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So about six weeks ago, my mother’s illness took a turn for the worse, and I took some time off work to take care of her. It was all very rushed because we never expected her condition to worsen so quickly and things were just very messy. I was also pretty stressed at the time, so perhaps I didn’t deal with the situation in the best way, and I only communicated with the CEO over the phone about the whole situation and I didn’t know how long I would be away. He was understanding and basically told me to take as much time as I needed.

Anyway, my mother died three weeks later and after the funeral I flew back home. I was still grieving and wanted a bit more time off to work through some emotions. But I wanted to actually come back to work to negotiate in person. To my surprise when I got in (and apparently to everyone else’s surprise as well) my desk had been cleared. I spoke to my CEO and he told / showed me a resignation email I had allegedly sent him. It was actually from my work address. He even showed me his reply email accepting my resignation. It was dated only a few days after I left and he said the paperwork had all been filled out and there was nothing he could do because they already hired someone to replace me.

Now, maybe it could be conceivable to others that, in my grief, I remotely logged in, sent the email and forgot I did it. I know I didn’t send the email (I need a work dongle to log in and I didn’t bring it with me) but I don’t know who would’ve sent it. I can’t imagine my CEO doing something like this. He seemed genuinely surprised that I had come back and he said he had been disappointed to learn that I had decided to move back for good. It could’ve been a colleague because I know there is a backdoor way to send emails using someone else’s account via some sort of a SQL database thing. We used to do it as jokes but it was never used for something like this and I can’t imagine anyone that would hate me enough to go this far.

The fact is, I don’t care that much about the job. It was the fact that I had long service leave in about 6 months (I was actually coming in to negotiate whether I could take the leave early) and quitting meant I wouldn’t be paid out for it.

So I guess in this situation, do I have any choice other than to accept someone quit for me and move on?