It used to be a running gag at the Job From Hell that it was damned near impossible to be fired.
You show up for a week wearing the same sweat-stained clothes, your hair plastered to your forehead with grease, smelling so horrific that the elevator still carries your reek three hours after you used it?
You are supposed to be a friendly voice on the phone, but you are so habitually high on something that you slur your words and are barely audible to those trying to train you? To the point where twice in one week you lay for head down on the desk and nap through your shift?
You get manic and make up a jolly song about, excuse me, his word not mine, niggers, and belt it at the top of your lungs while sitting at your desk?
Believe me. It was almost impossible to get fired from the Job From Hell. I know because I gave them cause a number of times, with my often contentious relations with some of the idiots around me. I did not get fired the time I, pushed beyond all endurance, and openly invited by the second worst human being I’ve ever known to “just say one word and (I’m) in big trouble,” turned to invisible bleachers filled with invisible spectators and said, “She did ask for one more word,” and obliged with one that I have never addressed to any other human being at any other time. (It rhymes with Bunt.)
In retrospect, this was actually a good thing for me. I was a wild, unformed creature and this kept me earning an inadequate but acceptable living while I aged to the point where I was able to consider most infuriating assholes zoo specimens on the other side of a glass.
But you wanna know how difficult it was, to get fired from the Job From Hell?
Let me tell you about the ending of one of our company Christmas parties.
The firm had enjoyed enough of a good year to book the party room of a prominent bar-slash-restaurant for an all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-drink, and alas all-you-can-smoke extravaganza.
It was more or less a good time until near-closing, at which point I suddenly realized that my throat and lungs were on fire.
I gasped. I gagged. The air around me was unbreathable. Nor was I alone, because everybody around me was in the same boat.
Dozens of us started pushing toward the exits. It was a panic, and nobody was politely waiting for anybody else; anybody who went down would have been trampled, the simple and primal need for breathable air being that urgent. On the sidewalk outside, people were going down on their knees. They were throwing up their meals. I myself was caught in a choking fit that lasted several minutes; worst choking fit of my life, painful and uncontrollable and threatening and deep enough to bring me to the edge of unconsciousness. It would be three days before normal breathing didn’t threaten a recurrence.
But I had caught a glimpse of what had caused all this, what ended up sending two people to the hospital – and what stopped at making others of us only very very sick.
Two of our employees were a pair of young douchebags who had stood in the middle of the dance floor, joking around with pepper spray. How hilarious! And not just with little bursts, either. You know what it’s like to enter a room that smells bad, and to practically empty an entire can of air freshener into the atmosphere, swinging it at the end of your arm while it emits its contents in all directions, because you want it to saturate the air in every directions? This is what those douchebags, whose own lungs were only mildly affected, were both doing, in the middle of a crowded restaurant, during a company Christmas party. They thought this the equivalent of a fight with water guns. And they had evidently done it before, because they had trained their respective lungs to tolerance, and even as they continued their little act of jocular terrorism were busily chortling that the rest of us were wusses.
A couple of the other patrons, not connected to our party, vomited where they sat.
I suffered the tortures of the damned just going back into the restaurant for my coat, and afterward stood there in the cold, shivering, because I didn’t trust myself to retain control of the car for my drive home. There were post-mortems in the parking lot, during which my fury was boundless. I’d been assaulted, just as the rest of us – including old people far more fragile, then, than me – had been assaulted. I wanted the perpetrators, whose douchebaggery had been evident at work but never quite as horrifying as this, arrested. The boss, who was angry too, rolled his eyes at what he termed my over-dramatics, and said he would take care of it.
That was at the start of a weekend.
Guess bloody what.
The douchebags were not fired and the bosses let everybody know that they were not to be confronted on company property.
They were big sales producers, you see. Pillars of the company. Why would you want to get rid of them, just because they recklessly assaulted people, fomented a panic, and risked lives?
They kept their jobs and suffered no consequences whatsoever.
Yes. It was almost impossible to get fired from the Job From Hell.
And I’m sorry, but this story offers no closure whatsoever.
Comment By: John Hudgens
January 5th, 2017 at 11:17 am
FYI – weird font change in the first and 12th paragraphs – maybe some rogue HTML tags? Shows up on mobile as well….
