I was fired from my job for using the phone.

But here’s the joke, the job requires me to use Whatsapp to communicate with clients 60% of the time.

I work as a customer service support staff in a logistics company and we communicate frequently with customers who have shipping issues.

With the world changing, email is considered outdated or should I say slow and I usually correspond with my customers on WhatsApp.

Other than official documents, I normally answer customers’ queries quickly with Whatsapp and I am good at my job. While other customer service officers are taking forever to do their job. I always finished whatever is assigned almost half the time.

So my boss is this old man who believes in fax and phone calls, it took him several years of convincing by his son to accept the email.

But he doesn’t think that working on Whatsapp or the phone is “working”. During the lockdown WFH period, he was erratic and thinks that he is paying for his staff for nothing as they are not in the office.

The joke is, I am still billing customers and we are getting the money. Meaning not only he made money during lockdown he made even more as the demand increased.

Doing my job fast is the bad part, half the time I appear to be very free and the old boss saw me chatting on Whatsapp on my phone.

The next day, I received a notice from HR that I was terminated for using my phone all the time. I went to look for the boss’s son and showed him that the Whatsapp chatlogs were all work-related during office hours.

He said he understand but could not convince his father.

A month later, the company called me to come back as their current customer service was overloaded. In my head, I was thinking “Now you know I am important”. I told HR to get the boss to call me if not I will not even consider coming back.

The boss called me and said that there were a lot of urgent tasks and so on and said he wants me back and will offer me a pay raise. I rejected him because he did not even apologise once and wanted money to buy me back.

Guess some companies are doomed to fail since they cannot move on.