Ummm -- thank you Zigner. You sure are a polite one, aren't you? lol I think that cbg explained the situation better. It's in the eye of the beholder. Like I said earlier, I have never taken any form of legal training. I know unfair, Zigner. I have learned it. I just didn't know it was all legal too. That's the disappointment in my idealistic soul. To say it's illegal to fire someone for age discrimination and then make it so it's nearly impossible to be able to prove...You're 56 years old - you can't seriously expect us to believe that you haven't learned that not everything in life is fair...
And I guess I will suck this loss up and move on. This company was a big part of my life, though. My three children worked for the franchisee from 1996 - 2011. All three were managers. Combined, my family gave this company over 45 years of dedicated service. I was told I was only being kept around because they wanted my daughter to stay (never given a concrete reason as to why). She was the last of my kids still working for them in 2011. She finally left, and sure enough three months later I was terminated - after failing the first inspection of my career. An inspection several managers have failed over and over again.
My cynical husband had warned me something like that would happen for years. I was so afraid of telling him I lost my job because he was homebound with a weak heart. I was afraid of giving him a heart attack. I just stayed out searching for work all those hours I would have been working. I did that for A MONTH AND A HALF! He finally figured it out. He spent the last 4 months of his life worrying about me as I scraped up 1300 a month for our insurance, and that's not how I pictured the end to be. He died last month, and now I'm ..... lost.
So Zigner - I'm going against your signature. I am whining a little bit. Because it's all I apparently can do. And it feels good to least get it out a little. Even if it won't do me a lick of good.
I somehow was under the impression that the LAW is there to ensure everything is fair. Some new terminology, and a lot of help from some of the posters here has made me see things clearly.