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
January 5th, 2017 at 11:17 am
This is an ongoing problem that I have tinkered with to no avail. You will find it in many of my posts there.
Comment By: John Hudgens
January 5th, 2017 at 11:17 am
K – just hadn’t noticed it before….
Comment By: Jeremy Lichtman
January 5th, 2017 at 4:18 pm
This is due to an inline css tag in the content (i.e. not an issue with the theme’s css).
The problem usually happens when you cut and paste content into the WordPress editor. Typically when that happens to me, I switch to the html editing mode and delete the extraneous tags, just leaving text. Then I switch back to the wysiwyg editor.
There’s several other work-arounds as well.
Comment By: Keith Richard
January 5th, 2017 at 11:17 am
As soon as you described them I thought “sales weasels”
Comment By: Ramón Peña
January 5th, 2017 at 11:17 am
This makes “The Office” look a profesional, mature work environment! Say, why you think this was? I wonder, the boss or bosses must have at some point realize that was not good business?
Comment By: Linda Hepden
January 5th, 2017 at 11:17 am
I am surprised that as other patrons were also affected, that the restuarant didn’t sue the socks off your employer and the little rats who did this.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
January 5th, 2017 at 11:17 am
I can tell you only that it was our third year having the Christmas party at that establishment, that the manager looked livid, and that we never had the party there again.
I don’t know what settlements took place behind the scenes.
Comment By: Adam Holmberg
January 5th, 2017 at 11:17 am
Money talks. You have it or you produce it for people with power and it buys you freedom from consequences.
Comment By: Paul Anderson
January 5th, 2017 at 12:17 pm
That party sounds like a real productive use of company funds…..
Comment By: Berry Kercheval
January 5th, 2017 at 12:17 pm
I wonder, had YOU gone to the police on your own, would THAT have gotten you fired?
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
January 5th, 2017 at 12:17 pm
The CEO, Gary Kranz, was as a student the ringleader of the Tulane basketball team’s point-shaving scandal, back in the eighties.
Motivated by this discussion, I just looked him up and it looks like the job from hell’s successor company, which they opened after the first was seized from them, went down to a similar end.
I can tell you things.
I can tell you that for years I almost daily told them that the creative liberties taken by salespeople at the job were actionable. I can also tell you that they didn’t care, not at all, that the only consideration was the bottom line. I can tell you, despite whatever friendly affection I sometimes had for them, that this story gives me some satisfaction.
Need I tell you their vocal political orientation?
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2013-02-21/news/fl-fbk-products-sentencings-20130221_1_telemarketers-fbk-products-septic-remedy
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
January 5th, 2017 at 4:18 pm
Oh, sure.
Some of these guys take legal repercussions as the cost of doing business, which is how we come to the 80-year prison sentence of a relative who made squillions working for Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
January 5th, 2017 at 12:17 pm
Lisa Kotze Brady you might be interested in recent developments.
Comment By: Lisa Kotze Brady
January 5th, 2017 at 1:18 pm
I can honestly say Adam-Troy Castro—the best thing to come from working there was meeting and marrying my husband—we missed the pepper spray by minutes—we left early to attend another function—but the fact that we got married on our day off–Thursday—and returned to work the next day to rapid fire questions—the look on the faces who were doing the questioning were Priceless—-how could love have blossomed and they were unaware??? How could we do such a thing without notifying them??? Well, it happened—and you know ATC–the other grand thing that came from working there….has been to watch your career as an author take off into the stratosphere as we always knew it would—–I’m sure Michael is looking over my shoulder right now and cheering on these words as well!!!! XO
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
January 5th, 2017 at 1:18 pm
Yup. And backatcha.
But even though you were lucky enough to leave the restaurant early, at least you heard about the event second hand, and can testify that I am NOT MAKING IT UP.
Comment By: Lisa Kotze Brady
January 5th, 2017 at 1:18 pm
I attest to everything you have ever written Adam-Troy Castro I only wish you would write a novel about it—I can hand you a few chapters myself that would make your hair grow in!!! Perhaps a musical—??!!!!!
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
January 5th, 2017 at 4:18 pm
The “recent developments” are by the way covered by a link in the reply thread above this one. The Kranzes hit another legal snag.
Comment By: Lauretta Nagel
January 5th, 2017 at 2:18 pm
I am surprised no one at the bar called the cops.