After the Termination – The Whistleblower

After the Termination – The Whistleblower

Because I never signed a nondisclosure agreement with HomeFirst, I was free to discuss my situation.  During the first couple of months after I was fired, I would launch my story anywhere.  I went into the hairy details with friends.  I told fellow students at the weekly figure drawing class I attended.  My wife and our grown children offered a fairly safe place to discuss it except that I was expected to be somewhat more upbeat than is my natural tendency. 

One day after I was fired from a for-profit CFO position twenty years earlier, I sat at the computer in our den working on cover letters for resumes that I would send out.  A neighbor, a young mother whose kids played with mine, came by.  She asked me what I was doing at home in the middle of the day.  I said I’d been fired, and she replied, “bummer.”  It is hard to know how to respond, I suppose. 

A friend suggested that my being fired might be God’s way of saying it was time to retire.  Another friend consoled me for having been “laid off,” but to my ear a layoff is done to many workers, like the periodic auto layoffs of years ago.  I was fired, specifically.  On the morning of June 3, 2014.  Another friend offered sympathy for having “lost my job.”  But I didn’t lose my job; I was fired.  There was no oops moment when I realized that the job I once had wasn’t there anymore.  I didn’t lose my keys; I set them on the table when I was told to leave the building.

A fellow artist in the drawing class was shocked when I mentioned I was fired.  He wondered if I had lost my job through a reduction in force.  He had been RIF’d, he said, but he had never been fired singly as I was.  He encouraged me to take any job I could and not to count on the results of a lawsuit that could drag on for a long time.  His sister had a bad experience in a similar situation.  She had to fire one attorney who had done no work on the case and resolution took years.  He was an odd guy, but I did not sleep well that night.

I called a former CEO of HomeFirst to commiserate with her as she recovered at home from painfully bulging disks in her back.  She had heard about my termination.  Thinking, perhaps, that I was calling her for help finding a new job, she offered to give me a good reference and suggested that a more junior job without the stresses of being CFO might be nice.  Her company did accounting for other companies and its CFO was always looking for staff, she said.  I did not mention that she had put HomeFirst in touch with her CFO and he recommended a possible replacement or that HomeFirst became one of her company’s accounting clients after I was fired.

A former Board member and Audit Committee chair complemented me via Linkedin.  I let him know that HomeFirst had fired me after I reported potential violations on whistleblower sites.  The news saddened him, and he suggested that we get together to catch up.  My response was light and optimistic, but that night I had my first panic attack.  He never replied, and we never met.

My wife and I had participated in a group of four or five couples from our church for several years.  Eventually we drifted apart as a group although we still saw each other at church.  Two women from the group visited with Louise while she recovered from an illness, and they sympathized with my story.   The men, whom I had known well and with whom I had shared personal problems, showed little interest and even turned away as from a distasteful odor.  So it seemed to me.  The line of people to whom I would confess continued on: my dentist and her assistant, who thought I was joking and asked if there was a big party to celebrate my retirement.

When I was fired years ago, I was sending out resumes the next day fully expecting to get a job quickly, rather than a year later as things turned out.  Now 65, I was not hopeful about finding another job, and I was not sure how much I wanted another job.  Beyond getting over potential employers’ reluctance to hire someone my age, particularly one fired because he did not play well with his boss, I wasn’t sure that I had the drive needed to take on a new senior management job.

I signed up for unemployment insurance despite my doubts about another job.  I attested that I was out of work through no fault of my own, but I was not sure about my guilt in the matter.  I had pushed the compliance problems and had reported them to the various whistleblower sites.  Maybe I should have known it would eventually come back at me.  But probably the State of California had something else in mind, and I checked the no-fault box.    

I was conflicted about looking for a new job.  I had planned to join my wife in retirement in a few months, so convincing a new employer of my commitment seemed unethical and unpromising.  A new job might reduce my eventual settlement, but not looking could also reduce a settlement.  Still, my claim for unemployment benefits was contingent on my statement that I was looking for work.

I put out some feelers.  I was an asset that HUD could use if I were interested, my contact said.  The partner at HomeFirst’s audit firm said he was disturbed at my termination and put me in touch with one CFO client.  That led to a possible temporary opportunity in a rural community 400 miles away.  I told the interviewer, “Yes, I am ready to work.”  I never heard back. 

I applied for a controller job at a local company.  In my application I included facts that were truthful but unlikely to excite potential employers: I was fired from my last job in retaliation for disclosing illegal activities, my past responsibilities far exceeded those of the position, and my expected salary was higher than the job was likely to offer.  Twenty years ago I would have finessed those potential obstacles in my initial contact, but I was too tired to play that natural courting game.

Gradually my job search activity slowed to periodic nonprofit CFO searches on a couple of websites.  I doubted the value of any new job.  Some contacts offered to speak to their friends.  I appreciated the thought but doubted their honesty or that anything would come of it.  Eventually, I was unable to say that I was actively searching for a full-time job, and I retired.

I volunteer in a few nonprofit organizations where I see some issues, but I have not complained about them.  I follow-up on some of the HomeFirst complaints, but I don’t really expect anything to come of them.  Still it’s something I feel I should do.