"BS! Indentured servitude has long ago been outlawed in the US, and while my company generally tries hard to get our good interns to come back full-time, HR doesn't phrase it as an obligation."
I'm sorry, but, you left out the most important part of that quote: "More than that, I wanted to comeback."
She was joking! I only included her statement to show that they were seemingly excited to have me return! The truth is, I appreciated the opportunity and felt a great sense of loyalty to the people at the company. I wanted to help.
I don't see loyalty as a flaw, nor was I blinded by it. Remember, the president actually said to me: "You have a number of years ahead of you, let's find out if there's something wrong."
If nothing was going to change, I was ready to walk out the door without so much as a word. I didn't seed my will, I simply wanted to believe what I was being dealt with honestly. I had a number of great offers in Boston, Austin, and San Francisco that I turned down to give this company a chance to work things out with me.
"There's an awful lot of relationship "turbulence" in the mid-20s, and it's awfully hard to pin a breakup to a specific root cause, especially when it's fairly vague."
Very true. We had been in a semi-long distance relationship for six years (90 miles while we were undergrad, then 180, when she went to law school.) When I stared working through the weekends or sleeping through my weekends with her, it put an obvious strain on our relationship.
"Going to academia, or anything other than hacking, is a cop-out."
I agree completely. Going back to school feels wrong on a number of levels.
"Go get another job hacking, and if that doesn't work out, go get another job hacking, and repeat until you find one that makes you mutually happy. If you get to 4 or 5 and find that you're still "0 for", then think about whether there are other root causes, and whether you bear more responsibility for some of your challenges than you are currently admitting to."
Considering that I was hired after two internships, they knew me, and that I had some ability to perform. After a year w\o sleep, a bad breakup, and moving across the country, all within a three month period, my confidence is rather shaken. I would rather not take another job and waste the time of my new employers, and bruise what's left of my ego while I grapple with existential dread. I probably need to get back on the FOSS horse.
I don't think of myself as a victim. I simply feel that I was lied to and don't fully understand why. Well, perhaps I do. The people involved simply didn't care. If they wanted me gone, they could have taken me up on my offers, or, as it was an at will work state, they could have fired me without explanation. The fact that they drug this out for over nine months and left me with extremely high medical bills when they knew that nothing was going to change seems cruel, and has apparently left them open to legal action.
I didn't know that I was entitled to a reasonable accommodation. Hell, I didn't even know what a reasonable accommodation was!
If nothing else this experience has taught me a lot. Unfortunately the price was much higher than I would have liked to pay.