Super Fired!
Written and Narrated by: Andrew Couch
Tunes in this Episode
Hazlehurst - Pale Cricket
More than Eva Braun (Guitar Interlude)
Working - Twain
Television and movies tell us, when someone loses their job, they either got what they had coming or got wrongly sacked by some capricious prick. In either case, the boss, confident, righteously indignant, or possibly just angry, drops the questionable employee like a brick. That employee might say something dumb like, “You can’t fire me! I QUIT!” but it usually goes well for the boss. It all seems so easy, so charged with electricity and exciting. My experience with the phenomena has been less straightforward, not particularly electric, and exciting for all the wrong reasons.
In a working life that has included roughly forty different jobs, I’ve only ever been fired from one of them - it was not exciting. In fact, I didn’t even get the pleasure of hearing the words “you’re fired” at all. It was a contract gig where I worked for a company that serviced many clients in the expo industry, and thanks to an admittedly ill-advised text message to a client which simply read – “That was singularly inconsiderate.” I was blacklisted and never asked to work again. However, as an employee elsewhere, I’ve been privy to several coworkers getting the axe.
The first time I saw someone get fired, I was working as a photographer in Mississippi. The gig was fun, especially for a sixteen-year-old. I would travel from town to town, taking photos of weddings, sorority parties, cheerleading camps, competitions, marathons, and graduations. It cured me of any desire to join a fraternity when I made it to college, for sure, and also soured me on weddings for years. I’ve hated the Van Morrison song, “Brown Eyed Girl,” for decades (a regrettable staple for wedding DJs and cover bands in the Southern US). Honestly, I’m lucky not to have been fired from that gig. I was totally out of control, often getting drunk, flirting with every woman I could, including clients, and experienced my fair share of post-work entanglements with a few of them.
Amazingly, the guy I saw get fired was a friend involved in the same crazy infraction as I was. He got canned, and I got a slap on the wrist. Was it fair? Yes and no. First, I’ll tell you about what we did and then how my boss, a hilarious guy called Robert, handled the firing.
So my pal and I were hired to shoot a party for a local college where the sorority sisters and fraternity brothers of two absurd organizations decided to drink, dance, and, hopefully, get laid. I’d been working for the company for a few years and was eighteen and a senior in high school. My friend was a year older and was a college freshman. Naturally, we both started drinking when we got to the bar and music venue. The gig required a certain social boldness, a little booze makes that quite a bit easier. Equipped with a 35mm film camera, a flash, and a dozen rolls of film, it was our job to approach the partygoers and coax them into photo-perfect moments – no blinking!
We were paid by the roll, so it behooved us to be bold, not annoying, and constantly on the prowl for photo-worthy moments. We were good at it, I would say. Now, while I was a flirt, my friend was much bolder and could close the deal. He called me over to a table where he was laughing with two young women. He was sitting close to a pretty blonde with dimples and a wry smile. They were clearly connecting, already touching each other’s hands and shoulders. They introduced me to her friend and roommate. In the interest of not being unkind or critical to this friend or myself, let’s just say sparks ultimately failed to fly between us.
After several hours of work and drink, the party was winding down, and we were wound up. I’d managed to fill quite a few rolls at 36 frames each. My friend had done less than half of that. I had driven us to the gig, and while I was pretty buzzed, I was straight enough to get us back to Mississippi from Memphis and was ready to go home. My pal and the cute blonde had other plans.
He looked at me with all the grim intensity of a football coach, saying, “She wants me to come back to her dorm room. Let’s go.”
“Can’t she take you? I’ll come back and get you in the morning.”
“No way, man! She didn’t drive either. They got a ride from a friend, and she’s already gone, so they need a ride back. It’s perfect. You can hang out with the roommate!”
He hadn’t noticed that “the roommate” was about as attracted to me as a cow is to a leather wallet. I’m nothing if not an ardent supporter of the desperate need for female affection, so I gave in, saying, “Fine, I’ll give ‘em a ride.”
The two of them made out in the backseat the whole ride while we listened to the fucking Dave Mathews band at top volume to avoid having to listen to red-hot slip smacking behind me or converse with the justifiably annoyed young woman in the passenger seat.
We had to sneak into the dorm room, as male visitors in the middle of the night were frowned upon for obvious reasons. As it happened, our sneaking was not exactly sneaky or successful. Once in the room, my friend and the blonde dove under the sheets of her small mattress. The roommate and I awkwardly sat a few feet from each other on her bed as the blankets across from us writhed and tumbled like water boiling in a pot.
“So, um…what’s your major?” I asked.
Before the poor girl had to answer that idiotic question, my pal popped his head out of the sheets like a gopher checking for the farmer’s dog and pleaded, “You got any condoms?”
