I heard this great story about a guy who was getting laid off from his Houston-area company years ago. As legend has it, all employees of the company were summoned to a meeting during which they were told that they were cutting jobs, effective immediately. When employees returned to their desks, if they were affected they would find a box and a pink slip waiting for them. In that case, they were supposed to put all their personal effects in the box and exit the premises immediately.
This isn’t what happened but what I would do in that situation is this: Haul ass out of the meeting and put my box and pink slip on a non-affected employee’s desk so they would think it was THEM getting the ax and not me.
Then, when someone came by and said, “Where’s Alice? I need her to complete this legally-required tonnage report by 3 p.m. or our entire C-suite will be under intense SEC scrutiny!”, I would shrug very sadly and say, “Apparently, you’re out of the loop. She went on a binge again. Ten years sober down the drain. And that’s not even the worse part. When she stumbled out of here, she was run down by a police officer on a horse who was galloping to a crime scene. Her husband’s crime scene. He held up a bank and now he’s going away for a looooong time so there’s really no point in calling to offer your condolences to the family.”
I might even cry a little but probably not because I’m the world’s shittiest actress and that’s why no one wants to play poker with me.
As a side note, I don’t know anyone named Alice or what a tonnage report is. Also, my story MIGHT come under suspicion because apparently no one at the SEC is even fucking awake, let alone scrutinizing.
It would so suck to be killed by a police horse, though. Not all of them are like “Robert the Rose Horse.” (If you don’t know what that is, it means your mother never read it to you when you were a kid because she hates you.) Some of those Houston police horses can be downright vicious. I swear to God this is true: I once had an employee who was pulled over on her way to work in downtown Houston by as mounted officer and people were like, “I saw you get a ticket from that horse this morning.” She wasn’t the slightest bit embarrassed about it but I thought it was the fucking funniest thing ever. I think I offered to pay her ticket if she would go outside and re-enact it for me but sadly, she declined. That’s because she didn’t know what “re-enact” meant. I’m actually not kidding.
Anyway, so back to the layoff meeting. The employees are told at the conclusion of the meeting that the company understood that many employees commuted by bus from all points of Houston and that losing their job in the middle of the day meant that they couldn’t go home. (That would suck, except if they had just joined Alice in the bar, maybe they could have prevented her from walking into the street and she would be with us today.) So, the company generously provided all employees with cab vouchers.
The gentleman in question arrived back at his desk and sure enough, there was a box, a pink slip and a cab voucher. So, he threw his crap in the box and rode the elevator down to the first floor with all the other drones and THEIR boxes (actually, I don’t know what floor he worked on or if there was even an elevator for him to take, bit I sort of like the image), and went outside to grab a cab.
When the cab driver asked him where he wanted to go, he said, “Dallas.”
Get this: He drove his personal vehicle to work that day.
