Sunday, September 26, 2004

Trumped, Part II

The following post is sponsored by the Department of Be Careful What You Wish For, Because It’s Going To Happen And It Is Totally Going To Kick You In the Nuts, Assuming You Have Nuts.

So I was sitting there at the Evil Boring Day Job fulfilling my usual duties of seething and procrastinating when the interim Boss Nass shoved his head in the door.

He sat at my side chair and did not close the door.

“Unfortunately,” he said.

I smiled.

It took maybe thirty seconds. I was handed an envelope with a severance check and COBRA information.

“You’re reacting to this very well,” he said, almost disappointed that I had not experienced a meltdown at the news that forty hours a week of formatting spreadsheets had just vanished from my life.

“Yeah, you know,” I said examining my check, “it’s easy when you don’t give a rat's ass.”

Of course outside my head I phrased this as, “I’ve been expecting it. Then I added, “When does this go into effect?”

“Oh,” he said. “Today.”

Ah.

It was 3:30 in the afternoon; the office shut down at 5. He left, for the day was waning and by God there was assery to spread across the land.

Friendboy Andy IMed me. “Um, I was just fired,” I typed.

As always, Andy had exactly the right words of spiritual comfort.

“Fuckers,” said he.

I sat for a moment, reflecting on my chief concern for the immediate future, which was that I no longer had to tape the 4 PM showing of Friends on TBS, and got up to report to my now-former co-worker the fact that the entire marketing department now consisted of her.

I leaned into her doorjamb. “Michelle?”

She looked up from her computer screen, tears on her cheeks.

I closed the door. “Oh God, he told you. He told you first.”

There were tissues and many utterances of the word “bastards.” Then I went about tenderly packing up a year and a half of my life, which pretty much consisted of yanking out drawers and dumping them into boxes. Come on, Stayfree stash! Let's go, delivery menus, peanut butter crackers, Tinkerbelle notepaper. You too, extra pair of pantyhose. We’re going home.

I went back to my office one last time, tore my nameplate out of the holder in a wild fit of cliché, and sat down to my computer. The documents I had been not-working on were still open, the cursor awaiting input. I ran the Doomsday Scenario on the hard drive, wiping myself away—the desktop images of Jim the Baby Nephew, Notre Dame screensavers, all the Monster.com bookmarks. I was filling out my last timesheet when Interim Boss Nass stuck his head in and looked around the empty office.

“Well!” he said cheerfully. “You certainly made short work of that!”

I smiled again, and entered numbers very loudly.

The boxes now sit in my living room, a shocked jumble of pencil holders and manila folders and a typing stand that I totally, totally forgot belonged to the company. Two days ago I opened the dryer door to finish some laundry and found a forgotten load of wash—tank tops and skirts I’d worn to work in a previous life.

I shook them out, and put them away.

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