Being the bad guy during Christmas

Story time!

December brings the occasional random memory. This one is from my early days in corporate more than 2 decades ago. This tale sounds so dated I struggle to write it now, chatGPT is no help to me here.

I was a banking greenhorn, working in a credit approval unit. This was my second job barely 9 months in. I was an early-20s nerdy clerk, too thin for my shirt and tie. My job was a glorious data capture role, encoding and checking credit card applications.

And I was working the night shifts! Long before call centers were a thing. The bank’s marketing team scored a home run on their credit card promotion, and thus our humble unit was inundated with tens of thousands of application forms.

Although I was technically a “rank-and-file” role, as you'll soon read this gig was actually a pseudo-management job in my view. In this job, apart from my own data capture quota (150 applications a day), I was asked to watch over a team of night temps who were hired to bolster the data capture capacity of the bank. These temps would squat on workstations owned by proper bank staff in the daytime.

During these early days of the internet, not everyone had an email address. Office communications were resolved by “inter-office memos” (yes physical) which traveled via brown envelope faithfully delivered by the bank’s vast network of couriers. Write a memo before lunch your recipient would get it by the later afternoon. Write it later, and it’ll be 24 hours.

So in this medieval era, having access to electronic mail was a privilege. Banking was a status-centric job then, and only managers and executives had access to electronic mail.

But I had email! Being the only regular staff on station at night, my superiors thought it tolerable to give me access to that glorious digital communication tool, rather than have to meet me in person.

Night shifts were also seen as a kind of third class employment in those days (why I was on it is a topic for another time), but I had the unique privilege of having an email I can open every evening when I checked in for work, to read the regular stream of complaints from dayshift staff who found their workstations messed up by the nightshift undesirables. Once in a while I would get an actual proper directive from the manager. I’d say the ratio of complaints to directives was 30:1.

Which brings me to the actual subject of this faint corporate memory.

It was December 23, a full 24 hours to Christmas Eve. I get to the office, it’s 9pm, start of my shift, and check my email. After sifting through the customary complaint emails about someone’s scissors landing in someone else’s desk, why the scotch tape and staplers were missing, and why their post-it pads were 50% thinner than they remember, finally a directive.

“Dear Doc,

As the number of credit card applications has declined dramatically given our promo has come to an end, we will no longer need as many temps as we used to.

Out of the 50 temps, please select 40 who will not need to come back to work after Christmas. I leave the selection to you. You do not need to, but you can brief them if you want.

Reply to this email with the full list of temps and marking the 10 we will retain. I will handle the process with HR.

Thanks,

Manager”

It took a full 20 minutes or so before the gravity of the email sunk in. I initially thought I was getting fired, but no, I was the one asked to do the firing.

Understand that I had logged maybe 18 months of practical work experience at this point. Nothing in my recent experience, certainly nothing in school would have prepared me for this. The humanity of it all! Long before I would start to complain about the injustices of corporate life, I was its first instrument.

It was quarter to 10pm. The first task was to determine who.

After spending close to 9 months with these people, I had formed a sort of kinship and bond to them. I would have meals with them, was fairly familiar with their lives. Some were twice my age. Many had families.

As this pre-dated my data mining career, I struggled to formulate some sort of algorithm in my head. Do I weight it towards people with families? To females? To older people? To people I knew better? No form of social justice seemed defensible, and I knew the selection criteria was inconsequential to my superiors, so the buck stopped with me in this.

In the end, I stuck with the easiest of the hard numbers no one could question. I clicked data > sort on my Excel sheet and ranked the 50 temps by the 2 most objective criteria I could find: how many applications they had encoded over the past month, and secondly how many of their applications had to be reworked. Descending – Ascending. I would keep the 10 most productive and least error prone of the temps. It didn’t matter who you were, what you studied, and what color your hair was. Your last 30 days was your CV.

Evidently, that was the easy part. At 11pm having sorted my list, I proceeded to approach each temp discreetly. At 11pm I began the first of 40 heart-wrenching conversations.

Some were tearful. Some were stoic. Most were resigned to the reality. December 23 Doc? You would send them packing right before Christmas? Temps usually don’t get bonuses or separation.

I spent an average of 10 minutes delivering the news. Some went longer a few were shorter. I finished the last of the chats by 6am. I dismissed the temps at 630 and spent another 30 minutes crafting the email to my boss. Attached my nicely sorted and formatted Excel sheet, and packed up for the day.

I barely slept during the day, remembered all the faces I spoke to the previous night. The pattern was the same – they came in the call happy to talk to me, then I witnessed all their expressions change when I delivered the news. I felt emptier and emptier with each conversation. Repeat this 40 times.

The next evening (December 26) I entered a much quieter office. The remaining 10 temps were catatonic, having survived the purge. No one wanted to approach me. I was the messenger of doom after all.

I opened my email and found no complaints from the day shift staff. After an 80% retrenchment of the night staff, their desks were very pristine.

There was one email though.

“Dear Doc,

Thank you for doing the necessary and sending the list of temps to be retained. I’ve advised HR about it and they will handle the process with our temp agency.

Meantime, just informing you that you failed to turn in your quota of 150 applications that night. Hope you can make it up in the following days as we now have less people to do the work.

Regards,

Manager”

The feeling I had after reading the email was hard to describe then. It was simultaneously disgust, grief, and relief (let me know if you know a word). It felt sordid. I also remembered that last nugget of advice in my manager’s fateful email:

“You do not need to, but you can brief them if you want.”

Whatever it was, I felt and knew that I was a changed person after that moment. Whatever I was feeling was mine and mine alone. And that feeling would haunt me for years until I finally left that corporate gig more than a decade later.

As I said, December jogs random memories. Hope you have a pleasant holiday season.

(P.S. to complete the picture, here's another selfie before there were selfies - this was taken around the time this story occurred. Imagine this punk firing 40 people in one night.)