Open Letter To Whoever Gives A Shit

On the morning of Monday, November 3, 2008 I was unemployed by Ameriprise Financial.

You could almost say I had it coming, after all I had given them six years of sterling service, as indicated by my mid-year and year-end ratings, the accomplishments I had made and the cost-savings and efficiency increases I had been instrumental in planning, designing and implementing.

(Hey, how about some of that $1.7 million I saved you coming this way?)

You could say I had it coming because I'm not a corporate clone. I don't play the game. I don't come with a belief system that directs me to play the game. I don't know how to effectively use the system to buttfuck another employee, the way I was buttfucked.

Jesus Christ, you didn't even spit.

My apparent naievity led me down this path. After the events in August that led to my first "warning", I thought things would change. After all, having been previously accused of racism, bigotry and harrassment (wait, I hear you laughing...), you would think I would change. Shit, I thought I had changed. But, when given the opportunity to provide feedback on the person who had accused me, and watched such feedback being written down and processed, and promised that it would be looked into, it seems it wasn't.

Because it continued.

You see, it's a two-sided deal. When you are the accuser you are protected, given advice, told how to act. When you are the accused, fuck that. You are told not to retaliate. That's all. You are not given your rights, a way to reach out, told how to act and what to do to document anything that may come at you. You are not even allowed to tell anyone, let alone seek counsel for your fears and concerns. I was told not to tell anyone, not even my wife. Shall we say the fear of God was put into me? Take a good, long look at the Individual Treatment Policy. Page Two, near the bottom. What will you see? Tell me.

Arbitration? Never heard of it.

Mediation: fucked if I know what that means.

How do you act?

Do you record every conversation with the accuser, dates times and witnesses?

Are you to never allow yourself in the same fucking room alone?

Thus, no options.

No advice.

No-one cares.

You are dirt.

Stay there.

Don't try to improve yourself.

I suppose I could, in retrospect, have played the game back, but as I have said, that's not the way I was raised. I was raised to confront an issue head on. The problem then lies in who you are confronting.

When you are confronting (unfortunately) a minority who proceeds to and succeeds in pushing your buttons on a daily basis (fuck being a hot-headed Irishman, thanks Mum!), and you retaliate, in whatever way, then you may as well just bend over, spread 'em and give me two good coughs. Because no matter what you say, you will just get that Gallic shrug of the shoulders, puppy dwag look, a smile and a barely translatable mumbled "I was just playing...". Guess things are done differently in Africa, huh?

ps - thicken up the accent a bit when you are saying that as well. More of an emotional impact that way.

Kinda sucks when you look back and you think of the times you tried to reach out and overcome cultural, national, social and religious barriers... learning about what it's like being a Muslim in America; asking questions about the Koran/Qu'uran/Quran (whatever - how many other people even give a shit enough to know how many different fucking variations of the name there are???); learning about Mali and West Africa in general; even attempting to learn some of your fucking language. Does that count for shit? Do you remember any of this? Does it even register in your fucking brain? Apparently not. Hey, just think, when you are accused of calling the guy a Bantu Tribesman, and you know that the Bantu people travelled east from Cameroun to Kenya and south through Angola, as opposed to west towards Mali, Nigeria, Sierra Leone etc, kinda doesn't add up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantu_people

Kinda like one plus one equals twelve. Add to the denial of that fact back in August, the fact that the statement "... if you were in a Bantu village then blah blah blah" being used almost daily against you when you are licking your Cheeto cheesy fingers, that's adding the reciprocal of a to the variance of 1.7 to the equation when a = a steaming pile of bullshit (or should it be water buffalo shit if I'm going down that path?) and 1.7 is the amount of times I got harrassed back per day.

Fuck, shit, arse, Goddamn it, now I have lost it completely.

And the worst and most disgusting part of it is, when you hear from your best friend a day later that he defended you and explained, with examples, dates and witnesses, the harrassment flipped back at you, and "they" didn't listen, the bleeding starts again. When he tells you that he was told "Oooh, Chris is in real trouble now" by the accuser, does that look like premeditation? Does that look like this was planned? Does that look like this was all being deliberately added up, plotted against, planned, stacking the deck against me? Kicking the stool out from under me?

I am hurt. Emotionally, spiritually, physically shocked, sickened and hurt by the way I was tarred and feathered and run out of fucking town. I used to love working for that company. I used to respect it as a leader in the industry. I used to be fucking well proud to tell people where I worked and what I did. Not any more. Not now. It's irrevocably tainted now. Fuck them and their efforts to promote diversity. Fuck them.

I am going to have my name cleared. I don't want my job back (well, yes I actually do but that's never going to fucking well happen), but I want to be able to tell prospective employers what happened and not have a black cloud over my name.

I am NOT a bad man. Hell, legally I'm a fucking minority as well. Check Dictionary.com if you don't believe me:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/minority

Main Entry: mi·nor·i·ty
Function: noun
Inflected Form: plural -ties

3 a : a part of a population differing esp. from the dominant group in some characteristics (as race, sex, or national origin) and often subject to differential treatment b : a member of a minority minorities>