(Time sensitive question) I'm pretty sure I just got fired. How do I act?

Act how you usually act. You may be about to be fired and you may not be. If you are then get exact reasons why (so you can work on them and not be fired in the future for the same things), let them know that you’ve appreciated the experience working with them and tell them you are sorry it didn’t work out.

Then resist the urge to bad mouth them. The message can get around and hinder you chances of getting a job in the future.

First, tell yourself you are being fired tomorrow morning and get the crying out of the way now. Do not cry at the meeting.

Second, treat the meeting very formally. No casual greetings or anything. Take it seriously like you took the job seriously.

Show maturity and poise. Hopefully, you can still use them as references.

Act the way you did when you went for your first interview. Don’t worry, it isn’t that important right now.

I agree with everything that @tranquilsea said. I would only add that having “close personal relationships” with your bosses can put you in this kind of difficult situation sometimes. It might be a good idea to keep a bit of emotional distance in your workplace in future. Tough decisions have to be made in business – no one can afford to make them based on personal history, especially in this economy.

And remember – they might just want to talk to you to give you a warning or offer more training, not to actually fire you.

All of that ^ and listen before you speak. Listen and hear what’s been said and then think about your responses. Don’t jump to making excuses. Listen to what his concerns are and if you are guilty of the problems he has with your work, maybe this is a great opportunity to learn. If you feel there are mitigating circumstances, don’t whine but do explain what they are.

I’d spend tonight thinking about why he might be dissatisfied with your work and how you could have done things differently if you are a fault. I know you’ve been sick recently. I remember your post. You can’t help being sick. If you’ve been unreliable at other times, you can help that. Perhaps you’ve been too casual and not been getting the work done. Why haven’t you been hitting your targets? Have a real think about some of the problems you can see in your work and learn from the situation.

Thanks all. @glacial, that’s a good point. I recognized from the start that the dynamic in that office is weird and not necessarily good. Everybody’s super close with each other, and that has created a number of awkward situations. I definitely am not the first person to have this dilemma.

@Bellatrix, the reason that my supervisors are dissatisfied is entirely about numbers. I work as a fundraiser on the street, which means that every day I have to raise a certain quota. For a while now I haven’t been cutting it. They know I’ve been working my ass off trying, but numbers don’t lie, and it’s hard to change that. But that said, I CAN be unreliable—I have trouble being totally punctual, and I sometimes space out while working. But some of it is also the sort of factor X that makes some people good at fundraising and others not so much. And I don’t know what that factor is.

Be ready to own up o your failings humbly, but don’t cry. You’ll come across as a kid, not a young adult. Be gracious and thank them for the opportunity to be a part of the group. Experience is a good teacher and not everyone has the opportunity to learn.

“Fundraiser on the street.” Does that mean you are basically begging or bumming money from strangers on the street supposedly for a cause?
If you are fired, thank them for the opportunity they gave you by hiring you and leave.

Uh-oh. Door-to-door magazine subscriptions?

@chyna, I guess that’s one way of putting it, albeit a rude one. I canvass for a LGBTQ civil rights organization. I don’t beg, I get people involved with a good cause.

Thanks for explaining @Rory. I would say that type of work demands a freshness and enthusiasm that would wear thin fairly quickly. I would imagine the shelflife for people doing this sort of work is fairly short. I’m glad you’re going back to college soon and won’t need the job anyway.

Be aware this might not be firing but a final warning. So as everyone else has said, don’t jump to conclusions. And don’t wave it in your boss’s face.

Sounds like it was not the best match of a job for you anyway. So think about your experience and how you’ll be on your next job.

First of all, don’t worry about it. The attitude to take to losing a job is, “well, I was looking for a job when I found this one, so I’m no worse off.”

The other thing to keep in mind when you’re examining “what’s the worst that could happen?” is: “They can kill you, but they can’t eat you.”

