[Ccddfergt]

I take it you will never need/want them to be referees in the future?

They actually made it an offence for an ex-employer to give you a bad reference, so if you get a bad one, you can take them to court for Slander.

--- Post Update ---

My current manager NEVER uses words like "Please" or the like. When I fix something gone wrong, or come up with some way that saves the Business $$$ there are never any good words sent to me like "Thanks" or "Good Job". But he has no problem saying "My Guys are great" to HIS manager.

I used to be a lot like that, fishing for appreciation when I'd done a good job, but in the end I realised that was self-defeating and I stopped worrying about it.

In the end, all that matters is whether you know you have done the job to the best of your abilities, met your targets etc or just worked your a$$ off and proved that they were right to employ you in the first place.

As long as YOUR happy with the work your doing, then it shouldn't matter what your immediate boss thinks.

In my last job, before I moved to be with my Fiancee, I worked on a sub-station doing security and my woman boss had absolutely no idea at all how to properly motivate people, she wasn't a "people person" at all and had the social skills of a rampaging rhino (the looks too), Yet I did my job to the best of my abilities, I impressed the clients (national grid) and I impressed her bosses and the owner of the business too, It didn't matter to me that she put me down every day and bullied people into motivating them, I put up with her $hit for a year and a half, kept a diary of everything she was doing, like falsifying log books and reports, taking credit for other peoples work etc, and then when I left, I gave all my reports and evidence to the owner of the business, some of the evidence included photographs taken from her sons facebook account (he was also employed as a day guard), showing him having his friends on site, (it was supposed to be a secure site, with no unauthorized persons at all), He also had a long list of friends that included known drug dealers and criminals, I took all this evidence and dropped her and her son firmly in the $hit.

A month after I left the site, her and her son were sacked, which was a kick in the pants for them and a big grin on my face for me.

The company still call me form time to time and ask me to go back to work for them, at the moment with my CFS its impossible though, but when I'm better (hopefully)I know I'll always be able to get work, because being honest and trustworthy is sometimes worth more than a dozen references from old managers.

Just keep on doing your job, to the best of your abilities, because someday, your perseverance will be noticed by someone higher than your boss and they'll realise that maybe your the better person for your managers job because you handle people better, work better under pressure and don't need telling that you've done a good job when you know your doing it already.