This is what it’s like to lose your job.
Somebody comes to see you. It’s early. This is by design. They want to get it over with, before the day gets started, before you can settle in. They have a Plan. You don’t know about the Plan, but they have known about the Plan for a while. They want to get the Plan over with, so they can move on and settle in with their day, return texts, go out for a mango smoothie at 10:35, and return to their computer and read that story about Ryan Gosling rescuing a beagle.
They find a quiet place and they tell you right away. There is no small talk. No weather, no American League standings, no Good God, did you see Game of Thrones last night?
This is what they say: We’re going to have to let you go.
This is a polite way of putting it, but it’s also accurate, because it feels less like a door being slammed and more like somebody releasing a grip as you’re dangling off a bridge. A minute ago you were sitting in a chair eating a cinnamon raisin bagel, starting to dig into your day, and now you are in free fall, a blur of panic rushing at you—what does this mean, how did this happen, how am I going to pay the bills, what am I going to do next?
Meanwhile the person who just vaporized your job is babbling about details of the split—severance, vacation, COBRA—and you are hearing none of it. It’s just noise.
You want to lie down. When people lose their jobs in movies, they’re always tipping over tables and throwing phones through windows and giving the entire room a brilliant, Oscar-winning F-you speech, in which they triumphantly promise to create a new company that will put this ungrateful dump out of business. In real life, you sit there frozen, incapable of summoning anger, much less an Aaron Sorkinesque soliloquy.
You’re told it has nothing to do with your performance. But you don’t really know, do you? This morning you came in to your job, and you thought you had a job.
This happened to me in 2008. I’d been working at Rolling Stone magazine for about eight months as the financial crisis unraveled and the economy cratered and advertising went poof. For weeks, very talented and hardworking people started getting canned all around me. Cardboard boxes were brought to desks; there were hugs and farewell e-mails and short, teary walks to the elevator. I kept my head down, but I felt secure. I thought it wasn’t going to happen to me. I was new, but I had a pretty senior-level job, and people with jobs more senior than mine told me many times to relax, that there was nothing to fear, the worst of it was over and everything would soon be fine.
Then, just a week before Christmas, someone came to visit me first thing in the morning. We’re going to have to let you go. I remember thinking it was a prank. I smiled and didn’t get a smile back. Rolling Stone wasn’t a perfect place—I had dreamed of working at the magazine ever since I was a kid, but by the time I got there, it felt more like a museum relic; its iconic owner, Jann Wenner, seemed pretty distrustful of anything that had happened after 1977—but it was a good job. I was proud of the stuff we’d done, enthusiastic about the future. I thought I was safe. They’d told me that I was safe. Again and again.
I wasn’t safe.
In the panic, I attempted to rationalize it, spin it, make it seem not so bad. This was happening everywhere! I was not alone! I wasn’t even alone at Rolling Stone that day—I was among a handful of employees the magazine swept out in a preholiday purge. But even though this kind of layoff was happening everywhere—literally thousands of people around the country were losing their jobs every day, banks were collapsing, John McCain was suspending his presidential campaign—it was hard not to let the moment brew into something hurtful and personal. A dull, sludgy feeling of humiliation crept in.
The rest of the morning was a haze. I was sent to a human resources–type office I’d never seen before, where I was asked to sign papers and agree to severance and basically forget the whole thing ever happened. It’s simultaneously clinical and one of the most vivid moments of your life, and you are spending it with a stranger who just wants to see what’s up on Perez Hilton.
Back at my desk, a cardboard box appeared. Time to pack and leave. Colleagues began gingerly to approach, saying Dude and Why and I can’t believe it. I hugged people as if I were about to board a spaceship, never to return. Then I walked to the elevator and down to a hired car waiting on the street. This was a strange gesture: they’d just cannonballed my life, but they would give me a sweet ride home. I got in the car with the stupid cardboard box on my lap, and I sobbed.
When you lose your job, people tell you as a reflex that it’s going to be the “best thing that’s ever happened” to you. You get sick of this very fast. How is this possibly the best thing that’s ever happened? At the time, Bessie and I were getting married in a couple of months, the economy was in free fall, magazines were closing by the shelf-full, never to return. I didn’t want to go out, see anyone. I was so embarrassed.
I went to see my therapist, Doctor Gerry, where I focused on my feelings of shame. I’ve been so wronged! My layoff had been written about in the New York Post. Everybody in town knows, Doctor Gerry! I could feel it. I had been to a friend’s holiday party a couple days after getting sacked, and I’d gotten out of there within minutes, dreading eye contact.
Doctor Gerry sat there at the other side of the room in his wool sweater and began talking in his low-medium voice.
“Do you mind if I tell you something?” he said.
