The good, the bad & the ugly

I've just finished a contract (I'm not going to mention the name of the company I worked for or the recruitment company that found me the post) and to be honest, it hasn't be that good an experience but not for an obvious reason.

The contract started well, lots done and everyone was happy. I needed some time off as the contract had come up during the school holidays and I didn't have cover in place for my youngest (her mother was ill again with a flair up of a problem she'd had last year). The new contract came up at a fortunate time as I'd finished another job a month early (the app was completed and on the stores, but there was no further work so we shook hands I both parted company without an issue and on good terms - something that has happens a lot with my work). The new position was fine with this and on those days I worked from home with my daughter playing on her microbit.

I had warned the new contract that I suffered from a stomach problem which can cause me problems - many moons ago I needed a stomach operation, but due to the NHS taking so long, quite a bit of my digestive tract had been damaged leaving me prone to "problems". Again, they were fine with that.

All went well. Then it didn't. I had a number of stomach problems where being more than a few minutes from the loo would not be a good thing. Nothing suffered, I carried on working from home and made back any time by working later into the night.

Then it became worse. During a scuba dive, something lodged in my ear which caused me a lot of problems and required it to be removed. I have a problem with anaesthetics (and drugs in general; they're unpredictable in effect or just plain don't work at all). At first I thought it was a migraine, it didn't shift, then I became dizzy then I went to the walk-in centre and from there to have it removed.

This is where it becomes very poor indeed. I get a phone call from a recruiter asking to call back. I did. I shouldn't have as I was feeling slightly woozy. They wanted to know if I could talk to someone about some freelance work, they would phone me directly. Sure. I put down the phone and woke up 5 hours later. I'd missed a call which was from the recruiting company who had found me the contract in the first place. No other calls, I therefore assumed that the "someone" offering "freelance work" would call another day; there is nothing unusual about this.

I didn't suspect anything about this as there is nothing unusual about someone within an office of the same company calling about a new position without always knowing that I was in a contract via them. Except it wasn't. A day or so later, I was contacted essentially accusing me of lying as to why I wasn't in. It didn't matter that on the Monday the car was in for the brakes to be fixed and the trains were on strike or that I had had no forms of email or calls from the company regarding being off (as far as I knew, everything was fine and emails had gone through and that was that. My phone logs at the time showed no calls), because of that one call, I was a bare faced liar. To cap it all, on that Monday, my daughter was at her mothers, when I did try to get in, I had a call from her asking to come and get her as her mother wasn't well. I will always put my family over everything. Because I had returned home when a call to the landline arrived, this just made things worse - I should be on the train not at home.

There had been a few other issues of calls not getting through on the mobile number (I later found my phone had a fault which has now been sorted under guarantee), however calls to the land line worked. The numbers always showed up though in the calls received logs, just no ringtone or notification of a missed call.

It didn't matter that I'd been ill but still had been working through until 2am in the morning to make up for lost time (including weekends) or that invoices had been not paid, they backed the company (to date I have 5 outstanding). They didn't bother about the contract not stating where I had to work from or that the decision to pay or not was not up to the company either.

I don't like being in that sort of position, but I carried on to finish the project, even continuing past the end of the contract to iron out issues without charge. Have I had one bit of help here from the recruiters? No. It's their first contract with the company and possibly don't want to rock the boat. Money talks it seems.

I'm not saying if my treatment is or was fair. I'm not going to disclose the names involved. I will say this though - everything is not as it seems. There are things people don't want to discuss or divulge (and to be honest, they don't always have to - for example, there are certain medical conditions that under law you don't have to reveal). When they do though, it is not up to people to judge without knowing everything. It leave a bad taste in the mouth. To have someone from the same office call you to try and "catch you out" is low and frankly unprofessional. Sure, both sides need protecting but this sort of behaviour is nothing more than you'd expect from the likes of debt collection agencies or cold callers trying to catch you out.

Thankfully, this sort of experience is the exception rather than the rule. There are many good recruiters and recruitment companies who really do help smooth the waters when things go off kilter. I'm sure that the recruitment company that found me this post is an exceptionally good one - but in this case, it doesn't seem to be. Maybe I'm just unlucky.