OP on p.74

[sparklestar]

As a mother, I can understand changing one's mind about wanting to work after the baby's born, there's nothing wrong with that.  What I have issue with, and everyone there did, was that she told the doctor she'd come back when she knew she wouldn't be.   

There's changing your mind, and then there's lying.

I can see how changing your mind would happen but I think you need to at least offer the employer a handover period if they've been kind enough to hold the job open for you.  And yes, you should feel guilty because I'm willing to bet that that employer won't look very kindly on the next employee who announces she's pregnant. 

My hubby has a friend who has 4 kids and is self-employed - she was back at work 4 days after having her fourth one, because she'd planned well enough in advance to have a really excellent maternity nurse and being off work means no income.  She had meant to take a few weeks off but felt fine and figured she might as well get back to work - it was her fourth, she figured it was no big deal.  It can be done.  And millions of self-employed women have to do it every single year. 

[Dindrane]

So here's what I don't understand: it is not rude, nor is it professional darwinism, to accept a benefit offered by a company even though you intend to quit after getting said benefit.

It is rude to lie to someone, but it's also rude to ask intrusive questions.  If you're going with business etiquette, it is absolutely not rude to lie if someone asks you a question and you think an honest answer will be detrimental to your continued well-being.

Maybe the employee in question had no reason to think that she wouldn't get those benefits if she told the truth.  If that was the case, then she probably should have been honest with the doctor.  But maybe she was legitimately concerned that admit to any hesitance to return to work after her maternity leave would mean she'd get fired before she even had a chance to take leave at all.

And this is why women still don't have equality in the workplace - because we ask for special treatment as mothers and then do things like this!!!

Professional Darwinism doesn't just affect these special snowflakes though - unfortunately every single woman of child-bearing age gets tarred with the same brush and discriminated against (albeit not openly) as a result. 

This does not just apply to women.  There are a lot of reasons entirely unrelated to pregnancy (or gender-specific conditions) why someone would need to take an extended leave, and might not want to (or be able to) return after it was up.

The only reason it gets associated with women is that pregnancy is by far the most obvious and common of those reasons for needing extended leave.

[StressedGroom]

When I was in the Navy we were starting to do system testing prior to exiting the shipyard.  We had some valves that were operating properly so they had to stop the testing to disassemble them.  They found that some cleanliness plugs were still installed (plastic caps to prevent dirt from entering the system).  The problem was that the worker had signed documentation that they had been removed; then two quality inspector had signed that they had verified the plugs were removed.  They probably still work there.

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I worked on a contract at a pharmaceutical plant where they had just implemented flextime for their employees.  They had to be at work from the core hours of 10AM - 2 PM, they could come in as early as they wanted or stay as late as they wanted, as long as they were their for the core hours.  This plant was in a small town, so a lot of married couples worked their and they love that one of them could be there in the morning to get the kids on the bus and the other could be there when the kids got off the bus.  Three or four month into this new policy they realize that one of the employees has only been working the core hours.  The people who came in early assumed she was staying late, the people who stayed late assumed she was coming in early.  When confronted she said that she had misunderstood and thought she only had to work those hours.  She was fired, because the entire time she had been putting in time-sheets claiming 40 hours.

------

This one would take the cake, except they got away with it.  At one of my customer sites they have the timecards where you go from the parking lot into the plant.  They were having some issues with overtime, so they were keeping an eye on what was going on.  They caught a guy with a fist full of time cards punching people in 4 hours before the shift started.  Security told him he would be fired for it, his response "I don't work here".  The guy worked at the gas station down the street and a group of employees were paying him to do this.   He would come in grab their time cards, and a bunch at random and punch them all it.  They ended up having to post a security guard and threaten to charge him with trespassing to stop him from continuing to do it.

[Piratelvr1121]

I can see how changing your mind would happen but I think you need to at least offer the employer a handover period if they've been kind enough to hold the job open for you.  And yes, you should feel guilty because I'm willing to bet that that employer won't look very kindly on the next employee who announces she's pregnant.

I think this, more than anything honestly, was one of the big reasons they were ticked with this girl.   When she made it clear after the birth that she wasn't coming back, they had to scramble to hire someone to be the doc's new assistant, and in the meantime the other MA's were trying to cover that doctor's patients as well as their own.  

[artk2002]

So here's what I don't understand: it is not rude, nor is it professional darwinism, to accept a benefit offered by a company even though you intend to quit after getting said benefit.

