Reply #43: I once worked in the H.R. Department of a large computer firm as a temp. [View All]

I won't name the company, but names are a matter of relativity anyway (hint, hint).

My primary job was to support the biggest asshole in the entire world.

On my first day working for him, I gave my two week's notice.

It turns out, EVERY assistant he had ALWAYS quit... frequently, often, and usually early.

I asked one of my co-workers, "If the guy is so terrible, how does he keep his job?"

They explained to me (I was young, naive and new to the corporate world) that it doesn't matter how you treat the people under you-- you are evaluated on your RESULTS. And the guy always got good results.

"But how can he get results when his assistants keep quitting?"

The answer: The secretarial pool. When an assistant quits, the work is shunted off to the secretarial pool.

The guy looked EXACTLY like Donald Sutherland... so much so that he could pass for him on the street.

Anyway, one of my key duties was assembling what I called "surprise packages" for people about to be fired.

Certain documents had to be collected, certain people had to sign-off, the computer department had to cancel the passwords, etc.

The whole firing process was designed like a coordinated military strike, planned down to the second, culminating in the victim sitting down with two managers to give an exit interview.

It had to be conducted in secret, and sometimes with deception.

For example:

"I'm going to be in Tampa for a meeting with Mrs. X. I'll take the package with me and have her sign-off there. When she gets back to Dallas, she can bring it to Y, and have him sign it. Y will give it to Z, who is going to be in Los Angels at the same marketing seminar that Mr. Terminated and his manager are attending. They'll meet with him in his hotel room and give him his exit interview there."


Anyway, there was this one guy was going to be fired because he refused to report back to work, refused to answer the phone or return messages left on his answering machine.

You see, the man about to be fired had suffered a heart attack at work, and a week or two after his medical leave was up, he was still MIA.

The day that the heart-attack guy was about to be fired, my boss' mother died of Parkinson's Disease.

The man was heart-broken, of course.

I'd worked for him for about a week, and I hated him with the passion of a thousand suns.

But at this moment, he revealed himself to be human.

And over the objections of his superiors, he told me he was going to give the heart attack guy another week.

I don't know if heart attack guy ever reported back to work. I didn't stick around that long.

Like I said, I gave my two-week's notice on my first day.

But toward the end, I felt there was hope for the Donald Sutherland-looking guy to become a human being. It took his mother dying to do it, but there WAA a heart inside that huge, giant, asshole somewhere.

The other thing that bothered me was that on some level, I had stared to ENJOY it.

I actually started to LIKE the feeling of sneaking around in the dark corners of a company, doing secret things... dark things. Knowing things that most other people didn't know. And about 99% of the people we were firing were hundreds of miles away, and there was no chance I'd ever see them. Very clean. Very abstract. Like piloting a Predator drone. Pixels on a screen, or a name on a file.

On some level, it felt fun.

But on another level, it kept me awake at night.

I think it was best that I left.