The Layoff

Well the end of June this year brought us a little bit of hard times. We had known for a long time that the contract at immigration was going under renewal. We worked really hard to get our numbers up and surprisingly we won the contract again for GDIT. But no good deed goes unpunished. We all were expecting that in a couple more years they would start cutting back. But no one was expecting GD to start laying us off after we worked so hard and won them the contract.

So on June 27th or 28th I get a call from my boss and I could tell instantly that things weren't good. He had that tone in his voice and he wasn't very happy. Sure enough he had called to deliver the bad news. I had been laid off and was given my two weeks notice. To add insult to injury three days later I was given the TOMIS (immigration contract) national employee of the month award for having the highest ticket count in the South East and for my volunteering to do extra projects, going to 2-3 sites everyday to cover for people, and even travel out of state without being asked. My reward, a pink slip.

Well apparently the government is really just as stupid as everyone suspects. They gave GDIT 227 million for the TOMIS contract for 5 years. After 3 years the money was gone. Spending rate, over 70  million a year. But then GDIT comes back and says they'll do the next contract, Itoms,  for 100 million for the next 5 years. How are they going to do that if they are as fiscally responsible as our government? Well the government was stupid enough to give them the contract again without questioning how they plan on accomplishing all these task for such a low rate. So then GDIT started laying people off. The very people who won them the contract. Then they went and had sub contractors give us all offers to stay at a rate of less than half our pay, doing the same exact job. Serious?

Once the government caught wind of what was happening they weren't too happy. But it's too late. They are the ones that were stupid enough to sign off on this deal. So now we were in an environment where we had everyone, especially the directors, that were fuming mad at the level of service they were getting or knew they would be getting in the future.

I managed to ride the storm and didn't go a single day without working after the layoffs. I was able to stay there an extra two months by working for a horrible sub contractor, Silver Rhino. These people were as dirty as they come. First they give me an offer. Ten bucks an hour less than I was making but I would have survived. So I took the offer while I was looking for something else. Well they didn't get me the offer in writing until ten days later when I was in DC. I had kept calling and they weren't picking up the phone. When I finally did get them on the phone they told me they were going to give me half of what they originally told me and no benefits. They were making claims that they didn't have enough money and their story kept changing. I told them that is nuts. That's 1/5 my pay to do the same job! I was fuming mad and got them to almost double it but without benefits, without time off, and without my knowledge they 1099 me. I didn't even know what 1099 was until a month later when they tried to get me to resign my offer letter with the date from a month back because they were going to get in trouble with the IRS for failing to tell me what 1099 is in the letter and failing to tell me I am responsible for paying my own taxes. I ignored their calls and refused to sign it. Then they had the nerve to tell me I have to check my Silver Rhino e-mail every ten minutes. Their webmail site was blocked at work, and it's against policy to connect it to my Outlook. So they told me to connect it to my personal phone. Ha, no. Needless to say I told them I'm not checking my e-mail every ten minutes.

So before all this bad stuff happened they had been sending people up to DC to help out because headquarters is a mess. Management up there is the worst in the country and they were months behind on tickets. I had volunteered but since we were understaffed in the Southeast they didn't want to let me go. Well the day after I got laid off my boss told me I can go. I was excited about that. I would make a lot of money in overtime working 12 hour days plus I would get 71 bucks a day per diem and free food at the hotel and I could rack up some hotel points. Plus I could bring the family and it's DC! So I did it.

Well even that almost turned into a complete disaster. All  of us that were brought in from other sites across the country were working 12 hour days. The people assigned to that site were only working 8 hour days. On top of that we had the jerk (Ken Brown)  that was responsible for the contract mess visiting us up there and he was ignoring the lazy, incompetent fools that work that site. But then at the same time he was working us detailed employees like we were in a modern day sweatshop. Then the guy would make us go out to dinner with him after work because he has no friends. It was torture, not just for me but for all ten of us on detail. We had to cleanup a decades worth of mess while the people who occupy that office sit on their lazy butts and watch. No joke, there were rat turds in two of their desks next to their food and we threw away over 10,000 useless cds.One girl left her oatmeal on her desk for almost a week before it got thrown out. These people were so lazy and they just didn't care. And since they were in DC where they could do some major buttkissing two of these people are the incompetent fools that moved over the next week to federal positions. Just goes to show that you don't have to be good at what you do to get a federal position with job security. You just have to be in the right location and make the right friends and you have the rest of your life given to you on a silver platter. And that is why the government is full of incompetent people that don't get anything done.

Then at the end of the first week Ken did the unthinkable. We had been assigned there for 2 weeks. Pre-approved and signed. I had my family there, hotel booked, etc. He decided that since we had the tickets knocked down so low he was sending half of us home, randomly. We were all wondering what the heck he was thinking because the way the people up there work there would be so much backlog we would be back in a week. But this is the overpaid moron making probably 300-400K a year mismanging this whole deal. So he gathers us all up and I am on the list to go home. I was fuming. So I talked to Ken privately and he said we'll that's what happens when you bring family along on a work trip. Seriously? I volunteered to help them out in the past and it was fine when my family came along. But the minute he wants to change the rules on the fly it's my fault? I told him he had already laid me off and I didn't have money to fly my family back. On top of that I needed the overtime to pay the bills. So then he puts me in the position to find someone to trade. No one wanted to trade so he forced a coworker from Miami to trade. I had no part in that. I was going to just go home rather than try to force someone to trade. But he forced the guy to trade with me and instead screwed him over.