I disagree.  It's both rude (lying) and professional suicide.  The person in the previous post who did this will never get a decent reference, having cheated the company.  These benefits are not rewards for work already done, but given in the expectation that you will continue to work.  Their entire purpose is to retain good employees.

[SisJackson]

This does not just apply to women.  There are a lot of reasons entirely unrelated to pregnancy (or gender-specific conditions) why someone would need to take an extended leave, and might not want to (or be able to) return after it was up.

The only reason it gets associated with women is that pregnancy is by far the most obvious and common of those reasons for needing extended leave.

Because of some instances of this (people quitting after being on long-term leave for various reasons, including but not limited to pregnancy) a company I used to work for had a policy put in place to protect themselves.  If an employee went on a long-term leave during which time the company continued to subsidize medical insurance, and the employee voluntarily chose to terminate employment at the end of the leave period, then the company had the right to recover the premiums paid on the employee's behalf for the entirety of the leave.

I guess the straw that broke the camel's back in that company was that a guy went on a medical leave, and near the end of it, got another job that started the day he was supposed to return to work.  The powers that be were furious and tried to recover what they felt they were owed, but since there were no official policies in place, they couldn't.  After that they got their legal department to determine the best way to protect themselves.

Since then, the only way for a new mother to "change her mind" about staying home with her baby is to actually return to work for at least two weeks at the end of her maternity leave, unless she wishes to repay the insurance premiums paid on her behalf during her leave.  As a result there have apparently been a lot of new moms trying to get their doctors to declare them unfit to return to work (the only way the company will permit someone to keep their insurance premiums without coming back.)  During the time I worked there, I knew several women who were really bitter about having to come back for the two-week transition period.

[Dindrane]

I have no intention of arguing the subject of medical leave further.  I apologize if what I have said is incorrect, but it would be impossible for me to edit out all instances of it in this thread.

[Suze]

had one gal where I work at swipe a Dr's scrip pad and was writing out slips to get off work

I walked in behind her the day she got fired -- the boss man (and he was a gruff but fair man - most of us young help were scared of him) had her timecard under his arm

when she couldn't find hers he held it out and told her that she wouldn't be needing it any more...

I scurried away.

[2littlemonkeys]

some of the bragging stories remind me of a woman I used to work with.

I work in advertising and sometimes the team is out on location for shoots for a week or two.  I've never been on a shoot but it seems like a big bonding time for the team, they all go out after production shuts down for the day and the alcohol consumption portrayed on Mad Men isn't exactly exaggerated.  Most of the time, everyone acts like a grownup, or at least doesn't brag about what an idiot they were.

This particular woman would always come back from shoots talking about how drunk she got and how one time she woke up in a strange place and didn't know how she got there and another time, her shirt was missing and she thought she'd been attacked but didn't remember anyone being in the room with her and she eventually found the shirt on the floor and remembered that she was trying to change her clothes and forgot what she was doing and ha ha HA wasn't it funny!

No.  Not really.  It's actually kind of sad.  And alarming.  And really not something I'd be bragging about at work.

She didn't get canned for that but she was eventually let go for performance issues.

[StressedGroom]

We used to have annual sales meeting where there would be a lot of drinking and "bonding" amongst our sales force and some of office people we rarely see (most of us are remote employees).  I was at one of these meetings the first night sitting in the hotel bar with a couple of coworkers when a woman at a table across the bar started calling over to one of my coworkers (Alan):

Drunk woman: Hey Alan, you know what this means?  (Places her hand on her forehead with here middle finger and thumb extended); It means you're a F****** (middle finger extended in front of her) Loser!!! (thumb and index at her forehead). 

At this point she was pulled back to her seat by one of the other women at her table. 

I leaned over and asked him:

SG: Who was that?
Alan: Christine Smith
SG: From HR?
Alan: Yes.

She didn't last long, we had a long history of bad HR people.

[Auntie Mame]

We used to have annual sales meeting where there would be a lot of drinking and "bonding" amongst our sales force and some of office people we rarely see (most of us are remote employees).  I was at one of these meetings the first night sitting in the hotel bar with a couple of coworkers when a woman at a table across the bar started calling over to one of my coworkers (Alan):

Drunk woman: Hey Alan, you know what this means?  (Places her hand on her forehead with here middle finger and thumb extended); It means you're a F****** (middle finger extended in front of her) Loser!!! (thumb and index at her forehead). 

At this point she was pulled back to her seat by one of the other women at her table. 

