Last week, a young woman who had worked at a web security company recorded the entire ordeal of her own process of being laid off. It’s an excruciating 20 minutes you can find online if you look. But don’t bother, frankly. It goes pretty much the way you expect it to.
She demands an explanation for her termination, but the two unseen representatives from corporate human resources deliver only infuriating HR-speak: We hear and understand that this is a difficult moment, your performance metrics unfortunately did not reach the standard we expect, that sort of thing. The young woman is upset, briefly near tears, but resolute in her response: she wants to know why, exactly, after only a few months of employment and basically positive feedback from her superiors, her performance has been deemed unacceptable.
Personally, I take no sides. I’m Switzerland, here. I have no idea if the laid-off worker has a point or not. She seems reasonably articulate, neatly attired, and probably not clinically insane — those seem to be attributes worth specifying these days — but she’s also the kind of person who records her termination and posts it on TikTok. So who’s to say? And the disembodied voices on the other end have the kind of tense and miserable tone that you associate with hostage videos. You think it’s hard to listen to HR weasel words and legally specific jargon read directly from a Say It This Way and They Can’t Sue Us crib sheet? Imagine having to spew them for a living!
The entire video is like a modern Greek tragedy, with everyone playing their own miserable part and no one able to escape the doomed final act, in which the fired employee disconnects in misery and the soul-dead Fates of HR move on to the next call, which will be exactly like the previous call and exactly like the call after the next call, and exactly like every call they make until the End of Days.
Although, you know, I may be making too big of a deal about this.
Luckily, the online world, like nature itself, always contains its opposite. A day or so later, in an airport somewhere, a person was fired in person from one of those airport terminal restaurants that look like a Starbucks but are not a Starbucks. The actual moment of termination wasn’t recorded, but the aftermath was captured by a random traveler and (of course!) posted online.
It isn’t pretty. The terminated employee raises a serious fuss — arms flailing, punches swinging, a stream of obscenity-laden shouts and demands — Let me get my stuff! Give me my stuff! — and it all winds up in a pretty impressive running leap across the counter to beat some sense into the person who fired her. The last we see is the terminated employee heading down the airport terminal, dignity intact because she got her stuff.
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Again: Switzerland. I have zero knowledge of the ins and outs of working at an airport coffee shop, but I can imagine it’s the kind of place that can’t be too picky about who’s manning the register and who’s doing the managing. I am also doubtful that the conversation, when it began, had the restrained, employment law-approved professionalism that a dedicated HRT team member would have delivered. What happened in that airport cafe was real and raw and fists and fury. What happened on that HR Zoom call was tense and weird and filled with unresolved and unexpressed rage. I’m not sure which person handled it better.
I mean, neither of them handled it well, but my guess is that the person who leaped across the counter and let it fly feels some measure of satisfaction, and the one on the Zoom call feels like she wishes she could have reached through the screen and opened a can of whoop a** herself. The problem for both of them, of course, is that it’s all on video. Everyone, including prospective employers, can see how these two people react to bad news, and that means there will probably be some awkward questions during their next job interview. Which I sure hope someone records on video and posts online, because I really want to see how this show ends.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.