I was fired a while ago from a job and it didn't seem particularly fair.

This was over a year ago now but I’m still kinda hooked up on it a bit. It was a job at a medical cannabis distribution center nearby where I live as a driver. I worked there for a few months but I was fired shortly thereafter.

I was told that my performance was satisfactory for the most part. A lot of the job involved lifting 30-50+lbs boxes up and over my head pretty regularly and up into and out of vans. Having worked and lived a fairly sedentary life prior to this, it took some adjustment. I was told that, but I had also been told that I was improving over time and that it wasn’t an issue.

The job involved loading these heavy boxes into and out of other buildings, sometimes up and down flights of steps too. The boxes of course being so big and bulky that I couldn’t actually see where my feet were. I did fall once, I was given grief about that shortly before I was fired. I was also given grief that someone across the room from me was shaking a stuck shelf-on-wheels which caused a bunch of boxes he had stacked up there to fall and hit him in the head. I was accused of that having been my fault in the same conversation where they yelled at me for falling down the steps too… I still haven’t figured out the mental gymnastics behind that one.

I was never told any of this was a problem. At one point I was asked to go upstairs and help another department out, I did for days until I was asked if I wanted to just go to their department permanently. This being in a large metal building on the second floor with a broken AC in the height of summer, for someone like me who has a medical condition that makes excessive heat more dangerous, I wasn’t necessarily okay with that change. The next day, the same people who offered the switch told me it was actually mandatory and that it came with a $2/hour cut in pay. They said it was my fault and that they had concerns the whole time about my performance. I told them they never said anything, they lied and said that they had. I obviously wasn’t okay with that.

Labor day was the following Monday I think. I went to Canada for the weekend with my girlfriend. Got back, and about an hour before I was supposed to go to bed for work, I got an email at 8:39 PM on the Sunday before Labor Day telling me I was fired.

Edit: I had a picture here that showed the emails but I forgot to censor the company name. I’ll re-add the photo once I do. I don’t need legal trouble here.

The “This was not a match” is the same excuse they gave my friend who they fired a few weeks before me. They refused to elaborate and referred me to the unemployment office with questions like they’d have an answer for this. I did apply for unemployement benefits but literally never heard back either.

To this day I can only assume they fired me because they fired my friend, who happened to also recommend me for the job. Neither one of us understand why. It was probably one of the few jobs I had actually ever enjoyed prior to me being asked to switch departments. What bothers me the most is knowing that I had even spoken to my old manager prior to being terminated and said “Please just don’t screw me like my last company did” to which she said “Cameron, that’s unfair, we’re a different company and we’re different people.” to find out that they literally stayed up on a day when almost nobody worked anyway just to fire me over an email… it just feels disrespectful.

Is this what I have to look forward to for the rest of my adult working life? This isn’t worth it. It wasn’t like I was making bank either, I was making less than industry standard and only a few bucks over minimum wage. This can’t be how things continue to go.