How You Will Be Fired

You’ll see it coming. Signs and signals and clues and hints will be everywhere, even if you tell yourself they’re pointing everywhere but you. After you’re fired from your job, you’ll spend time thinking obsessively about how you saw it coming, how you should and could have seen it coming sooner, and could have prevented it from happening somehow. But you’re almost certainly wrong.

Now, here, in the moment, you are being fired, and this is one of those moments, like birth or death or your first sexual experience, that has at its core a pure binary dividing line of about-to-happen/has-happened. But where that exact line lies can be hazy, and also like birth or death or sex, being fired is really a period of process and invisible wheels turning to create a change of state. It can take a while for you to be fired, but there is a narrower range of chronological time where the actual firing may be said to occur, somewhere, and where the fact that you are being fired is communicated.

You will be fired by your boss, or by someone not your boss but senior to you, or by a nominal colleague, or by an operational functionary whose job responsibilities include informing you that you are being fired by someone else’s decision, which is being incarnated as a decision made by the company, which is the abstract being that is your actual employer and which is speaking to you through its other employee, the person telling you that you are being fired.

The decision about who communicates the fact of you being fired is comically fraught depending on the personalities involved and their own attitude toward you and toward the act of firing people. This background tension is sometimes visible in the demeanor of the individual doing the firing, like an unctuous emotional vapor wafting from their psyche. Even as you are being fired, their thoughts are elsewhere, on those invisible turning wheels that led to this moment and the implications beyond this moment, for them, and how those wheels will keep turning. They may seem distracted or abrupt in reciting dialogue and responses that are clearly if halfheartedly rehearsed. They do not expect or want anything from you except acknowledgement that you are being fired.

You will be fired in person. You will be fired over the phone. You will be fired via email. You will be fired singly and serially and in parallel and en masse. You will be fired by showing up to work and finding the entire company has vanished, including the furniture, and all that remains in the vast, empty office is a folding table with a cardboard box containing the alphabetized final paychecks for you and the other puzzled employees who were the last to know.

The declared, communicated reasons for you being fired are a form of art, a resonant void of meaning designed to be frictionless and immune to engagement. The reasons are a voiceover filling the airtime until your firing is complete. The company is restructuring. The company is failing. We are making strategic adjustments. Your group is being reassigned. Your position is being eliminated. Resources are being reallocated. We’re moving in another direction. Let’s call it a day. It’s just not working out. The truth is, in most cases, you can be fired for any reason or no reason, but they still have to say some words, or so they prefer to think.

You will be fired at a meeting that has appeared on your calendar with no explanation, and which will not be explained upon inquiry beforehand, but which is characterized as both urgent and mandatory. When arriving, there will be individuals present who can only be there for one reason, which is to participate in firing you. Accountants. Lawyers. Assistants. Managers you don’t report to you or work with. Human resources personnel. They will observe your arrival with a studied neutrality bordering on the scientific, in what they likely imagine to be professional detachment, but which reads as fear. No one likes to be the bearer of bad news, unless from their perspective, it’s actually good news that you are being fired, in which case they may take pleasure in the act of firing you, as it affirms their self-image of toughness, pragmatism, doing what must be done.

You will be fired in a conference room. You will be fired in a coworking space where you facilitated the ascent of the individuals now firing you. You will be fired in a hotel courtyard, yelling to be heard over exhaust from nearby air conditioners. You will be fired at lunch, at a favorite restaurant, over a dish you will never enjoy again.

You will be fired and it will please your antagonistic colleagues and distress your friendly colleagues. You will not want to give comfort to your enemies or undue discomfort to your friends, but you will no doubt do a little of both. You will put your enemies from your mind, and if you relish their future disappointments and begrudge their future success, you’re only human. Your friendly colleagues, now your former coworkers, will be sympathetic and solicitous, and you will of course notice in their attitude some conscious or unconscious pity. They too are only human, and in turn you will find yourself pitying them, knowing they can all too readily see their fate in yours. All of this is natural. Honest pity does not deserve resentment in return. Pity doesn’t make anyone weak unless you let it, unless you fear it.

And then it is done and you have been fired. You have a host of unasked-for complications and stress that must be faced, decisions and conversations and actions you would rather avoid, but they follow you being fired like the seasons and will come regardless. And they will also depart like the seasons and your firing and other hirings and other firings, for you and others. You will think about those who fired you reading this and knowing they won’t, and then you will think about them reading how they won’t be reading this, and then you will stop, and write it down, and get back to work.