The Time I Got Fired

Filed in archive Careers and Money on September 13, 2007

I read J.D.'s story about having to fire an employee today and it reminded me of the time I got fired. I didn't get fired fired exactly, but sort of. The story's pretty pathetic, but I have to fill up this blog somehow, so I'll just tell you about it and you can laugh at me...

When I was in college I needed a summer job and for whatever reason was really having a problem getting one. I finally landed a gig at a dollar store called "Everything's A Dollar" (which has since gone bankrupt). The store wasn't open yet, so they were hiring workers to get it started-putting in fixtures and getting those one-dollar items in their proper places. They hired some high schoolers and college kids like me to get things going, and they actually did tell us that not everyone would get a permanent job once the store opened, but I assumed they were talking to the other idiots I was working with.

While we were getting the store ready I kept joking about who was going to get cut. Once the store was ready to open, they had a little celebration where they had pizza and soda, and I remember joking they were just fattening some of us for the slaughter.

Then the store opened and I still had the job, so I assumed they'd canned some of the dead weight and I'd have a job until I went back to school. I remember when we first opened we were supposed to do this really stupid thing-the store manager would yell "Price check!" and we were all supposed to yell back "Everything's a dollar!" to amuse the customers. Every time this happened I muttered the phrase quietly and rolled my eyes.

When the work schedule came out for the second week of business, my name was not on it. I was shocked. Perhaps some mistake?

I went to the store manager and said, "Hey, Jeff, my name's not on the schedule. What, am I fired?"

He said, "Well, I wouldn't call it fired. We just can't keep everyone, you know? We said that at the very beginning."

In other words, I was fired.

I tried to console myself by thinking that it made more sense for them to keep the high school kids than the kids going back to college, except I saw that one girl who was going back to college was still on the schedule. Then I started thinking about my cracks about slaughtering animals and my eye-rolling over the price check routine and I knew I was seen as an employee with a bad attitude.

Fired.

I suppose I should say I learned something from this, and I guess maybe I learned to save my eye-rolling for after-work bitch sessions at the bar, but I still think the "Everything's a dollar" thing was dumb and they went bankrupt, so there!