The Day We All Got Fired (AKA Reflections From the Sh*t Can)

I.) Fired! - Facilitators, Fruit Flies, and Facial Hair

The cherries were perfect. Plump, crisp, pulsating with a picturesque deep burgundy hue that infused an irrepressible life force into that artificially lifeless afternoon. It is often said that small details leave the most lasting impression during outsized moments. Indeed, the cherries are my most vivid memory from the balmy August afternoon when I and 100-and-some odd colleagues were summarily fired by the new ownership of our suddenly-former employer.

Thanks to a plucky corporate health and wellness program, each work week was ushered in by “Fresh Fruit Monday,” during which the main kitchen was stocked with all manner produce - presumably to mitigate the artery blockages hastened by the cornucopia of pre-packaged sodium snacks served up during the remainder of the week. Naturally, fruit was typically purchased for the 170 stalwart occupants of the office - a number which, at that very moment, was undergoing an exponential reduction. As our elfin conquistador and his stone-faced minions read from carefully worded scripts detailing the particulars of our “non-voluntary separations” and “very generous transition assistance” offerings, the question burning in my mind like neglected Jiffy Pop in the company microwave was, “do these eco-hostile robber barons have any idea how much delicious fruit they are putting to waste?”

Thankfully, my darker ruminations on the fruit flies that would soon have the run of our once-welcoming kitchen were periodically punctured by the incredulous exclamations of “wh-huh-huh-huh-wwhhat!?” from the now-former colleague to my right. It would typically begin like a stymied whistle, overtaken by a muted fit of laughter - the type of haplessly awkward cacophony that sprung involuntarily from your larynx that time your teen camp counselor walked in on you vigorously “checking yourself for ticks” in the custodial cabin. Gradually, it would coalesce into a spasmodic expulsion of the only question that makes sense at those cinematically surreal moments when nothing makes sense. “Wh-huh-huh-huh-wwhhat!?”

Of course, on some level, I knew exactly what. I think we all did. While that Monday morning was undoubtedly the most jarring plot twist in the professional stories of most in the room, it’s hardly an original narrative. Per Thomson Reuters, 2015 was the biggest year in history for mergers and acquisitions, with $4.7 trillion changing hands through various machinations of corporate wheelings and dealings. Despite growing economic uncertainty, 2016 and 2017 have followed much the same trajectory, leading economists to speculate that we may be in the throes of a “merger wave.” That means if you haven’t been downsized, laid off, jettisoned, restructured, re-aligned, rendered redundant, shown the door, kicked to the curb, consciously uncoupled from your cubicle, or otherwise crammed into the proverbial shit can and tossed down the corporate refuse chute with all the other mis-sorted recyclables yet, you probably will be. Such merger waves historically occur on roughly a 20 year cycle, meaning every generation since at least the 1960s has experienced at least one. With 30-some odd years of deregulation in the United States leaving once robust anti-trust laws stripped like carcasses in the legislative desert, the 21st Century may well see such waves break into the new normal.

So when you’re told that the company through which you have made your living, many of your friends, and possibly even your identity for years, even decades, no longer has a fiscally salient use case for extending your employ, a certain visceral reaction is natural, even healthy. Anger? Sure. It was your effort, dedication, and innovation that enabled a once fledgling virtual supply chain encoding company to grow into a viable acquisition target in the first place, and all you got was this lousy COBRA plan? Fear? Absolutely. Years of immersion in one singular corporate eco-system may well have left your skill set only marginally adaptable to the larger industrial landscape - to the extent there even is a larger industrial landscape in a postmodern marketplace of niche sectors and micro-industries. Not to mention, you are a lot older than the last time you embarked on a job search, and a whole new generation has stormed the workforce with seemingly endless vigor, coding skills, and free room and board in their parents’ garages enabling them to drive wages down by working for a serf’s pittance. Embarrassment? Of course. Even though most informed adults understand the cold nihilism of corporate mergers, when a new acquaintance asks what you do for a living, and your response begins with, “well, see, what had happened was…”, even the most benevolent soul judges just a little bit. And everybody knows what “Oh, uh, I’m doing a little consulting” really means.

But surprise? Nobody should ever have reason to feel surprise at being let go. Between acquisitions, mergers, downsizing, outsourcing, crowd sourcing, off-shoring, automation, re-location, revenue reallocation, and efficiency audits breeding job consolidations like feral rabbits, if anything, we should all clutch our breath and utter a hushed “hallelujah” each time the clock strikes 5PM and we haven’t received a pink slip that day.

Yet when the email hit my inbox, before the sun had fully ascended, announcing in all-caps a MANDATORY all-hands meeting in the main kitchen at 1PM, I naturally assumed that we were being gathered to celebrate my work anniversary, which, as LinkedIn had so kindly reminded all of my connections, was that very day. Even after our new overlords dropped an inadvertent Easter egg by flipping the logo on the company website an hour before the meeting, I joined right in with my co-workers feverishly positing rationalizations as to why it didn’t necessarily mean we would all be escorted from the building by the time the afternoon coffee was done percolating. If they were going to shut us down completely, they wouldn’t have bothered re-branding the website. They will still need both staffs to manage the combined customer base. They will probably keep us around for a year so they can transition clients over gradually.

