This is going to be an account of my one year of employment at Manheim Automotive Auto Auctions in Tolleson, AZ as a Parts Coordinator. It was one of the worst experiences I ever had at a company and everybody who is considering working for this company needs to hear my story. Nobody should have to go through what I went through. The company is part of Cox Automotive, which is owned by Cox Industries.
On February 25, 2019, I was hired as a Parts Coordinator. Most of my career was in the health insurance industry, but I decided to do a career change. I had some transferable computer skills and was familiar with a lot of car parts because I am a car enthusiast.
When I started, I did not even have a computer or telephone on my desk. It took almost to the end of March before I received the computer and I received the telephone about two weeks prior to that with a faulty ethernet cable that kept falling out disabling my telephone. Then it took another two weeks before my computer was loaded with the correct programs I would need to do my job. By this time, it was about the beginning of April before I could start performing my job duties. In the meantime, I was learning other job duties from my department co-workers to help them out. In addition, I was receiving training for my position, although it was never scheduled and was through a mentor. The training was haphazard at best. Here is the start of all my troubles.
The training was in another office in the same building. However, the size of the room was about the size of a small bedroom. Similar in size from homes built in the 1980's and earlier. To say it was cramped is an understatement. Four people worked in the same office, each at an office desk with a tall filing cabinet on top of it. In fact, it was so cramped, that the co-worker would literally back their chair into their co-worker's chair whenever they got up. This is where my haphazard training took place. I literally had to place my notebook on my lap to take notes, when there was a chair available for me to sit in, that is. When there was not a chair, I had to somehow takes notes standing up for 1-2 hours. In fact, at times, I even had a fan blowing directly into my face while I was trying to train. How management thinks this is conducive to training is beyond me. In addition, I was not trained on everything I needed to learn, which is one of the reasons I was fired. The training lasted about 2 weeks and it was about 2-3 days each week for 2 hours. However, as I stated, I could not use my computer until about the beginning of April, meaning that what I was learning in training all that time I could not even apply to my position until then.
My job functions were to request part quotes from automobile dealers and parts stores based on condition reports done by what are known as CR writers in my department. They enter notes and take pictures of the cars they are working on, and then create work orders in the system for each vehicle. I would obtain the quotes and enter them into the system. The vehicles were sent to us from companies, like Hertz, to be re-conditioned so they could be re-sold to the public. The quotes would have to be reviewed by a representative from Hertz. If approved, the quotes would go to our ordering department to be ordered. I had no authority to order parts and no access to the ordering system, which is very important to note and the main reason, as you will see, why I was fired.
I finally started to perform my job duties in early April and on May 14, 2019, I was already written up with a Corrective Action Form. Here is where it starts to get very interesting. One of the senior co-workers was asking me why I wasn't doing one of my job functions and I told him it was because I wasn't trained on it. When he evidently made my supervisor aware of it, my supervisor started questioning me about it and I told him the same thing, but he didn't believe me. In fact, he never even asked the person who trained me if she actually did train me on the other job responsibilities. He just assumed it. This happened several times, and I had to be trained on the job responsibilities that I was never trained on. This was the beginning of my supervisor confronting me on many issues due to him not wanting to believe me. In addition, my team lead was making mistakes on part quotes, which I corrected when I received e-mails from the ordering department stating the part numbers were wrong. She did this several time and I brought this up to my supervisor who didn't do anything about it because he trusted her. That would have cost the company money. Watch how this progressively gets much worse.
In one example, one of my department co-workers left a box of wheel covers on a desk for about 3 days before my supervisor asked me why I didn't place them on the vehicle. I told him I didn't leave them there and I had no idea why my co-worker placed them there in the first place.
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