…the video guy taketh away.

So much for that. I’ve seldom witnessed a greater leap from reason to unreason in so short a period of time, and in this case it’s most unfortunate because I was really looking forward to that job.

What happened? Well, you’ll have to ask Chris Martin of CFM Communications, ’cause I’m not exactly sure. I missed my first video shoot, which normally would certainly be grounds enough for letting someone go, but as folks know, that morning—April 23—Carole was in labor. Yes, that was the morning I awoke to Carole saying she’d been having regular contractions all night, increasing in frequency. It would be three weeks early, but Alexander, of course, was two weeks early. So I called Chris, and told him the timing was unfortunate, but Carole was in labor, and I obviously needed to be with her. At the time he seemed surprised, but also seemingly cognizant that, yeah, I needed to be with Carole. As one would expect another father to seem.

As everyone also knows, Carole’s labor continued into the afternoon, only to stop, much to our chagrin. Nothing we could have done about it, or to be done about it; it happened, and we had to spend a couple of days getting back into “waiting for labor” mode. (Though it could be argued that we never fully have gotten back into it.)

And that’s where things stood. I’d dropped off the Adobe Premiere Pro tutorials to Chris that Tuesday, apologizing again to him for missing it, but pointing out what, again, should have been the obvious: Carole was in labor and I needed to be with her, especially since I was her coach. My wife, we thought, was about to have our first baby. I felt the need to point such a thing out because he seemed disenchanted, if not outright irritated, with me, like I was getting in his way. He suggested we just wait a couple of weeks and I said I’d really rather start the next week, since I really needed the income and was ready to get to work anyway. We’d already postponed it two weeks at that point. And that’s where it was left off.

The next Monday came and I spent the whole day off and on working on the After Effects tutorials. I’d tried a few time to get through them more over the preceding week, but the DVD kept screwing up and I’d just decide to try again later. Monday, for whatever reason, it decided to work. (Rebooting and cleaning up the computer seemed to help some.) So I worked on them all day. Tuesday I called Chris to update him and he said he thought it would be best just to wait a couple of weeks. I told him again I’d really like to start, if only on the office work that, according to the job description he’d tailored specifically for me, made up roughly one-third of my job. He said he’d talk to his wife (something he did a lot, which will be noteworthy later) and call me back that afternoon.

He never did. I was getting more concerned and confused by the whole situation. It had been three weeks since I was supposedly going to start, and still not even a day in the office to start learning the layout and procedures. While lying in bed that night (this past Tuesday night) talking about it, Carole suggested that maybe he was afraid that he’d start me, only for her to go into labor again, meaning I’d miss the rest of a week and, according to the agreement, he’d still owe me for a full twenty hours. Maybe I should let him know I wouldn’t be expecting him to do that. By Jove, that seemed more than plausible. So I got up out of bed just to send an e-mail to that effect, as well as explain the delay in getting them info on the hard drives and links to the websites I’m creating. Just an overall update. I wrote it, tweaked it more than I probably needed (I thought at the time), and sent it.

The next morning Carole got up to get the kids breakfast and came back in the bedroom almost immediately, saying darkly, “You need to read Chris’ e-mail.” I did, and was stunned. Somehow he’d misread the plain text of what I’d written, interpreted something offensive no one else has been able to determine, and summarily let me go. I immediately called and left a message to him explaining that there’d somehow been a bad miscommunication, and then wrote an e-mail back to him to the same effect. I then called his wife to try to explain things to her, but I got only voicemail from her as well. So I set out to write an e-mail to her, too, copying and pasting the conversation thus far so she, too, could see my original e-mail to him, his response, and my follow-up. My hope was that his wife was coherent, liked me, and would ask Chris what he was thinking. After getting side-tracked from it and coming back to it, I sent it, only to find Chris had already written me back.

It was then I discovered Jekyll’s Hyde, because as generous and helpful as he was in the beginning, he was a snotty jerk now, saying that I was basically too much work for him and unreliable. How he squared this with my repeated attempts to start work sooner, and the fact that I missed the shoot — the only scheduled work he’d given me — because my wife was in labor, I wasn’t real sure. So I wrote him back, though I slowly reworked my first draft to take out the blunter points, considering I might have to associate with him professionally at some point and that might make it easier. And maybe I thought if I was nice enough about it, he’d realize he was being a jackass and reconsider. But no, and now I’m wishing I’d sent him the e-mail that formed in my mind the next morning in about five minutes. Oh well. As I told both Carole and Dad, who both agreed, better that I found it out now instead of later. Though I’m realizing just now that maybe not, considering at least later I’d have learned more. As it is, I now have a decent working knowledge of After Effects based on 15-16 hours of tutorials (though without the benefit of actually having used the software).

So, in a word, crap. Considering he hired me knowing what kind of situation I was in so far as employment and Carole’s pregnancy, what he did was really rotten, and I really can’t conceive what possessed him to do it, much less change so much from my first perception of him. Maybe he’s just had a really stressful couple of weeks, not that that justifies it; it’s called professionalism. Which is what makes it all so richly ironic, considering the big theme of my interview with him was maturity, and the lack of it from his prospective employees. It appears I could have just held up a mirror.

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