He left a government job four years earlier, after what he described as documented harassment. He applied to the same branch, in a different location. Three interviews later he had an offer, and he started.
In his second week, HR called him in. The message was that a breakdown between in-house HR and state-level HR had produced a result nobody had caught: he was on the ineligible-for-re-hire list. The reason he was on it, he was told, was that he had not given a full two weeks’ notice when he left the toxic job four years before.
They apologised profusely. They explained that hiring someone on the list was against the state hiring protocol. He was put on paid leave pending a decision, and then advised to collect his personal belongings that day.
He wrote that he had never been so embarrassed. He had not been removed for anything he did in the job. He had been unhired for something he did four years before he was hired — a fact the state’s own process had already recorded, and had failed to check until he was sitting at the desk.