This was always a big deal: Doctor Gerry wasn’t a huge fan of telling me anything. I liked him very much—he was smart and comforting, and when I was bored I’d beg him to tell me about his craziest clients—but mostly his style was to nod, let me talk and reach my own conclusions, and then charge me the price of a lobster dinner for four.
“Okay.”
“This is going to be blunt, but it’s true.”
“Okay.”
“Nobody gives a shit.”
Doctor Gerry argued that while being laid off may have been a seismic moment for me, to other people it was just Something That Happened. Sure, some people who knew me might have been briefly stunned or sympathetic or even titillated, and yes, some may have even gossiped about it to others, but it was quickly forgotten and pushed to the side in the daily crush of information. It wasn’t an emergency to anybody but me. I thought of how quickly I’d forgotten this type of news when it happened to other people.
When you’re starting out in the workforce, you can quickly become immersed and confuse your job with your life. There are times that I miss that kind of obsession—long nights out with coworkers after closings, the close attention to office battles, the comical pettiness of the usual workplace grievances. Hopefully, the pettiness declines as you get older and develop other, bigger, healthier obligations outside the office. We are many generations into the fetishization of work life, and while sacrifice and hard work are often essential, we have placed too much personal value on how we fit into a workplace. All of us want to make our work work. But we are not our jobs.
Doctor Gerry was 100 percent right. Nobody gave a shit.
I’ve never opened that stupid cardboard box.
★ I was also sacked from my first job. In my early teens I was hired by a man who lived a few miles from me to do some light landscaping, which included attending to the putting green he kept in his backyard. This putting green was his pride and joy. He owned a special weighted mower to do it, and on the first day he spent an hour showing me how to operate it. On the second day I yanked the blade too low and ripped a long strip of grass and dirt out of the middle of the green. His beloved putting green now had a terrifying jack-o’-lantern smile stretched across the middle of it. I thought he might weep. In the garage a short while later, he paid me and said, “I’m going to have to let you go.” I said, “Okay, thank you, I’ll see you tomorrow.” I had no idea what “let you go” meant. He finally had to say, “No, I mean, don’t come here tomorrow.” I was too embarrassed to tell my parents. For a few weeks I would ride my bike off around the appointed time and then ride back home a couple hours later. Which was pretty George Costanza of me, thinking about it now.
★ All jobs become two jobs. The first job is your actual job—you know, the stuff you’re actually supposed to do for the money they give you. That’s the satisfying part. The second job is the role you play in the unspoken Broadway musical that is called The Workplace, and that role often has very little to do with the stuff you’re supposed to be doing. Throughout your career you will encounter many drama-generating people who pay no attention whatsoever to the work but are virtuosos at the musical. They are masters of gossip and politicking and the maneuvering necessary to stay a step ahead of the chopping block. They are Jedis of sucking up, but they might not be sure how the workplace actually operates, and they are by far the least fun people to hang out with at the office holiday party.
★ If you’re getting started on your career, know this: nobody expects anything from you early. Yes, occasionally you encounter a young person in his or her first job who is full of whimsy and vigor and feelings of wanting to overtake the world and own a jet at thirty. This kind of person may soon find himself or herself locked in a closet with the printer paper. Usually new people in the office are freaked out and intimidated by the mysteries of the workplace. If you are, please know you don’t need to master it right away. If you are twenty-two and in a panic about where you are right now—relax. You’re twenty-two. Sit down. You could go to jail for five years and half the office would not notice.
★ Don’t go to jail.
★ By now we’ve all agreed that meetings are terrible, but occasionally they are a necessity. Lately there’s been a shift to the standing meeting (Look at us—we’re all bored in the meeting, but we’re standing!) and the walking meeting (We’re bored but walking) and even the super type-A running meeting, in which the sinewy boss summons staff for a satanic sunrise 5K. Forget that. I support one kind of meeting: the meeting right before lunch. Nobody wants to stay more than five minutes, nobody raises a hand, nobody tacks on extra business, because that really good taco place is about to open and tacostacostacos.
★ Everyone will have good bosses and bad bosses. The bad bosses make you briefly miserable but do give you plenty of material for funny stories over cocktails. I once rented mopeds at a moped shop owned by a boss who, when business was slow, took us to his home and made us wash all the windows in the house. But the good bosses stay with you always. My first great boss in newspapers was my first editor, Dick Reston, who gave me my first writing job and used to stand over me when I was typing, gently ashing his cigarette onto my shoulder as he edited my opening paragraph. There was my editor at the Observer, Peter Kaplan, who hired me after a bizarre double interview in which I bungled our first conversation and he asked me to walk around New York City until I had a better idea of what I really wanted to say. My editor at GQ, Jim Nelson, was endlessly curious and enthusiastic, whether it was about a story or about finding the most random restaurant in the most faraway city. My current editor at the Journal, Sam Walker, basically took a chance on hiring me to write a goofy sports column and hoped I would not burn down his garage. The best bosses share a common characteristic: they are encouragers. It’s easy to be an ass-kicker, to find the holes in someone’s professional ability, but good bosses see a flicker of something and just let it barge out the front door.
