The win win of firing...

If you have ever fired anyone you know how fun it is. You are just cleaning house and slashing and burning dead wood. You are making the workplace cleaner more beautiful, and most importantly, more efficient.

If you have ever been fired you know how invigorating it can be. It is like all of the hard work has finally paid off, and not only do you get to leave, you have to leave. All of your work has to be done by someone else. No matter how badly you know it will be screwed up by whoever thinks they can “fill your shoes” they won’t even let you help! It is like being set free from slavery. It is almost like being set free from the confines of the flesh and mortality. I think that’s why some people come back and gun down the whole office after being fired. It seems too good to be true, so maybe it is a dream and you can kill without consequences. That’s probably not a good way to test whether you are having a dream or not.



One guy I fired once actually described how he was going to kill me from the roof of the neighboring building. I actually wanted to keep him around to train others in how to use software but whenever he was a teacher he got obsessed with power and forgot to actually teach anything. It was frustrating, because he knew his software very well, and was a very good artist but not a good commercial artist, because he always wanted to interject his own ideas into simple designs that just needed to be done as described.

I’m all for creativity, but when creativity takes 5 hours and looks like "$#!t", and getting it done would have looked like “what I asked for” then somebody who isn’t me gets the boot. I feel bad that I didn’t get to fully enjoy firing this guy because of the death threats. He was certainly crazy enough to do it too, but that just shows my commitment to quality.

Some of the best times in my life were times that I was fired. Actually, I can only think of one time right now, seems like more. I know people say, “you weren’t fired, you were laid off”, but to me getting laid off sounds pretty wimpy, plus, it makes the company sound like professionals. They can’t possibly be professionals if they even entertained the idea of “letting me go”, Oh, just thought of the other time I was fired. Both of those companies went out of business very shortly after my leaving. One I could have saved, the other was hopeless due to a shady IPO and many other bad business practices.
Once the president (of the company I was working for at the time) asked me to help him fire one of the receptionists at the front desk. I thought to myself, “what? is he scared to do it himself?”, but I didn’t say anything because I wanted to be included in the firing. I did tell him that I didn’t think she should be fired. I was asked about this later by one of the tech support guys. He said, “so what would you do if he asked you to fire me?” I said, “I would disagree, but I’d can you.” He was in shock that I could enjoy firing people so much that I would fire people who shouldn’t even be fired. I could have said something about how sick it was that he was cheating on his wife, but then he would have found out what a total jackass he was and that would remove a whole level of the enjoyment I would have had in firing him if that eventuality ever did arise.

Of course, I would never make the choice to get rid of someone ideal for a job, I’m just there to help other “managers” liquidate their valuable employees when they are too weak to do it. But for anyone else, make a stupid decision and follow-through, that’s what I say.