Perhaps you’re going to be fired. But in a well-run office you would have had at least one and probably several “performance review” type meetings, either formal or informal, to attempt to get you on the right road to the desired performance. If they’re going to fire you out of the blue, then it’s not a healthy place to be working career-wise, and in any case you’ve already indicated that this was never going to be a long term position for you anyway.

It’s okay to fail. Really, it’s perfectly acceptable and in fact, if you never fail, it means that you’ve never challenged yourself enough. Take the failure and forget about it (assuming it happens), but don’t lose the lesson.

Whatever has caused you to fail (again, making this assumption), a sensible and compassionate employer / manager will tell you what went wrong and offer some tips – sometimes even objective career advice from a disinterested observer who isn’t in your head – about career choices that you may not have considered before, and that you might not have even known about.

Consider also that you’re wearing a mantle of “expected failure”. That’s something that you should be working on – for yourself, by yourself – already. Don’t wear that; it’s very unbecoming.

Whatever you do do not cry there.

It wouldn’t be the end of the world even if you get fired, it is your first job.

I’m sure you’ve learned not to get casusal with your bosses.

Good luck with however it goes and please update us on how things go, if you would like to.

Thank you.
JCA
The Update Lady

Well, you haven’t actually been fired yet. And some people get a lot less warning than that.

Of course you’d rather not cry, but you may as well know that people at all levels of corporate hierarchies have cried when they got the bad news. If you do, don’t be humiliated by it. Just be sure to have a tissue in your pocket when you go in so you can cry neatly.

Do, if you can, ask what you ought to have done differently. You can’t force people to donate. But should you have requested additional training, help with your technique, longer mentoring, role-playing rehearsals, a consultation with your manager? Ask.

Another approach is to acknowledge that your personality just isn’t well-suited to soliciting, but you really value the work that the organization does, and you want to continue learning from them. Then ask if there might be other work you could do for the organization for the remainder of the summer?

My sense is you’re not getting fired, just getting a talking-to. What I can’t understand is why you would find it appropriate to text about getting fired. I believe that made your boss angrier.

You know what would irk me if I were you? For me, when someone in a position of authority tells me they need to talk to me, it causes me what I consider unnecessary anxiety as I would be worried about what the issues could be. I’d rather not know they want to talk to me, and just go in and wing it at the time of the talk.

<———Is wondering how the meeting went.

@Katniss & @jca and whoever else was wondering, I went into the office this morning and had the meeting with my boss.

He looked me in the eye and asked, “Rory, I want you to be 100% honest with me. Do you want to work here?”

And I said no. And it was the biggest relief in the world. He said that he had noticed how unhappy I’ve been for ages, and that he felt like me getting sick so often lately is partly my body’s response to the amount of stress and pressure doing this job has been putting me under. He said I wasn’t the first person to burn out emotionally in this line of work, and that he doesn’t want me to keep doing this job if it’s making me this unhappy—that that would be detrimental not only to me but to the office as a whole.

I’m calling him this evening to give him my final decision, which will be to quit—he told me to go home today and just really think hard on it. What I’m happy about is there are NO hard feelings at all, and he also gave me an out. It’s more of a parting of the ways than me being fired, and I’m incredibly grateful for that. Officially, I will have quit.

I did cry, but it wasn’t a big deal. I apologized for getting so emotional and my boss told me that given the amount HE cries at the office, it is not a big deal (he DOES cry a fair amount, lol).

Thank you all SO much for your support and responses. I so appreciate having people responding and looking out for me. :) <3

I’m glad you were allowed to make the decision, and that you are comfortable with it. Good luck with the next thing!

Under the circumstances, @rory, that’s a great outcome.

My guess is that you’ll still be taking lessons from this experience for a long while to come. I’m sure you’ll find them valuable.

I’ glad that things went as they did. I hope you can use this manager as a reference in the future.

Two things; congrats on being able to be honest and forthright with you boss about what you wanted or needed to do.
and kudos to your boss for being able to find a way to rectify the situation in a manner that left both of you feeling like it was a positive event.