So after two weeks in DC I finally go home and guess who ends up on my flight to Atlanta, Ken Brown, two seats behind me. I just couldn't get a break. To top it off when we all get home the jerk tries trimming off our hours causing another fight. And to make it even better I lost my holiday pay for 4th of July. Apparently there was an issue where the holiday hours don't go towards billable hours before overtime. So instead of getting paid 80 hours that week plus holiday I just got paid 80 hours. The holiday got thrown out since it was useless the way they do their pay. And my last day with GDIT was the day I left DC. Otherwise they would have let me take a floater holiday later in the year but instead I had to take a loss. What a joke.

Well we were all right about our predictions of what would happen once we left too. A week later and I got invited to go up again. I got a call Monday afternoon and they wanted me to fly out after work. So after a long day of work I had to go home and pack and fly out to Baltimore, land at midnight, and then take a cab down to Silver Spring. By this time I was no longer with GDIT, I was with Silver Rhino and these morons wanted me to pay for it on my personal credit card and bill them later. I told GDIT I couldn't go because I'm not doing that so they laid down the hammer on Silver Rhino and forced them to flip the bill ahead of time. I finally get in at 2 in the morning and had to be up for work at 5. Fun stuff. But I got a ton of hours and stayed until Saturday morning so I got paid for a sixth day that week.

The best part of this trip was that Ken Brown wasn't there this time. Instead they sent this real nice guy from Colorado named Chris. Chris bought me lunch twice that week and really gave the people at that site a verbal lashing. He would yell at them about how they watch me work and how they watch me clean up there mess and how they better get their act together because their jobs are all on the line. He told them he came all the way from Denver because jobs were on the line and he wasn't happy to be there. There was some some yelling, and cussing, and it made me laugh. He caught people lying about where they were too. People claiming to be working at other buildings but they were probably out on the town all day. This kind of stuff was going unchecked everyday before he came up there.  It was a complete 180 of Ken Brown's lack of management, making the detailed people work, while ignoring the incompetent lazy turds that run that site.  Instead of shipping us in to do all the work he was trying to force the people there to actually do their job so we don't have to keep coming back.

After getting back to S. Florida it was a joke trying to get Silver Rhino to pay my expenses. They wanted me to wait a month. I told them pay it now. I eventually won that one but they told me in the future I'll have to wait. I told them I won't travel again if they are going to be like that.

So anyways, after my DC trips and after two months of interviews I finally got two offers in a week. I got one offer with Lockheed that had been in the works for about a month. I was expecting to get a Systems Administrator job at Homestead with them. They made it sound like the position was mine. But last minute they had a guy that had already worked there that decided to come back from New Mexico so that spot was full. So instead I got a Network Configuration Manager position at a much lower rate. It was out of the mess with GDIT and Silver Rhino so I took it. Plus it gave me the opportunity to tell GDIT no when they asked me to make a third trip to DC! I notified Silver Rhino after my final day was complete. I wasn't going to give them an opportunity to screw me over again. They of course wrote me an e-mail apologizing for the bad situation that GDIT force them into and tried to blame all the mess on GDIT. Yeah they are right that GDIT is the owner of the contract and they created the mess but it was completely unprofessional for them to bad mouth the hand feeding them. It was also a joke that they tried to pin everything on GDIT when they had been dishonest in their dealings with me. The letter went on about how they expected that a person with my skills would not stick around for very long under those conditions and they wished me well in the future. Yeah, blah.... Maybe if they weren't so dishonest in their past dealings with me I would have bought all that garbage they were trying to feed me.

Three days into my new job with Lockheed I get a call from FPL giving me an offer. I had started interviewing with them probably before I even interviewed with Lockheed and they were finally getting back to me. It was a lot more money than with Lockheed and the location was in Plantation, a lot closer than Homestead. The only problem was that it's a six month renewable contract. I thought about it for a couple days and declined due to the contract.

Well the next week things changed. We were all notified at Lockheed that much to their surprise they didn't get the contract. The contract there had just been given to GDIT. And why? Well because they underbid something like 11%. I knew what this meant. Paycuts and layoffs. So I immediately called FPL to see if the position was still open. A couple days later I had an offer and before even getting to start doing any real work with Lockheed I was out of there. I think I might have barely been there over a month. Just long enough for training and getting settled in and then I was gone. I wasn't going to stick around to watch them destroy that contract. I liked the job, I liked the people, but I hate GDIT! People there knew my situation, they knew about what GDIT is doing on all their contracts, and everyone understood why I was leaving instead of sticking around to find out how things would go. Well sure enough I found out a week later they got 15% paycuts. Already way underpaid there and then GDIT screwed them even more.

So that is the story of my layoff drama. Now I am with FPL as an E-mail Administrator and I really like my job and the people I work with. The rumor is my contract should keep getting extended so I am hoping the rumors are true. If not then maybe I can squeeze my way into another position over here. I still have my top secret clearance so I am considering looking into nuclear positions and such. Hopefully this is the last layoff for years to come. I really did enjoy working at CIS (Immigration, La Migra). The district and regional management was the best of any company I have ever worked for. Unfortunately it was the upper management, their stupidity, and their lack of caring about their employees that messed it all up.