It paints me in a bad light, I know, but sure... why not?

For background, suffice it to say that the manager in this story, who was my boss at all times except my time with the migration project I mentioned, was not well liked, and for good reason. This is a man who micromanaged absolutely everyone and everything, was insulting (called me and my "whole generation" - I was 23 at the time - a bunch of slackers, told me I was "getting too big for my britches" when I made a fairly innocuous suggestion, and repeatedly talked about other employees behind their backs), and seemed to only care about making himself look good.

Anyway, my firing:

I had been working on a fairly high profile assignment, lots of pressure, etc. and had worked on my own time until 4am the previous day. I was running on maybe 3 hours of sleep, so I was more on edge than usual. I mentioned this extra work to the boss, and asked if I could go home at 4pm that day (1.5hr early). Anyway, the day progresses and I was finally able to finish my tests, get peer reviews done (a story unto itself), and passed my work off to be installed my the clients production control team right at 4pm, so I had to wait to confirm they hadn't screwed up the install - a very real concern, btw.

Anyway, around 4:30 the boss calls, asking me about a "post-implementation review" (something was installed and had run for the first time, so the programmer needs to confirm initial results) that I was supposed to do a few days earlier. Genuine mea culpa here, as I had just plain forgotten about it and didn't realize it was even installed yet, and had been distracted by the "OMG GET IT DONE NOW" assignment being installed in this story.

He told me that since I was "overbudget" (I had logged about 54 hours on a 50 hour estimate), I was not to charge any more time to that ticket. This essentially means "work for free." He also told me to have it done by 9am the next morning, so my choice was either stay late or come in early and work, so I told him since I was already staying late waiting for prod control, I'd do it right then.

So, my install was completed a few minutes later, so I spent 10-20 minutes confirming the install before starting the requested post-implementation review. This review, btw, was estimated as an hour of work, for good reason. I had to go through a week or so of production runs to try to find data that had actually ran through the logic I changed.

I hadn't actually found any runs through my changes by 5:30, when the boss left for the day. He stopped by my desk on the way out, and "joked"

> What are you still doing here? Didn't you ask to leave early today?

I explained, calmly at first but steadily angering, that I had wanted to leave early but since he had told me to get this thing done by the morning, not to charge time for it, etc. I was stuck here. He told me to just go home and do it in the morning, but I explained that if I have to work extra hours for free, I should do it at night so I don't fuck up my billable hours for the next day and be forced to stay late to make that day balance.

There was a bit of back and forth, but I ended up visibly angry and yelling a bit. He told me, forcefully, "go home."

I left, choosing to take the stairs to try to burn off steam, but the anger overflowed and I yelled "Stupid fucking piece of shit job" about a floor and a half down.

I went home, beat the shit out of a couch pillow, and broke down crying.

The next day, I went in and started to work on that same post-implementation review, and the boss came over and took me to a conference room. My new project manager, first day on the job, was there already. They told me I was suspended for three days, and they took my badge, etc.

On my way out, I passed my HR rep, which made me think she was supposed to be there for the meeting, but who knows. I went home and wrote my side of the story to that same HR manager. I got a response that afternoon (around 5pm) thanking me for my side, and giving me a formal letter of suspension.

I heard reports from a friend that my phone was disconnected around 2pm that day, so clearly I was fired before I got the letter of "suspension." This was even confirmed by another friend who talked to a guy in IT who said that same HR woman called them to terminate my accounts around 2pm the day I was suspended. She apparently called back a few minutes after it was done, panicking, saying she had only meant to suspend me. I still think I was accidentally fired, then actually fired to cover for it.

Anyway, that's the story. AMA.