How to Never Get Fired
Editor’s Note: Today’s column comes from our guest writer, Laura “The Meme Queen” Mayfield. and is the latest installment in the parody series “Smart People, Stupidly High Salaries.” Check out her previous post, Hot Dog Heiress.
You aren’t bad at your job – you’re “disrupting the industry” – how to spin your work failures into work gold.
An Ideal Life
Rachel wakes up at 8:00am and checks her email. She has gotten several 10s of emails today, but says she is only planning on responding to 1 of them. Rachel is a high-powered specialist in the cardboard box sector. She makes $100,000 a year, and never worries about getting fired, despite “low-key” doing nothing at her job. Read Rachel’s story for genius tips on how to never get fired, even in a “high-key” recession.
Work in an Industry That is Extremely Boring
With so many layoffs in the news lately, even the most hard-working employee may start to worry about the status of their job. Let’s face it, we are all one crazy diamond mine-owning boss away from getting fired. But what are some steps that you can take to keep from being fired? Rachel says the key is to find work in an extremely boring industry.
“Elon Musk does not want to get in the cardboard business,” Rachel says. “It’s not sexy, we don’t have blue checks, and mainly, I’m just selling cardboard boxes to diorama hobbyists or people who are moving.” These “boring” industries still make money, and desperately need workers.
Surprisingly, there is less competition for jobs that don’t offer free foosball and beer. However, the lack of benefits also comes with a lack of drama. “The biggest controversy we’ve had is when part of the warehouse flooded, and a couple of dozen pieces of cardboard got ruined. There was a loss of, like, $10 dollars that day,” Rachel said, “We all just told Reggie to stop leaving the hose on “for the birds”, and the flooding stopped.”
Become the De-Facto IT person for Your Boss
If you start working at a company that is tech-backwards, suddenly your ability to merge a PDF will be thought of as genius. When Rachel started working at Cardboard City USA , the company still used cardboards files for all their record keeping. “Invoices were scrawled in sharpie on discarded cardboard boxes; it was a mess,” Rachel confessed.
“I simply signed the company up for Quickbooks, and became a hero. I can’t even tell you how much management freaked out when I showed them that you can edit PDFs.,” said Rachel. Be extremely careful with this tip though, or you will be called on to help with every vaguely related computer problem.
If you get tired of helping with IT issues, just tell them you emailed the head of the Internet, but they haven’t gotten back to you yet.
Have a Fall Person at Your Fingertips
No, a fall person is not the vaguely ominous woman in high boots posing in autumn leaves. A fall person is someone who you can plausibly blame for all your mistakes. Take care in choosing your fall person though. You don’t want to blame your boss, or someone who could potentially confront you about your backhandness. Try blaming the intern, someone in another department, or ideally, a fictional person that you’ve made up.
“I chose Reggie as my fall person, ” Rachel said, “because he already messed up with the flood thing. People could easily believe that he would accidentally delete all our records from 2019. Not that anything like that happened.”
Gain Sympathy or Be Intimidating. Or a Mixture of Both.
Rachel says the key to gaining fire-proof sympathy is by having a tragic backstory. Maybe say you are an orphan, or were only given white chocolate, not milk chocolate, as a child. People will feel bad for you, and be less willing to fire you first. Note, this doesn’t work if your boss is a sociopath.
Another alternative is to intimidate everyone who asks you to do something.
“I try to be as standoff-ish as possible,” Rachel says. If someone is scared of you, they are not going to ask you to do things. If you do get assigned a task, assign it to your fall person. In an ideal situation, your fictional fall person, Brett Peterson, gets fired for not completing any tasks, and you take his nonexistent job, with a raise, because you really helped clean his mess up.
If All Else Fails, Choose Blackmail
Unfortunately most bosses are sociopathic and don’t care about anything except their bottom line. Start digging until you can find anything remotely embarrassing, and then hold on to this information. Rachel said this strategy has been a great backup plan for her. “I found out my boss sometimes buys plastic boxes, after I followed him into Costco one afternoon,” Rachel confessed. If this information got out to the shareholders, he would be ruined. “One day I just sent him an email with a photo of him holding a giant plastic bin , with the subject line, ‘someone’s got a dirty* little box secret’. Whenever the subject of layoffs comes up, I never worry,” Rachel said smugly.
By using some or all of these tips, you are free to spend your time worrying about all the other million things going wrong in the world, instead of just whether or not you will lose your job. Who knows, maybe you can use all the free time you didn’t spend worrying to write the next great American novel. Or spend more time at the Costco restaurant. Whatever you choose to do with your life, the world is your new job-secure oyster.
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