u/farmersboy70

Started with this company back in February 2024, and my interview with my boss, the Technical Manager, already rang alarm bells; the questions he asked me were a tad basic for someone with more experience than he had been alive.

Soon became obvious said manager hadn’t a clue, he was winging and bluffing it all the way. That’s why, when we took on 4 new Revit technicians with no experience of our industry, he asked if I would switch from Senior Engineer to CAD Manager to teach them – he certainly couldn’t.

In the background he was compiling a list of things that had gone wrong, generally things he’d fucked up, and laid the blame squarely at my door. Upper malmanagement weren’t interested, he’d got them all fooled.

Ultimately he sacked me February of last year, and I wasn’t sorry to see the back of him, but my team weren’t happy about it.

6 months later I got a call; he had been ‘let go’ (turned out he’d been bullying 4 members of the team and they’d all filed official grievances), and would I come back?

So I did, and withing days realised that something was wrong. Sure enough, 6 weeks later the company goes into administration. It took another 6-8 weeks for the company (and less than half the employees) to be taken over by a huge company that does this sort of thing.

So our design team has gone from 10 people to 3 (I’m now a manager without a team), but we all get along, and the designer is a chap of my age and experience, and I thought we got on very well together, cut from the same cloth and all that.

There’s been a few bumpy bits between me and the parent company, and I’d been warned over slagging them off, so I said I’d keep my mouth shut.

Imagine my surprise when I come on a Monday morning (May 18th), and about 0930 I get invited up to the meeting room by my line manager, to be presented with a document listing 15 accusations of misconduct and gross misconduct. I’m suspended from that moment, on full pay, until I hear more.

The list makes no sense at all – failure to complete some elevation drawings, buffer vessel design, as-fitted drawings on a job we haven’t starting installing yet, that sort of thing. There’s nothing that would or should be classed as misconduct, let alone gross misconduct.

I’m invited back in for an informal meeting on the 28th May where the allegations are explained, and this makes it even worse; one of them was for me leaving work on time on a Friday (we leave an hour earlier on Fridays); the complaint was that I should have left half an hour later to allow for my ‘legally mandated lunch break’. I quite often don’t bother with a lunch break, and what’s it got to do with him anyway, he’s not my manager. I’d initially shown some acoustic louvres too high, but that had been corrected.

I haven’t been told who made all these allegations, but I can work out that most of them have come from the colleague I thought I got on really well with (clearly the guy is massively two-faced and doing his best to get me sacked) and the others will probably have come from my line manager, who has also enabled all of this bullshit. I think he’s also the idiot who ha labelled everything as misconduct or gross misconduct.

I sent an email on the 18tth June basically asking what the hell was going on, but all I really was told was that my line manager ‘did not appreciate the tone of my email’.

It’s now June 29th, the start of my seventh week of suspension, and I’ve still heard nothing; they’ve not even instigated a disciplinary meeting yet.

I can’t help but think they’ve realised they’ve fucked up, and don’t know how to get out of it.

Never a dull moment…