My roommate tells me never to take these events personally. But how can you not?! For whatever reason this has happened to you, golden_eve, all you can do at this point, is prepare yourself for the worse case scenario -- that they fire you.

I think the people who get fired, tend to be the people who contribute the most effort to their roles and to their departments.

Like I said earlier, the slackers NEVER get fired. Somehow, they obtain job security, weasel their way into promotions they have no business being given, and they sabotage their more successful coworkers' with divisive strategies worthy of Sherlock Holmes or the really catty Housewives of Orange County (those women are catty as hell).

When I was hired to teach community college 20 years ago, I only had my bachelors. I was over the moon. But not even one month after I was hired, the man who hired me, was FIRED and a CHEF took over his position as the community college's education director. Um, you're a chef, dude, you don't have any academic credentials like this guy who hired me did. But that's what happened. Soon after the crooked chef took over, he promoted the crappy instructors from part-time to full-time, and gave the dept. ONE SEMESTER to enroll in a masters program (which by the way, is not a terminal degree for teaching...a masters of arts is useless without a ph.d. behind it for teaching). Of course, none of us with bachelor degrees pulled that off, so we were all let go.

Now, community colleges here in my city require 2 masters degrees or a masters plus a ph.d. which is all about politics.