Corporate Stupidity

Ah, finally! My husband will finally get to start his new job this week. I was really starting to sweat about that.

When Edgar lost his job last year, he had to take a crappy, much lower paying job working in customer service for a very large cell phone company just for the sake of us being able to pay our bills while he looked for something new. Something new came along late in July in the form of a purchasing position with an international industrial supply company. He actually got the call on my birthday, July 24th, a Friday, that they would be offering him the job.

On the very next Monday, things started to fall apart. They called him back and said that they might not be able to proceed with the offer because he's not a US Citizen (he's a permanent resident). There was this whole thing about government contracts and being unsure if non-citizens could work on those things. And it's not as if they didn't know this--he had three different interviews with four different people for this position, and he stated in all of them that he was a resident, not a citizen. After a week of indecision, they finally proceeded with the offer. Which they should have done in the first place, because he's worked for other companies with government contracts and never had a problem. So at this point, a week had gone by since they initially told him he got the job.

At that point, they sent him the offer papers stating that he would start work on August 3rd. If only. Then they tell him that he needs to take his drug test and pass a background check, and once that's done he'll be able to start the next day. If only. He took the drug test on the 3rd, and that was also his last day at the crappy cell phone company (he had to work weekends there). This, of course, was his last day because he was working under the assumption that the background check would take only a few days (as it does at, oh, say, EVERY OTHER COMPANY ON THE PLANET). Not so much this time.

A week goes by. According to the manager, they're still waiting on hearing back from the background check company. Edgar was calling the manager pretty much every day at this point. Here we are, he's already had his last day at his job, he's spent a week at home, we have a new apartment that we're moving in to in September--he needs a paycheck! So after another week of waiting, the manager says they've finally gotten the background check and he'll be able to start in 3-4 days.

THEN, lo and behold, the background check company left out a document that was necessary to show that Edgar's SSN was actually his own. Luckily, that was something that he could get from the Social Security Office on his own, which he immediately did and emailed to the manager. So everything should be ok then, right? Wrong.

The background check company had filled out all of the paperwork wrong. Edgar has a very long last name (four words). He only uses, and I only took when we married, the first name in the last name. From his own experience, life is just easier that way. Of course all of his official documents, license, SSN, green card, etc., have his full last name, and the company that's hiring him is aware of the name he goes by vs. his official last name. The background company didn't put his full last name on the forms, so everything had to be resubmitted. That was early last week.

So here we are, a month to the day after he was told that he had gotten the job, and he has finally gotten word of the official day that he needs to start. He's out several weeks of salary, and now will not get paid until after we move in to our new apartment.

So with these things in mind, I have a word of advice for his company:

1. Know your hiring policies. I would think that HR would be fully aware of their hiring policies regarding the hiring of residents/legal aliens with work authorization vs. citizens.
2. GET A NEW EFFING BACKGROUND CHECK COMPANY

Ok, I'm off my soapbox. And I'm so relieved. I have been stressing this out in a major way for the last couple of weeks. When Edgar lost his job last year right around the same time that I was told that I would be laid off from The Devil in the first quarter of 2009, everything in our lives was plunged into uncertainty. Can we pay our rent? Can we make the car payment? How much money is there for groceries? With us being locked into a lease at our new apartment when all of this started to go down, all of those questions started swirling around in my head again. I hate that feeling; it's the feeling of not having any ounce of control in your life. All of a sudden you're living your life by someone else's terms instead of your own.

I'm so blissed out right now with the fact that this uncertainty has finally gone away. My life is my life again, and it's going to be a good one.

*Breathe*Relax* Smile*