I leaned over and asked him:

SG: Who was that?
Alan: Christine Smith
SG: From HR?
Alan: Yes.

She didn't last long, we had a long history of bad HR people.

You can't see me, but my jaw is currently on the floor.

Pixie's rule for Happy Hour with coworkers: 2 drinks, sip them slowly, and drink 2 large glasses of water with them.

[heathert]

The consensus here, if I remember correctly, was that, well, it wasn't affecting YOUR work and she was pregnant so give her a break. I still don't think this is okay.

Yes, that doesn't seem ok to me either. I guess if it were me, I would've asked the boss if she's ok, as if it were a safety concern. "Is Isabella ok? She's laying on the desk and making funny noises. Should I call 911?" 

Heather

[audhs]

No.  Not really.  It's actually kind of sad.  And alarming.  And really not something I'd be bragging about at work.

She didn't get canned for that but she was eventually let go for performance issues.

Do you think her preformace issues were possibly related to the fact that she regularily got black out drunk.? 

[onikenbai]

*One girl was overheard telling a customer "What do you want me to do, hold your hand?".  Keep in mind this is a tech support help line.

Maybe she had one of the customers from Unsupportable:

http://www.customerssuck.com/index.php?categoryid=18
http://www.customerssuck.com/index.php?categoryid=19

My favorite Professional Darwinism story is a cautionary tale told to all ALTs entering Japan.  Japan has very, extremely strict drug laws.  Stuff that will get you a slap on the wrist in America will get you jail time in Japan.  Every ALT from any country who enters Japan is informed of this and told not only to stay away from drugs yourself, but to steer clear of anyone you know is doing drugs, since you can and will be brought in for questioning simply for having in your cell phone the number of someone who got caught with drugs.  You are lectured, you're told being caught with drugs (not even arrested) is grounds for immediate dismissal, you're made to sign a contract, etc.  In other words, there's no shades of gray about it.

Yeah, well, one brilliant ALT decided to grow his own marijuana behind his apartment building.  It got discovered by a little granny doing her gardening.  He was arrested, thrown in jail, fired, and then deported.  Hope the weed was worth it.

What's an ALT?

Assistant Language Teacher.  Actual duties of the ALT range from walking, talking tape recorder to massively overworked, completely unqualified teacher.  I was the latter.  We had one of the former who got booted for drugs.  He was a hiker so he started a good size grow-op half way up a decent sized mountain.  Every weekend he would go "hiking" to tend to his crop.  People lauded his energy and dedication to the sport until the police caught on.  The Japanese government was content enough to deport him immediately rather than chuck him in prison for a few years.  Once you get deported from Japan you are never allowed back so it was probably cheaper to deport him.

Other ALTs in another year chose their first weekend in the country to get completely plastered and to cook up as much rice in oil as they could find and have a rice wrestling contest in front of all the rice farmer neighbours.  That little escapade garnered an official bowing on the floor apology at the prefectural board of education on Monday, and a good number of ALTs that weren't even at the stupid party were screamed at by their entire Japanese staff merely because they were ALTs from the same city.

The same merry bunch decided to conduct the first annual naked Olympics at 3am at the prefectural ALT meeting in a rather swanky hotel.  I had earplugs in my ears and they woke me up, despite being two floors above me.  The sporting event was broken up by the Minister of Education.

The thing that finally got the morons fired was that they all went to Tokyo to party and got plastered (legal) and completely strung out on cocaine (definitely not legal).  They didn't actually get caught in Tokyo, but they came back to the province and wrote all about it in great detail in their blogs.  The ministry of education reads our blogs.  In Japan, actually being caught in the act is not required to be held accountable.  Most were at least smart enough to leave under threat than to make the country actually deport them.

Edited to fix weird italics problem

[nutraxfornerves]

I just remembered this one. Also at the government agency that had hired the "blankety blank flute player." The government had a fleet department that handled all auto purchases. Our inspectors had cars permanently assigned to them. If we needed a replacement car, we jumped through a huge amount of bureaucratic hoops and Fleet added the car that year's giant purchase.

One of my coworkers picked up his new car and drove about 10 miles before the engine suddenly died. Turned out there was no oil in it. Funny thing, though, Fleet had signed off on the car being ready to go. That triggered an investigation. They found all sorts of vehicle defects that were never detected when the shipments came in. Seems the guy in charge of inspecting new cars was just filling out the inspection forms without bothering to even look at the cars. They were very lucky that none of the defective cars resulted in an accident.