turning point.

I only took one week’s leave after Hailey passed away.  Although we received flowers and a sympathy card from my co-workers, no one else in the company suggested that I do anything other than return to work.

No grief counselling.

No suggestion to ease myself back into work.

Not much of anything at all, other than, “When can we expect this project to be completed?”

I returned to work, while Cathryn spent her days largely alone, meaning that as much as we were together, we grieved alone in many ways.

I honestly did not know any better.  I thought that this was what people did, that they remained dedicated to the company, and the company would look after them.

In retrospect, I should have seen a doctor, and asked for medical leave, but I wanted to do what I could for the company.  After all, they had given me a week off, and some flowers and a card.

Of course, I was making progress on my work, but it was slow.  I was distracted at work, and my thoughts drifted.  I spent time searching for help online, though we were not really supposed to do that.  The internet was really only for “work-related purposes”.

One supposes that the sanity of an employee is work-related, right?

About two months after we lost Hailey, I received an email from IT security, and it was cc’d to my supervisor.  I opened it, read it, and waited for my supervisor to come to my office, as I knew he would.  You see, IT security had recently implemented a new policy on internet usage.

Anyone who used a WHOPPING 90 minutes a month would receive a detailed breakdown of what, where, when and for how long, and his supervisor would also receive a copy.  It was then up to the supervisor to determine if the surfing was “work-related”.

I believe that my first report stated that I had used the internet for more than 90 minutes A DAY – mostly at lunch time, but also in the morning and in mid-afternoon – during coffee breaks.

I laughed out loud at the breakdown because it claimed I had visited Dell’s website hundreds if not thousands of times.

Banner ads.  Great software, guys, it couldn’t distinguish between web sites and banner ads.

Anyway, about half an hour after I received the email, my supervisor came into my office and sat down.  He said, “I believe you know why I am here”, and I said, “Yes.”

He went on to say that I “could be FIRED for ABUSING the INTRANET”.

(Get it right, Einstein, there is a difference between internet and intranet, but I suppose that nuance is lost on many PHB’s.)

So, of course I agreed to stop surfing at work that instant, but somehow the “trust was broken”.  It did not matter that I was in there for 10 hours a day working on his projects, I had “broken the policy on internet usage” and that was a bad thing.

I could be FIRED, after all.

I was also not quite where he figured I should be on my project, even though I was writing code that no one had ever written before, and even he did not really know how to help me with it.  I was doing things that had not been done in that field before, and I knew it.  The code is still being used in the industry to this day, to my knowledge, and it is solid, well-documented stuff.

My supervisor wrote me up, and about the only thing he mentioned in the letter was that I had experienced some “family trouble”.

I guess “family trouble” is management-speak for “a child died in the employee’s arms”.

In the letter, it said that if I was able to meet my targets by the end of the year, it wouldn’t have any effect on my rating.

So as I healed, I got faster, and I actually finished my code a couple of weeks ahead of schedule, adding in a few rather elegant features that were not part of the original scope.  I went above and beyond the requirements.

I exceeded requirements.

I had my final performance appraisal for the year, and my supervisor and I both agreed that I had done a good job of pulling up my socks, but he let me know that there was still a “normalization” and that final decision on rating was made two levels higher in the organization.

When I received my final performance appraisal for that year, the document had been sanitized and there was no mention of what had happened to me and my family, but there it was in black and white, for all to see, that early on in the year I had “abused the intranet” and I was slower than expected on my projects.  It went on to say that I had met my targets, but I guess that didn’t matter.

All that mattered was that punishment was metered out and I received a grade that indicated I was not fully meeting requirements.

It followed me to my next assignment too, after I had left that group.  My new supervisor hired me on the basis of my interview and references from my old supervisor, but when she later read my old performance appraisal, she said if she had seen that, she would never have hired me.

I asked her if she wanted to know why my performance was slow in the first part of that year, and she said she was not interested.  To her, all that mattered was that I hadn’t put in my time every day, focusing on nothing but work.

That was a turning point for me.  At that moment in time, the company was dead to me.  I continued to work there for many more years, but I just viewed it as a convenient way to make money for my family.  Whenever anyone spoke positively about the company, I just laughed and said nothing.

Several years after we lost our daughter, my supervisor at the time (several supervisors and projects later) passed away suddenly.

The company offered grief counselling for us, and insisted that we attend as a group.  We were also given time off to attend his services, which was nice of the company.  Finally, we were told that we were not expected to work up to full capacity for a while because of what had happened to us.

I thought it was quite interesting that I received greater consideration for my supervisor than I did for my own child.

Also interesting was that the person who arranged for the counselling, and gave us such consideration, was that same supervisor who had not been interested to know why I had not performed as expected, the year that Hailey passed away.

This is why I will never, ever put the interests of any company before my own, or those of my family.

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(This piece is presented to you unedited.)