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Career Advice after a bad job....

shawnre · 2013-06-28T12:37:46

Hello all, First I guess I should preface that this may be a long post....I am not sure... On March 20, 2013 I lost my job. I was fired, the reason, "insubordination" according to my employer. I had worked at the company for almost four years. When I first started, there was one IT person responsible for day to day operations. A new "CIO/ITO/Network Admin/ISO...." slash whatever title you could insert for someone heading up an IT office was also hired a couple of weeks before me. The reason why is that the current IT person was retiring after 40+ years. I was fresh out of college with an AAS in IT with programming as my major concentration. I took the first job I could find that would at least get my foot in the door. My first few days, I was straight up bored. The employer gave me an office next door to the newly hired boss, but I sat there by myself with pretty much no interaction by anyone. I then proceeded to pull up a chair with who would eventually become my "boss/supervisor" once the current retired. I spent about a week doing this, just watching him answer the phone and working on IT issues. I then decided it was time to go see the outgoing IT supervisor and see if I could finally figure out what it was I was supposed to be doing for said company. He explained a lot of things to me in the two weeks before he finally retired. One thing he did warn me of though was my new boss. Apparently (which I did not know at the time), my new boss had worked for the company before. He had connections and history with a few of the senior management people. Over the few years I was with this company, I learned how little my new boss knew. Questions of "How do I tell if someone is locked out?" (in an AD environment were asked of me. "How do I show hidden files?" once we upgraded to Windows 7 after two years.... Over those few years, I submitted many new ideas about how to improve our job within the IT department. As an example, my boss thought the only way we could update Adobe Reader and Java when new releases were released was to visit each machine and manually update......REALLY?????? Buying new machines meant we installed everything manually instead of using imaging technology (something I demonstrated in a feasibility study to save the company money, but my boss didn't understand it, so it was never implemented). Eventually a third person was hired, and yes, the company had grown by about 50 employees, but my "opinion" was we didn't need another employee. Why, you may ask? Easy, if my boss would pull his weight, we didn't need an additional employee. Needless to say, at this point, I had figured out my boss, he was lazy. By this point I had already been to his boss on a number of occasions (which unfortunately was the CEO....). In the meantime....ok, so story takes a twist here, bear with me. A new person was hired. Yes, it was a female. Yes, I almost instantly was attracted to her. Long story short, she was in an abusive relationship, I supported her throughout her whole ordeal. She eventually went back to her abusive relation. At one point I had shown her, and this is why I was fired, that I read my boss's chat log. Well, after the fact she wanted to go back to her abusive relation, we were both fired on the same day. I had read by boss's chat log over a year and a half ago at this point. I know where it came from, and I understand that it was hard for her to be around me at the same place of employment, it was for me too. Not the point. Point is, that is how I came to be fired. Now, I am still unemployed, and deciding, or attempting to, whether or not I have a future or not in IT....of course, over the few years I was there, I wrote quite a few programs, and decided that programming is what I like more than doing mundane IT work..... There is of course more to that story, just figured it was getting too long already.....what would you do dear reader of the forum, I could seriously use some advice. If you question my morals or ethics, that is fine, but I guarantee you that just about everyone at my former employer would say I am quite ethical and morally sound. Yes, I did read my boss's chats, for a reason. Any help/advice? Thanks!