Even after the first portion of the two-part execution, during which the acquisition was explained declared, our outgoing CEO - compelled, judging by his body language, by invisible firing squad - announced his own termination, and our new CEO instructed us to return to our desks to await further instruction via email, the rationalization continued. When the emails arrived, brusquely instructing the majority of us to return to the kitchen, while a select few staffers were cordially invited to report to the Hyatt across the street, there was still a small voice in the back of the mind of each and every one of us kitchen-bound peons crowing, “At least those poor fired bastards are getting a farewell banquet at the Hyatt.” Mine sounded eerily like Will Ferrell as Robert Goulet.

I don’t remember the words that were used to tell us kitchen-captives that we were no longer employees of the company whose communal space we currently occupied, or even who spoke them. The writerly crevices of my mind, prone to flights of metaphorical fancy, picture the words oozing from the mouth of the new CEO and owner of our now parent company. With his smarmy smirk and giddy vindication at conquering the company whose superiority he freely acknowledged in his takeover speech, he makes for an easy villain in this story; the newly moneyed man-child petulantly personifying unfettered capitalism run awry in the digital age.

But my more logically leaning lobes know it wasn’t him. The simple fact is, we were too insignificant to warrant a proper send off from upper management. Our official dismissal was outsourced to a team of termination facilitators, whose sole purpose is to travel from office to office, city to city, severing “human capital assets” from the corporations for whom they no longer hold operational value. Think George Clooney in Up In the Air, but without the cheekbones, charisma, or anything else that might render them identifiably, you know, human. The role of these consultants is literally to be as innocuous as possible while executing the process in an efficient and uneventful manner. It’s as if by presiding over such an emotionally fraught procedure with the distant, clinical precision, they manage to similarly quell the natural, and potentially charged human emotions in those they are shepherding out the door. Indeed, they all blended into the moment, a collection of pressed white shirts, earth toned khakis, and blank alabaster faces, reading in monotone from the lawyer-approved copy in front of them.

One guy had a beard. His beard is probably my second most distinct memory from the day, behind the cherries of course, because I knew he wasn’t supposed to have it. Surely in the firing-bot training manual, all new hires at the termination facilitation conglomerate are reminded that facial hair is prohibited because it may appear disconcerting to those they are administrating off of the employment rolls. The effect, for me, was actually quite the opposite. Having cut my professional teeth in the media world, I was always told that facial hair makes it look like you’re hiding something. But the sense I got from Beardy was that he, himself, was hiding. It was oddly comforting to know that the human being behind the beard was bothered enough by the line of work into which his own economic necessities had funneled him that he felt compelled to conceal himself behind thick tufts of scruff. When the prepared text had been read, and the floor was opened to questions, I directed my inquiry about the continuation of benefits directly to Beardy. He dropped his eyes, and his voice cracked barely perceptibly as he referred me back to the prepared text. Still Beardy’s visible discomfort was oddly affirmational; the ever so subtle confirmation from behind the studied aloofness that while this may be business as usual, there is nothing usual about this business.

II.) A Familial Facade

No other experience will ever quite so surgically deconstruct the humanity of the modern workplace like the moments during and immediately following a mass termination. Never will there be so palpable a bond between colleagues, across all ranks, tenures, departments, and tax brackets as when you’re all being shoved in the shit can together. We all applauded heartily in unison as our outgoing CEO took his final bow. We caught our breath collectively when told that what began as just another manic Monday would end as our final day together. We shared a few gallows laughs, a handful of hugs, a couple of stray tears, and ultimately the heavy silence of finality as we filed out of the kitchen, termination packets in hand.

Cliché as the notion has become, a workplace truly is a family of sorts. With coworkers, we labor in tandem and in support. We partner to achieve collective goals, and jockey to further competing interests. We celebrate wins, lament losses. We share ice cream cakes on birthdays and utterly useless gifts (never to exceed a value of $20) during the holidays. Once a year, we may even bring the whole extended unit together for a picnic or cookout, and gossip derisively about whoever downs two too many Coronas and pees in the fondue pot. In the era of the “lifestyle job” many of us spend more time with our work kin than with our flesh and blood relatives. We don’t get much say in choosing either brood. And from our vantage point, it may always appear as though the family across the street is more prosperous, or a little less dysfunctional. Yet we generally make it work, because that’s what families do. In the process, a bond is formed, however conflicted or convoluted.

Yet unlike blood relations, a work family is, by nature tenuous and temporary. Members leave all the time, and once the last of the leftover cake from the farewell party has been devoured, are rarely thought of again. Within a couple of weeks, the seat to your left vacated by Bob is filled by Chuck, who is filing the same reports, sending out the same prickly Thursday afternoon emails reminding you to submit your numbers for said reports, and telling pretty much the same stories about his precocious children that Bob did. Eventually, Chuck becomes Bob to the degree that in five years, half the office will swear it was Chuck who pee’d in the fondue. The transience is generally so gradual as to become imperceptible. But when the familial facade is exploded by outside forces, the coldly individualistic nature of the modern professional world instantly comes crashing into focus.

