FIRED!

Wow - I have to say this has been one emotional rollercoaster of a week. I made my first professional sale for an absurdly high amount of money considering it's my first professional sale and it's the first story I ever wrote with the idea to publish it. The guy I'm currently dating (yes, dating), showed up with a mind-boggling amount of romantic spontaneity to drop off flowers (yay!), and the next day, I'm fired from the only paying job (save writing, of course ^_^) that I've ever truly enjoyed.

The manager told me that she usually "let people go" (she actually used that namby-pamby term) at the start of their shift, but instead, due to time constraints, she let me work for two hours in blissful ignorance before giving me "the talk" after my break. She gave me rather vague reasons, and I was too much in shock to actually ask her to give me something specific.

Basically, she let me know that in a small bookstore, the employees had to be part of a small, close-knit team, and they also had to handle all the different jobs at once. From what I gathered, I didn't fit into the team, and I was easily flustered. She suggested I work at a larger bookstore, i.e. Chapters, where one was hired to do a certain task and only a certain task. She then went on to describe how over the last few weeks the store had become a "disaster area" during closing, how not everything was being done. I found that hard to comprehend, seeing as I always made sure I did rounds and checked things, and I never closed alone - I always did so with a more experienced coworker.

I realize part of the firing had to have been my fault, but I can't help but harbour a few suspicions. I'd only been working there for about a month - what happened to my supposed three month probationary period? The reasons I was given seemed to be the mistakes of someone who is inexperienced, not stupid or deliberately destructive - they hardly seemed drastic enough for her to let me go this soon. I also happened to notice that the senior employee who went on the long vacation that required the manager to hire new people started work the day I was fired. Of course, the worst scenario I can come up with is that the manager was always planning on only hiring me for the short term but didn't have the decency to say it up front. The best scenario is simply this: she runs an extremely, extremely, EXTREMELY tight ship, and my square peg corners chafed in the round hole she needed filled.

To be honest, this "letting go" was the employment equivalent of the "just didn't do it for us" rejection letter - it lets me know I'm not good enough, but can't give me constructive reasons as to why I can't measure up, and it's very disheartening. At least I worked there long enough to get some free and discounted books out of it.