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Stay Free! asks: Ever Been Fired?

As a teen, I briefly worked at a carpet store in Hawaiian Gardens, Calif., a city known less for fulfilling the promise of its exotic name and more for the colorful gypsies who inhabited it. Anyway, one day I come into work expecting to haggle with customers over the pricing of remnants, but instead find the place in total disarray: desks overturned, papers askew, you get the picture. "What’s going on?" I ask the owner, who appears to be in shock. Hysterically, he explains that his rent has been raised, forcing him to close his business immediately and, of course, terminate me. About a month later, I was driving in the neighborhood and noticed the business was still open, even thriving: Apparently, the guy was too yellow to simply fire me and actually concocted this whole story and even went so far as to upheave furniture to avoid having that confrontation.

BECKY EBENKAMP

I worked part-time for our local Public TV station. One day I walked in on a producer faking on-air calls to use during a pledge drive. As far as I was concerned, it was a slimey tactic and I called him on it. He basically told me to mind my own business and I basically told him to fuck off. Little did I know that he kept the reel-to-reel and later used it to show that I was somehow a confrontational nutcase. I got a reluctant call from the production manager a few days later saying that "my services were no longer needed." Fortunately, after speaking with others in the field, I’m lead to believe my experience was an exception.

FRANK BOROS

I was fired from McDonalds when I was fifteen. I was stationed in the back, operating the fryer, with the convicts they had bused in from the state prison. Once, one of my coworkers told me, "You look like a violent person." I found this odd, as I was your classic 98-pound weakling. I told him that I wasn’t particularly violent, and he told me that that was good, because if I didn’t give him a problem he wouldn’t blow my head off without hesitation.

The entire experience was awful, and to this day it has molded my view of wage labor. One manager, a smarmy little man who would drool over all of the female employees, hated me. The only thing that made it tolerable was the food, which we weren’t allowed to eat, but which I would eat all the time anyway. One day, a manager sent me into the walk-in refrigerator, and I took advantage of the opportunity to stuff my face full of shredded chef’s salad turkey. The manager came in. My cheeks were fat, like a squirrel. "What’s in your mouth?" he asked. "Mmph," I said. "Punch out and come in tomorrow if you want your job."

I didn’t really want my job, but I felt obligated to come in the next day. The manager, a pathetic young go-getter type with a bad moustache, told me,"We’ve decided to let you go." I didn’t realize that "let go" was a euphemism for "fired" and thought he was letting me off the hook. So I said, without irony, "Thank you. I appreciate that."

JASON GROTE

I got fired twice. The first time, waiting tables at a pizzaria, I was simply written off the schedule. When I came by to get my hours one day, the entire two weeks was blank. The manager appeared clueless but the head wait interpreted it for me. I couldn’t really blame them. I could never get that "listen to what customers order" part, and spilled something nearly every day. In fact, the only way I managed to wait tables at all was by pretending it was my first day–every day. Customers felt so sorry for me that they would tip generously. . . . The second time, I was working in a copy store, having just graduated from college. Although I’d been at the job over a year, there was no advance warning. I simply showed up to work and was presented with the mounting evidence of my sloppy collating and stampling skills. I went home and cried.

CARRIE McLAREN

I’ve been fired once and it was a Norma Rae situation. I’d been working at a small natural foods co-op. After a group of us discussed unionizing, the manager called in a union-busting organization; we were all laid off and then rehired for a two-week period where we were encouraged to reapply for available positions, which, incidentally, paid less. The whole union issue was coming to a head when I was called into the manager’s office and terminated. She said that she regretted doing it and always thought of me as a comrade, saying. "perhaps I even loved you..." (which was really weird and disturbing). I called my friend Shad, who was jealous because he wanted to be the Norma Rae of our union drive, and we contacted the press. People were outraged; there was a big demonstration at the store. The management and board, smelling a big ugly scene, capitulated and accepted the union. Part of the deal was that they were to hire me back, however it wasn’t much of a victory: the store was closed by our lenders a few days later.

DAN GILLOTTE

I was freelancing for a pretentious "documentary" production house, putting together schlocky tabloid hours for A&E’s Investigative Reports and similarly crap-ridden, reality-based programs. Most of my coworkers used a special kind of language; they could talk for hours and say basically nothing while patting each other on the back for being "up to speed" and "on the same page." The second-in-charge, my senior producer, was a closeted fiftysomething bitter queen–your typical star-fucking, name-dropping, magazine-addicted, aging media hipster. I am gay and make no bones about it. Everybody in the office would confer with me, as "the gay one," about this guy and how obvious it was that he was a homo.

Anyway, he and I didn’t get along and it would always make me want to wretch whenever he laid a hand on me. He called me into his office one day and says, "We want to save you from yourself," then went on to pontificate how he’s going to do me the favor of firing me before things get ugly. He cited my body language as evidence of me not wanting to be there. Ultimately I was pretty psyched because had I quit they could have denied my unemployment benefits.

ELY PUSHKIN

I worked for two days at a corset shop in the Bronx. After measuring the hips, waists, and chests of our mostly elderly customers, I would go into the stock room to find the proper "foundation garment." This room had what seemed like 15-foot-high ceilings. Along each wall, from floor to ceiling, was stacked thin lingerie boxes. To get one out, you had to climb a ladder, and, using a clawlike device, remove it without toppling the entire pile. I, however, am a klutz. After maybe the fifth avalanche, the proprietress fired me, screaming "You have a nasty attitude, young lady!"

ELLEN SALTZMAN

My boss, Chris, was 23. He played in a successful cover band and ran a little breakfast cafe. I waited tables, though he could have run the place without me most of the time. Chris used to spend a lot of time at the photo shop next door, talking "business" with the manager. Made him feel powerful, I think, to be on the employer end of things. One day the photoshop guy fired his cashier for stealing. Chris was fascinated by the story and constantly talked about it. So it didn’t come as a surprise when one morning Chris greeted me with, "I don’t ever want you to come in here again!" "Why?" I asked, assuming he would accuse me of stealing. Wrong: I had let the towel rental guy give us a mop head for a free trial.

ROSIE WEAVER

When I was 17, I bused tables at the White House Lodge. I was known as the Dancing Busboy because I would do a little dance when delivering popovers to tables. The White House was not a classy place, despite its attempts by hanging up portraits of every president up to Reagan. Consequently, my dancing was not out of character, although the owner thought otherwise.

I wasn’t fired for that, though, nor was I fired for licking forks. There were any number of offenses that I or other busboys could have been fired for: eating the shrimp cocktails, spitting tobacco in the chowder, sneaking off to get high. But I was fired for was stealing liquor. The incident was completely uninteresting: the police were called in, we gave our statements, received misdemeanors, and were fired. When I went in to return my uniform, I was offered a job by the head cook at his father’s Wisconsin Dells Restaurant (I declined).

JOE GARDEN