Some days at work will really feel like a rollercoaster of emotions!

This user shares how he got fired and re-hired on the same day!

Check out the full story. 

How I got fired and un-fired in the same day.

So this one goes back to ’99 or so.

I was working in the corporate headquarters of a very large telco, responsible for the email system for HQ – about 1100 users at the time. Like all the sysadmins at HQ, I was a contractor, working through a bodyshop outsourcer.

This is where it gets tricky!

My boss was a guy I’ll call S. S was the site manager for the outsourcer, and was the direct manager of all the contractor sysadmins.

The customer contact was a guy I’ll call J. J was what they called an IT planner – basically a systems architect. He had dotted-line responsibility over all the sysadmins, including me.

I also had a backup there, who I’ll call B. B was a competent sysadmin, capable of handling most day to day stuff.

We normally kept staff in the office from 8-6 on workdays, with an on-call rotation for certain specialty areas, including email.

He explains how things worked around the office.

Back then, we carried a pager (yes, an old school beeper) for on call duty. My on call rotation was one week on, one week off. This story happened in my “off” week, when B carried the pager.

One Saturday night, at around 3:30am, my home phone rang.

My wife answered, and it was J calling. She grumpily handed the phone to me.

Now my wife and I had just gotten home, having been out for much of the night with our neighbors. I was, for lack of a more refined term, positively hammered at this point.

J informed me that there was an email outage, and that I needed to remote in and get it back up immediately, and then drive to the office to start a root cause analysis.

UH OH…

I informed him that I was in no condition to drive (let alone touch a production rig) and asked what B told him when he called the on-call pager.

J told me that he didn’t call the on call pager because this was way too serious of a problem to trust the backup sysadmin.

He wanted me working on this, and that if I can’t be relied upon to do my job when I was needed, he’d find someone else who could, and hung up the phone. I went back to sleep.

The next morning I had an email from B, telling me that J had called him at home (rather than paging the oncall rotation.) It was a very simple issue – our backup software went screwy and started writing out hundreds of GB of temp files, which filled up a critical volume on our production email server.

That’s INSANE!

Temp files deleted, email services restarted, problem kicked over to our backup software SME to figure out what happened. Total downtime after B got the call was about 15 minutes.

The next day, I arrived at the office to a note from S, my manager, asking me to come see him ASAP.

I went to S’ office, and sitting there was J, who was in the process of demanding that I be fired immediately for “being drunk at work.” From there, the conversation went something like this:

S: But Blempglorf wasn’t at work. He was at home, and wasn’t in the on-call rotation this weekend.
J: I don’t want to hear it about the on-call rotation. Blempglorf needs to be ready to work when I tell him to. I can’t rely on an alcoholic, and I want him gone.

S: If he’s not on call, he’s free to do whatever he wants with his time. J: Not as long as he works for me.

He wasn’t expecting that!

J then demands that I hand my office badge to him, and calls security from S’ phone to have me escorted out of the building.

I’m in absolute disbelief at this point.

S gets up and goes off to points unknown, just as security arrives to see me out to the parking lot. As I’m driving off, I see J’s boss, I’ll call her M.

M is running across the street to the parking lot. Strange, but I was more focused on how the hell I was going to explain this to my wife when I got home.

He knew this was going in a different direction…

I got home, and my wife was sitting on the couch, just absolutely livid. Now this was REALLY weird, because I hadn’t told her what happened yet.

“Those idiots fired you!?!?!” I’m confused as hell at this point. My wife told me that M called her, and that I need to call her back as soon as possible.

Come to find out, when S had went off, he was going to M’s office to explain the situation and keep him from firing me. M heard from S, and freaked the hell out.

When I saw her running across the street, she was trying to catch me in the parking lot before I left to tell me to come back in.

He was really confused about everything here!

When M couldn’t find my car, she went back into the office and called the house, intending to leave me a voicemail, but got my wife instead.

M told my wife what had happened, promised to rein J in, and asked her to tell me to come back into the office to sort it out.

So I let them stew for a while. M called about 20 minutes after I got home. We let her go to the machine. S called as well, just as my wife and I went out to get some lunch.

Over lunch, my wife and I talked about how we would handle this, and (largely for financial reasons) we decided to talk to them to see if we could work this out.

Finally the cherry on top!

We got back home to 3 more voicemails from M and S. About 30 seconds after we walked in the door, the phone rang again. This time it was J, obviously on speakerphone.

J apologized to me, and asked me to come back to work the next day. I agreed, but as he hung up, I could hear M say to him:

“J, you’re an idiot.”

I worked there for another year after that, before another J screw up made me leave once and for all. That was a whole ‘nother story.

YIKES! That sounds tricky!

How come nobody saw that coming?

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this one.

This user has a great response for this company.

This user knows there is something very surprising here!

This suer shares a story from their work place.

That’s right! This user knows why M jumped in.

Somebody’s being really clever here!

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.