But if OP's boss had a reason to be celebrating, then OP is somewhat at fault as well.

#1, I don't know the employment laws of Australia, but firing someone often means: 1. You have to pay them unemployment benefits 2. You risk a wrongful termination or discrimination lawsuit 3. You admit it was a mistake to hire you in the first place. Getting someone to quit is a winning management strategy.

All we can do is make assumptions, however, if OP was really doing something that bad he/she could have been taken aside and told. You can't expect someone to learn from their mistakes if they don't know that they're mistakes in the first place. But I mean, there's a backstory here that none of us knows. I'm sticking with the boss being an asshole just from this bit of info we have. Haha.

12 - Yeah, that is true. Here in Arizona you can get fired if your boss doesn't like your shoes. :p Haha I guess I'm just used to it this way. You don't need a reason to fire someone here so you can't face wrongful termination or anything.

#16, haha, I know all about "termination without cause" because I, too, live in a barbaric jungle. In the civilized world, employers have to go through an orderly system of warnings, etc. to get rid of someone. You can't instantly lose your income and your health insurance because you wore ugly shoes one day.

19 - It's pretty ridiculous, isn't it? I get where you're coming from with your previous comment then. I'm just so used to this system here. Hahah.

There's two sides to everything. Yes, employment laws help prevent wrongful termination, but they often also force employers to hang onto shitty employees who don't deserve the job they have, and thus limit opportunities for deserving people. My 8th grade English class had to endure an entire year of shitty education from a worse-than-useless teacher because she had tenure and the teacher's union is so powerful in the state of New Jersey. The students' constant complaints about her went unheeded until years after I graduated when the principal was walking behind her in the hallway and saw feces running down her leg. When I was in her class she would display blatant favoritism to certain students. She hardly ever bathed or brushed her teeth and instead attempted to cover up her stench with perfume and breath mints. She rarely washed her face too, but applied makeup daily, so that it was caked on her face and would even fall off in crusted chunks sometimes. If you showed her an essay, she would mark what needed to be corrected. Then when you showed her the exact same paper later, having changed nothing, with her marks still on it, she would say, "This is much better! I see much improvement!" When we read "Flowers for Algernon," I had to explain to her that the main character was mentally retarded, not dyslexic. I also had to explain to her the difference between the words, "malicious" and "meticulous" because she claimed they were "the same thing." She also had us memorize prepositions of the English language, which would have been fine, if she understood the nature of the words and didn't describe them as "words to spice up your writing." But perhaps the "spiciness" of words like "to" and "on" are simply lost on me. One time a student walked in on her sitting on the toilet with the stall door open. These a just a few examples of why she was a horrible teacher. Had it been easy to fire that waste-of-space, my fellow students and I would not have wasted a whole school year in a worthless English class, and a quality teacher who deserved the job would have been able to get a job he or she wanted instead of having to live on welfare or find a job doing something they didn't like.

Thanks for sharing that novel

You're welcome. I'm going on a book signing tour soon. You should look up the schedule at your local bookstore. I'd be happy to make out a signature to an adoring fan such as yourself.

Feces running down her leg? Reminds me the time of when i saw a old asian women at my school with her bottom caked in feces....

Gracehi, you are right on target. The problem with unions is that they force employers to hang on to worthless employees so a no-good bum gets to keep a job at the expense of a better worker and to the detriment of the employer. No industry is more rife with this than teaching, as you have pointed out. For far too many teachers, the day they receive tenure is also the last day they do a lick of work. One of our local districts has been involved in a protracted contract dispute and the monstrous salaries of the teachers are at the heart of it. The teachers are demanding outrageous pay raises and benefits at a time when the community's economics have completely tanked. The teachers keep screaming that they are worth it but the district's test scores show otherwise. This district is paying top dollar and is well below average in PSSA testing. When confronted with this discrepancy, the teachers blamed the 'retards' for unfairly pulling down the scores. Since this is not the only district with mentally challenged students, I highly doubt that they are the issue. And how compassionate of the teachers to blame the mentally disabled; what a great example to the non-challenged students they are.

@39 - You couldn't be more wrong if you tried. If you **** up, you get fired, Union or no Union. Union contracts are still contracts and still detail the duties the worker has to carry out to maintain employment. In most cases, teachers don't get tenure. At all. What's more, teachers that do literally no work at all do still get fired. The US Education system suffers from gross under staffing, an outdated core curriculum, a severe lack of education of the arts, lack of after-school programs, and too many mandates written by people who have no clue how the **** to educate kids. Teachers deserve $60k+ salaries their first year, just like anyone with a sciences degree who goes to work in private industry. They deserve to have $100k+ salaries if they're veteran educators or if they have a Master's degree. We could easily free up this money for these teachers if we scrap all the redundant educational oversight panels and meaningless standardized testing. Teachers don't call kids retards. Kids with crappy living situations just don't learn. It's been confirmed time and time again by research studies. The single largest determining factor in the success of a student is household income, because Teachers are only dealing with these kids 6-8 hours a day while all the rest is spent with parents who aren't home because they're working, separated, or just plain shitty parents, if the kid is lucky. Sometimes they go home to a depressed parent with no food for the kids. Sincerely, an educator who is from an extremely large family of educators who knows what the **** we're talking about when it comes to educating kids.