Great lessons to be learned from all this:
When you’re unhappy, it shows;
Bosses aren’t necessarily insensitive;
Imaginations are usually more scary than realities;
Experience is always valuable, whether positive or negative.
So on to your next experience and good luck!

He sounds like a great boss. Good luck.

What a great boss. Sounds like the sort of person you should stay in touch with just because they’re a great person. What a fabulous outcome.

@rory Thank you for the update :0)
I’m glad that everything worked out. Your boss sounds like an incredible person.

Just to add to my post:
Crying at work is a no-no for esp. for women _“There you go this is why I/we didn’t hire women they are just too emotional,
Not mature enough is another conclusion bosses get to. So, crying at work, something to avoid.

Of course it’s something to avoid. But not everybody always has the control and the power, especially when blind-sided and stunned. So it’s important to know that if you are overwhelmed and can’t help it, you’re not just a uniquely dumb, immature emotional idiot. It happens to a lot of people, and many of them are not women.

Besides, there’s a big difference between having your eyes fill up, with one tear spilling over, and letting go with out-and-out bawling and sobbing.

I’m recalling how much crying there was in Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. There was a huge amount, and all of it was done by men, most of it by Steve.

She/he wasn’t blind sided, but was expecting it, “I’m worried that I will cry when they tell me I’m fired.”…“The meeting is tomorrow morning first thing. Help!”
So that was my advice.

And these famous people, it doesn’t matter how many of them cried made a habit of crying, how high their status was. They were lucky enough not everyone dropped them etc. So, I don’t learn the lesson that crying is free of consequences, even if Steve Jobs et al became who they became.

And re. “not everybody always has the control and the power,” That is why we have “How to gain control and power of x, y, z”. out there.

All right, then. I’m overpowered by @flo‘s logic and must agree: if you ever cry at work, you might as well be dead.

@Jeruba when the logic is impossible to counter it s impossible to counter.

Also “It happens to a lot of people, and many of them are not women.”
It doesn’t matter if it happens to men too. Try hard to avoid crying at work whenver possible.

I’ve cried at work. Shit happens.

I’m glad the outcome was a good one, @rory.

@flo: Regarding crying at work: What is ideal in life and what is reality are often two different things. Of course it’s better not to cry at work, but sometimes, life is not perfect. Workers are not drones and they do have emotions, and sometimes emotions cannot be controlled.

I am not saying everyone should be hysterical bawlers, but sometimes people get upset. I work as an advocate for employees who are in trouble with management, and I have seen grown men on the chopping block who get shaky and emotional when they fear their jobs are at stake.

@rory: Thanks for the update and good for you that you have such a good attitude, and this job will be but just one little stepping stone in the great path that will be your life.

JCA
The Update Lady

@rojo
I second the comment above about not texting the boss, esp. if it was after working hours. It is all about boundries. There are things you go to your parents about, things you go to your friends about, your boss, your govt. rep about, all kinds of different relashinships. If you cry about heavy things like death in the family, some natural disaster that killed people you don’t know for example, in front of your boss, that’s not going to affect your employment status.

If you cry when you are about to be talked to/warned – and if there is a legitimate reason for it- it makes the boss’s job that much more difficult.

I work with humans rather than robots, crying is an emotion, humans demonstrate emotions. If the crying is genuine, and I would hope I’d know the person well enough to judge if I was their boss, I would have no problem with someone getting upset on occasions at work. We spend a huge proportion of our time there. Sometimes things happen that hurt employees, whether it be the way they’ve been treated by a client or having to face an unpleasant truth about their work abilities or something else entirely. Maybe they’re are things happening in their private life that are affecting them. I’d rather people were genuine than desperately trying to put on a front. As long as they aren’t doing it to manipulate me or anyone else, I certainly wouldn’t judge them negatively.

@rojo is not asking how to stay in the same position as she/he was a couple of days ago.