By the time we made it back to our desks, the bonds so heightened in the moment of our termination had visibly begun to fracture and crumble. Soon we were occupied by the individual and intensely personal tasks of assembling boxes, packing our belongings, and fumbling through miscellaneous desk drawer accumulations in a hurried attempt to sort keepsakes from artifacts of a now past era, in which we were uncomfortably still lingering. The ever efficient termination facilitation crew stealthily maneuvered the office handing out cleaning supplies and strategically placing waste baskets to assist us in the purging of our work spaces. I took that as my cue to grab my water bottle, a handful of business cards, the souvenir pen that a long departed team lead had given me after a trip to Belize, and head for the elevators, leaving my overstuffed desk virtually untouched. I didn’t work there anymore. Why would I provide free janitorial services? After a few terse goodbyes, I walked out the door of my erstwhile employer the same way I had walked in exactly six years and five hours prior: alone and not unhappy.

III.) Epilogue: Fanning Your Flame

I would love to tell you that I took the scenic route home that day, and in surveying the browning leaves and wilting flowers, I was delivered a great epiphany about the inevitability of change, the metaphysical circularity of endings and beginnings, or at least something quasi-profound enough to turn the day’s lemons into a bestselling self-help aid. Unfortunately, I grew up in the participation trophy era, so I’m not that global of a thinker. My contemplation that day never transcended much beyond myself. Thoughts of how my work could serve the company were inverted to how my work at the company could serve me. What skills had I acquired, what knowledge had I cultivated, what connections had I made, and how could it all fit together in the image of marketable job candidate. What was my story? And what was the next chapter? It was selfish. It was shortsighted. It may have been a tad narcissistic. And it was the way I should have been thinking all along.

My grandfather worked for the railroad for over 30 years. He knew his work would never make him rich or famous, but he could also count on the fact that if he labored diligently and dependably, he would be rewarded with a wage substantive enough to support his five children, and a pension that ultimately enabled him to live comfortably to the very last of his 97 years. Many of our grandparents, and even parents, followed a similar path. So it is all too easy to fall, consciously or subconsciously, into a mind state of professional malaise; to stay somewhere comfortable simply because it presents the path of least resistance. Or to rest on the assumption that if you serve your company, your company will serve you, because the alternative means never truly resting.

But our grandparents’ world doesn’t exist anymore. At-will employment has become the de facto standard, meaning anybody can be let go at anytime for any reason, or no reason at all. Pensions have gone the way of rotary phones. Even simple cost of living raises are becoming fewer and farther between. Early in the exhaustive job search that followed that faithful August day, I was interviewed by a lady whose email signature carried the title “Vice President, Human Capital Acquisition.” I wasn’t so much surprised that such a title existed, as that she would so brazenly plop it at the bottom of every outgoing email for the world to see. It’s no longer a secret. We, as workers are not human beings whose full complement of talents, values, and life experiences are sought to fortify the foundation of a business. We are human capital to be acquired, presumably to serve a quantifiable purpose. No amount of affirmational interview jargon can shift that paradigm, so we might as well embrace it.

In the 21st Century workplace, we are all a brand of one. We will likely spend several decades licensing our brand to others to satisfy the cold hard financial realities of the world in which we live, but regardless of who is signing our paychecks at any given moment, we are working for ourselves. As such, we must take great care never to let our personal brands get lost within the larger brand of any employer. If you contribute a post to the corporate blog, demand a proper byline. If you are tasked with planning a conference, be sure to schedule a speaking slot for yourself. Overhauled the accounting system at your workplace? Write a LinkedIn post about it. Voila! You just went from accountant (zzzzzzzzz) to “Thought Leader.” Which one sounds like a more valuable piece of capital to you? Commit to attending two professional events each month – one related to what you currently do, the other to what you want to do next.

That’s not to say workers should conspire to bolster their personal brands at the expense of an employer. Rather, when evaluating prospective employers, we should openly and unabashedly seek out mutually beneficial arrangements where interests align, and both entities will grow through the union. At which time your interests change, or your employer's do, or you feel there is simply no more room for growth, move up and out. Will it ruffle a few feathers? Maybe. But those same feathered friends probably won’t hesitate to hand you a box to assemble the day your role becomes redundant. Or simply too expensive.

I may very well get fired again one day. I may be hit by a bus, or pooped on by a flock of passing pigeons. You might too. These are risks we all take when we choose to engage with the world. But a firing should simply be the temporary loss of a paycheck, no more, no less. Your professional identity is yours, and does not transfer to the company when you hand in your badge. I walked away from my firing with a clarified and re-invigorated personal brand, which proved more valuable than anything that could fit in a banker box. I just wish I had grabbed a handful of those cherries to enjoy along the road ahead.

About the Author

Jeffrey Harvey is a writer, content strategist, and narrative maven based in Washington, DC. As the writer of the Media Matters blog on LinkedIn, he offers inspired analysis, commentary, and brain droppings on all things communications, contemporary culture, and life in the digital age. He is always eager to connect with other content strategists, communications pros, and dynamic minds from all realms. He periodically lapses into describing himself in the third person, and for that he apologizes profusely.