@29 - Awesome. You had one shitty teacher. They exist, and they're pretty much always going to exist. Oh, and by the way, just because you fire that teacher doesn't mean there's another one to replace her. There are few jobs more thankless than a high school English teacher, and the pay is just too low for some people to survive on. It's certainly not enough to justify the cost of a College education.

I was speaking from my personal experience, which is one of many examples. I've had other worthless teachers. She was just the worst one. But my experience clearly proves beyond a reasonable doubt that unions and tenure can keep undeserving people employed. There are many cases similar to the one I described in which a teacher undeserving of their job continues to get paid, such as a case in New York in which a teacher was permanently suspended WITH PAY for sexually harassing students. He gets paid to do nothing because the union there is so corrupt and powerful the district can't simply fire him. Although I wonder why, if you find your job so thankless and the pay unworthy of your qualifications, you sought a teaching career in the first place.

Come to Pennsylvania or New Jersey. You'll love it. Six figure salaries, guaranteed pensions that they contribute nothing to, unlimited sick and vacation time (yep, vacation during the school year, hey they need a break), an outrageous number of holidays and breaks, zero contribution to the finest health care plan available, a minimal work day and accountability to no one as written into the contract. Too lazy and cheap to get a real master's degree but want the bump in pay? No problem. Get a 'master's equivalent' which is paid the same as a real master's degree but by the program's own admission is not as good and rife with cheating. Teachers make no effort to hide the fact that they are passing the coursework around to each other like cocktail napkins; it's about the pay raise, not the education. The principal wants to institute a change? Flip him off. The teachers don't have to do what the principal says; they tell the principal how it's going to be and that's the end, as written into the contract. Commit a crime? No problem. The federation will not allow you to lose your job. The current head of one local district's union has had multiple DUI convictions and is currently up on a harrassment charge but is still in the classroom (where she doesn't teach, she screams at the students that their parents are cheapskates for not giving in to her union's demands). Don't drive past one of our schools at dismissal. You run the risk of being run over by one of our teachers rushing away (in a BMW, Caddy or luxury SUV). Every year we have at least one car accident between two teachers who ram each other in their haste to get out. Summer school? Who's around to teach it? All of our teachers are so rich they have homes at the Jersey shore. The last day of school is the last day we see any of them and thank God. They drive around town like maniacs and get drunk as lords at the bars (where the bar owners complain that they often undertip, stiff them on the bill, steal silverware and salt and pepper shakers and leave the place a mess). Again, accountable to no one and unstoppable. We have a huge glut of teachers around here because the old ones hang in there forever and why not? Why get off this gravy train? The new ones want to get on board and start slurping it up but can't find a place at the trough. And most of them suck at teaching because they didn't get in it because they wanted to do it. They got in it because they saw what a cushy situation it was. We can't get rid of them and even if we could, the next generation is just as bad.

TL;DR

OP resigned, he/she wasn't fired. What the boss did could result in legal action though . Makes this whole thread pointless, but still interesting.

What a bitch or bastard! Unprofessional to say the least. Sorry OP. Clearly you'll do better at another job...you can only go up from there. Good luck!

They should be CRYING over u OP!

OP probably does already has a new job lined up. In this economy, shitty job or not, the rule of thumb is that you don't quit without having something new lined up for you.

30 - OP is from Australia. Our economy is doing great at the moment. Even so, always best to have another job lined up before you quit.

The boss is God in the office. OP going up against that is like a ant trying to lift a planet - he could try, but in the end he is too weak and powerless.

But can you imagine taking it to court? "My boss hurt my feelings by being happy I quit" ..........

...but it is 100% awful. Yay rhymes!

Perdix, you are absolutely right. There are two easy, efficient ways to unload a garbage employee. The first is to induce them to quit. The second is to highly recommend them for a promotion in another department. Smart managers choose the first option. The second one only works the first time. Once you have successfully tricked another manager into taking a shitty employee off your hands, they are onto you and will not keep that information to themselves, so your own ability to be promoted is compromised.

I was forced out of a job before. New management came in and a bunch of us were forced out. We all had fun screwing with the management on our way out. I mean what were they going to do, fire us? Oh noes a week vacation before the new job starts. I should add that none of us were shitty employees. They could just get other people in to do our jobs cheaper and they chose to do so. And some of us actually had ethics which the company didn't seem to share. We fought when it came to misleading consumers and such. We weren't perfect little soldiers and that often caused a headache for the higher ups. I didn't care that they were happy when I left. I was just as happy to be rid of them. Life turned out better for me and eventually that management was let go. Because of the circumstances they had trouble finding decent jobs in the industry. Karma. :)