Utter Chaos

I just quit my job, and I thought I would vent a little bit. I will be a little vague as I don’t want to be too recognizable.

So, one of the major reasons why I quit was because our lower management regularly instructed us to cut major corners. However, these instructions always came verbally, never written down. Of course, whenever shit inevitably hit the fan, they denied their involvement in the problem.

As such, my colleagues and I have learned to avoid management like the plague and to try to hide our most important assignments from their eyes, so that at least those could be done properly.

Unfortunately, when I was on holiday recently, a very complex assignment came in from one of our most difficult customers. I was solely responsible for all of the assignments coming from that specific customer. Long story short, instead of telling the customer to wait for my return, my line manager and my backup colleague managed to screw things up so bad that the customer escalated to our upper management.

When I came back from my leave, my line manager called me and told me that I would have to get things back on track by the end of the day. When I told him it was impossible, as I don’t even know anything about the case, he told me to just not read the background materials and prepare the solution as if everything about the case was standard. He made me understand that missing the deadline at the end of the day was not an option.

There is of course no written trace of this incident or the instruction anywhere.

The problem is that nothing about the case is standard. As such, the standard solution I went with will be utter garbage.

I handed in my 2 weeks notice the next day.

Here comes the even weirder part. My boss decided to reallocate this case to the least competent colleague in the team. (The whole team was shocked when they heard of this decision)

Anyway, I wanted to warn my colleague that she is walking into an utter shitstorm. Two days before my last day, I asked her if she has 5 minutes to talk, as there is some critical info about the case that I want to share with her.

She told me that there would still be time to talk about it the next day. I said okay.

Then the next day, on my last day, I messaged her again.

To my surprise, she responded by telling me off for not scheduling a call with her and just expecting to be able to contact her whenever I feel like it. Again, this was meant to be a call to help her ON TOP of the handover documentation I have prepared.

Instead of responding, I simply shut down my laptop, went up to the IT team, had my company account deleted and went home without warning her about what she is walking into.

Sometimes I wonder how this company survives. I am just glad I am out of there. Thanks for listening to my rambling.