★ Still, an underrated part of being a boss is maintaining order. You can’t just let everything fly; they call you a boss for a reason. I had a boss who was beloved but could not discipline an employee, ever, which made that workplace a comforting environment to exist in, but it got to be a problem in terms of deadlines and inefficiencies. There was a rumor—never confirmed—that some of the more senior editors decided it would be a good idea to hire a paid actor to join the staff for a week. The actor would be grandly introduced at a staff meeting and then, at the end of the week, the boss who couldn’t fire anybody would suddenly fire this paid actor for being a lousy employee. The boss who couldn’t fire anybody would know this paid actor was not really an employee and could finish the job. It was a brilliant idea. This plan was scuttled at the last minute, word had it, because they didn’t have money to pay an actor, although I like to think it was because the boss couldn’t bring himself to fire the paid actor.
★ It’s been a long time since I worked in an office every day—the Journal has allowed me to write from home as a free-range organic columnist—and there are certain things I miss. I miss the conversations and the jokes and the easy shorthand that develops over sharing space and office nemeses. I definitely miss eating the goodbye cake for the coworkers I didn’t really know. But the truth is I was a terrible office worker. I spent an astonishing amount of time talking and gossiping and involving myself in dramas that accomplished nothing. Now I’ll be out somewhere with coworkers and it is briefly thrilling to hear the latest dirt—Wow, did Geoff really expense a donkey?—but you soon realize how useless and distracting it all is, how little of your time at work was actually time working.
★ Geoff did not expense a donkey. I’m pretty sure. If he did, it’s filed under “Donkey Miscellaneous.”
★ This is not to say there aren’t plenty of distractions you can find working at home. Raise your hand if you spent an hour this week lying on the living room carpet taking close-up black-and-whites of the cat.
★ Just me?
★ Joining the company softball team is a nice way to meet coworkers and burn about six calories, but you need to make sure of what kind of company softball team it is. Is it the kind of team that takes itself seriously, wants to win, and imports ringers who have nothing to do with the company? Scamper away fast. You want to play for a company softball team that is excited but hasn’t won since radio was invented and may smoke weed in the outfield. Typically the boss does not play for this type of team. Typically the boss could not name anybody on this team.
★ Do not feel bad about dreading the company holiday party! Everybody dreads the company holiday party. In fact, if you are excited about the company holiday party, this is likely a signal from the lighthouse to cancel, because you fit the profile of the person who winds up kissing four coworkers, then stands on a couch at 2:00 A.M. railing against the company health-care plan before passing out, then waking up twenty minutes later and demanding that everyone take you to Atlantic City for breakfast.
★ Somebody once taught me a brilliant holiday party strategy called “The Big Boss Grab and Go.” It involves going into the holiday party, walking straight up to the boss, and having a pleasant ninety-second interaction in which you say just one memorable thing. It might be a joke. It might be a compliment that’s about something other than the party (don’t compliment the party—everyone compliments the party, and the party may actually be horrible). Walk right up to the boss and make eye contact, shake hands, and depart like you’re Nicolas Cage walking away from an exploding van. Leave without saying goodbye to anybody, and be back in your bed watching Downton Abbey on Amazon by 8:45 P.M.
★ On the matter of workplace gifting: don’t listen to anyone who tells you “gift up only” or “gift down.” If you’re the kind of person who describes coworkers as “up” or “down” relative to your own position, you probably deserve to fall down a modest-sized flight of stairs. If you are the kind of person who enjoys giving a gift, give it to the people at work who actually help you and deserve a gift. And then get one for your boss. Don’t be an idiot.
★ Recently I have done a little bit of work on-air in television, a job that has its fun side but also transports you back to a very turbulent emotional place called the sixth grade. You suddenly become consumed not with your ability to speak and think fluently (which is supposed to be the job) but with how you look (which is mostly the job). You find yourself at the blunt end of physical criticisms you haven’t experienced since teenage life. The standard complaint people on TV get is How is this person on TV? which you need to realize is mostly TV’s fault, not your own, because TV has basically spent its existence trying to sell you a version of what a human being looks and sounds like which is not human or normal at all and is more like a handsome robot trying to sell you a condominium.
★ Advice for your next job: The first few years, don’t say anything. Cultivate an air of detached mystery. Dress impeccably and open all doors. Attend all staff birthday parties and farewells and clap wildly at toasts. Once a month, dress completely in orange. Never send an e-mail. Stay late every Thursday, singing gently to yourself and pruning a bonsai at your desk. When it’s Take Your Kid to Work Day, bring in a spider in a plastic box. Implement the 11:45 A.M. meeting. Take everyone to that really good taco place. You have my word: you will become an office legend and, pretty soon, the boss.