Legal Question in Employment Law in Florida

I have an upcoming unemployment appeal against a large international company based in US that I worked at for over 4 plus years.

As a desktop computer support technician & from the encouragement of my employer, I obtained my Microsoft desktop support certification, to enhance my on the job call handling and support. In order to further develop my job skills & self development I took the initiative to get hands more on experience form the knowledge I gained. In excess of a year, on company time, co-workers, supervisors, & directors alike solicited me via company email to work on their personal computers at my home. The company more than benefited from the knowledge I gained and this was clearly reflected in my evaluations. I had no reason to believe what I was doing was not job related or could be considered violation of company policyMy job as a computer tech phone support person is to deal with a variety of computer issues and end user knowledge, etc. My job is to fix over the phone if I can or send out a tech to their site at a fee back to us for their time and labor if we are not able to fix it over the phone.

We need to have a good working knowledge of all factors and good customer service skills to deal with a wide variety of end users and to not be taken advantage of my repair techs when they say how long they had to work on it and what needed to be done and charged back to us. The company encouraged and paid for me to update my technical certification. Gaining this updated book knowledge made me realize how different working on newer computers had changed since I had done the hands on work years ago.

The book knowledge I gained did further my ability to lower repair costs for us and better deal with the claims daily, however being the conscientious employee I always strive to be to go above and beyond as my reviews clearly state I have always done for the company, I realized I could do this even better if I really had some current hands on experience with these newer model computers.

I asked my supervisor if she thought it would be OK if I offered to work on people�s computers for them to gain more current hands on experience to even further my job development skills.

She said YES, that�s a great idea in fact I need you to look at my computer first. My supervisor, as were others, were fully aware that we were all using company email to communicate about repairs needed and how I could do them to further my hands on experience and job development.

I was using the knowledge I gained to be able to save the company time and money, I was able to reduce labor time and costs to the company on repairs to provide complete and accurate repairs and costs to the company and my reviews clearly show these results.

I have been acknowledged as the go to person on troubled repairs because of my additional knowledge I have gained. I am able to sort through them due to my hands on knowledge of the repairs, how long they should take to repair, what should be done to resolve the issues instead of allowing the repair techs to dictate to the company what the costs and labor should be.

I have one of the highest/best audit scores on the entire floor. My evaluations state and I quote �Tom has a solid performance in his stats. He is thorough in his repair claims notes and provides quality service to callers.� �Tom�s diplomatic approach to negotiating with vendors is a strength for him.� �Tom has a talent at diplomacy ensuring all parties benefit from negotiations.� �Tom is always open to visitors observing his calls.� �Tom sorts through the complexities of an issue to make the best possible decision in the least amount of time. He uses his EXPERIENCE to separate critical facts from less important information. Tom is able to employ his EXPERIENCE and intuition when make decisions. His judgment is consistently sound.� �Tom takes a systematic approach. He speaks with customers, selling dealers, repair facilities/techs and vendors to learn all the different perspectives, and he creates plans that reflect a deep analysis and understanding of the issues and varied approaches. He is able to drive results because he takes the time to balance and manage each different person�s needs and expectations.�

I one of the very few who receive numerous 100% QC, risk and customer service audits. The QC manager tells me he does not even worry or even have to listen to my calls that are recorded because he knows I do such a great thorough job on each and every call I handle, but he does continue to listen to them and rate them and thus the numerous 100% awards I continued to receive.

These are some of the many reasons my supervisor was grooming me to be promoted to the next level and I continued to work as I did to achieve these higher marks for the company.

Everything I did was to better my career at the company. The compliments from my supervisor as well as others along with my outstanding evaluations and awards I was given assured me I was on the right path.

Regarding how I come to a cost I would charge for repairs, If a new part is needed I call around to get the best price for the part, and charge them $30 or so dollars above this costs as my goal is not to make money doing these repairs but it was to improve my on the job skills to do an even better job for the company. I also do not just fix what is broken. If a computer needs a new hard drive I do this work but I also go through the computer and programs to familiarize myself with the interworking of it and how it interacts on our supported network and how applications loaded and functioned. I keep notes and records about the different models I worked on and many come to me to refer to these notes on their repairs, network settings, firewalls settings, etc. I clean up old files, temp files, repair installation on things causing errors on boot up, modify their msconfig files to make the system boot up faster, I go through each application to make sure all features are working and if they are not I fix this also, I defrag the hard drive, etc. I do this because my goal is not to make money at repairs but to learn how to do my claims adjuster job better as I deal with repair techs and vendors.

I had every indication what I was doing was the right things.

If asked because this new supervisor really is trying to trump up my offense and justify his actions so if I am asked what about the fact that you have personal repair business cards Tom? My father in law made those up for me as a gag gift, he knows I much I appreciate my office job I have now, but that I had been working on computers and really appreciating my stay in the office job because of this. He thought they were funny and cool. I did give them to a few people as I was working on their computers at my home and they needed my number and address to drop off their computers and contact me after hours, but they were not stacked up and handed out as any marketing tool for business. My goal was to do a better job in my claims adjustment job NOT to work on computers to make money.

Closing statement for unemployment appeal:

I poured my heart and sole into my career and would never do anything to jeopardize my career. I got out of the computer tech field work long ago because of it was getting too hard for me to lug around all the repair equipment needed and be so transitional and not be able to go home at 5pm because repairs were still pending. Now that I have a small child to pick up from day care and such I loved my stay in the office job because it allowed me to use my skills in and stay in the office environment. The only reason why I was doing any computer repairs was because the company encouraged and paid for updating my certifications for newer model computers and operating systems and I wanted to do the best job I possibly could for them. Through the years at this company I have always gone above and beyond my normal job duties. I love my job and was lead to believe everything I did was correct and above board.

They since fired my supervisor, no knowledge was given to us as to why and the same week this new supervisor began who was promoted to supervisor from my area and was fully aware and partook in the emails and repairs that I was doing, even brought me tools and disks in to do some of the work I needed to do in the past, yet he fired me for conducting personal business on company time without any warnings or questions. Above is my argument about why I was doing this how I had previous got my supervisors approval to do so.

He wanted his friend to have the promotion I was up for and would not have got to bypass me to get him promoted so he fired me for this reason.

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