The roommate silently winced and stiffened even further. “Uh, no, I don’t.” I turned to the frozen roommate and offered my idiot’s inquiry, “Do you?” With only the tiniest movement of her head and narrowing of her eyes, she managed to unmistakably communicate, “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!”
My pal’s head popped back into the mound of sheets. Terse negotiations followed a bit more tousling. I could hear whispers, heavy breathing, and then a strained silence. The pot had been yanked off the burner. His head popped again from the sheet pile, “We’re leaving.”
I’ve seldom felt a more profound sense of relief.
I thought the matter over, but, as usual, I was totally wrong.
The following week, I was in my boss’ office when he called my friend on the phone. We’d been seen leaving the party with two of the girls, then seen again arriving at the college with them. The same virtuous sleuth watched the four of us as we entered the dormitory, then again as two of us left less than twenty minutes later. This was enough for the college to demand action from the company. For whatever reason, the move was to fire my friend and take me off duty for that particular sorority. I’m guessing it had something to do with the limited number of shots taken by my pal. The firing was smooth, calm, and understanding but emphatic. My friend took it well and thanked our boss for the opportunity. After the call, my boss looked at me and said, “Well, you can’t polish a turd.” Funny but uncharitable. From then on, the fraternity brothers referred to me as “The Shack-tographer” – a stupid name and one I hadn’t earned.
Firing looked easy. You could even do it over the phone. But when it came time for me to sever ties with an employee, I had no such luck. Many years after listening to the photo boss let go of my friend, and after having witnessed lots of other employees lose their jobs in various ways, some more dramatic than others, my time arrived with a sickly feeling in my guts. As you might have guessed, I’m not cut out for it; my laissez-faire style of management was really a cloak to hide an ego too sensitive, insecure, and desperate to be liked to deliver the cold and indifferent hand of command. Honestly, I should not have been at the helm in the first place. But there I was, facing an employee who had to go, and I had to be the one to do it. Of course, it was a young guy, not much older than my friend, who was so amicably fired over the phone, who I needed to send home for good. After months of warnings about his performance, he gave me an excellent excuse to let him go - the ace card for all managers looking to rid themselves of a lackluster employee - a no-call, no-show.
I waited for him to show up for work the next day, positioning myself by a window, watching the traffic for his beat-up car to hit the parking lot. As fate would have it, he was on time for the first time in weeks. Before he could strut into the building, confident he would be clocking in and trudging through his work, I intercepted him on the sidewalk and asked him to join me at an outdoor table.
Incapable of hiding my intent and not wanting to waste any of his time, I blurted it out as soon as we sat. “Man, I hate this, but I’m letting you go.” It felt as stupid as it left my lips as it does writing it down these many years later. I’ve never been the type to rehearse what I’ll say in the future, and it shows. “Letting you go” is the same as “putting an animal to sleep” – a feckless and insincere softening of a harsh and bitter pill that is best swallowed quickly and whole. The kid was still gutted. As his smile fell apart, his eyes changed from a confident young man’s to a sad old boy’s. “But why?” He asked me in disbelief. Not once in all of the firings I had witnessed had anyone asked that question. It seemed, even when a surprise, at least understood by the fired employee.
It was my turn to change eye tones, shifting ever so slightly from mildly insecure man-child to totally insecure man-child. Squirming uncomfortably, I thought, if I was going to be this soft, I should have poured him a beer first or said almost anything else before pulling the trigger without aiming. Better yet, why hadn’t I been more forceful and taken charge of the moment? I had no great one-liners like an old boss in Brooklyn who once fired a guy in front of me by calling him into his office, shaking his hand with a smile while saying, “Tony, your services are no longer needed, please see Cathy in accounting about your paycheck.” It had been fast like a guillotine, painless and smooth. By the time the guy realized what was happening, his head was in the basket, while his body walked to see Cathy in accounting. In contrast, my attempt was more like trying to kill a mouse with a brick - clumsy, painful, and demanding multiple strikes before the deed was done.
And like a trapped animal, the poor guy started crying and pleading that I change my mind. He was shit at his job; this much was true. But had I done enough to warn him beforehand? Come on, no call, no show equals no job, right? My mind was made up, policy dictated letting him go was the right decision, but I’d managed to fuck up the moment, and everything just felt wrong. My ham-fisted attempt to calm him down and assure him he would do well elsewhere was so weird and out of sync with reality that it gave the whole affair that squeaky-church-fart variety of tension. Eventually, he gave up, dragged himself back to his car, and left.
Since then, I’ve not had to fire anyone. In fact, I haven’t had anyone to fire. I’ve mostly worked alone for the last decade. No team, no management structure, and only myself to blame for the countless fuckups and missteps. It’s better this way, as I might just be categorically unemployable at this point. Some of us are born leaders; others are born to follow. The rest of us are just born weird, wandering from gig to gig, awaiting the pointless glory of the next project. Never hired, never fired, only rented for the occasion, like a tool or a bowling shoe.