Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice (2015)

PART II

Life Skills 101

9

The Benefits of Getting Fired

Almost any grown man you know has a “the time I got fired/laid off” story. They just don’t advertise them. Maybe they’ll mention it, in a Toby Keith “How Do You Like Me Now?” boast. But for some guys, the day they got fired is just too heartbreaking to talk about.

An unlucky photographer was fired from Patch.com live on a conference call.^* Other staffers at Patch were informed of their dismissal via a recorded message. You hear some of these stories and wonder if some employers are in a sadistic competition to come up with the coldest and most impersonal way of communicating the bad news: Termination notices sent by FedEx. Firings on Christmas Eve. Actor Jeffrey Tambor recalls being interrupted, mid-sentence, while performing a scene on the old 1980s television show Max Headroom, that the show was canceled, and production was stopping immediately. He didn’t even get a chance to finish the sentence!

Paul Petrone, “The Worst Way to Fire Someone: I Was There,” LinkedIn.com, February 17, 2015.

If you’re a Millennial, you might be more focused on finding a job than worried about losing one. But if your situation at work is looking grim, take heart. Getting fired can be a blessing, even if the immediate experience is miserable.

One bit of advice right away: it might seem like a good idea to go out in a blaze of glory, perhaps engaging in a preemptive strike on social media and telling your boss to take this job and shove it. But please don’t. Let someone else be the #MoronOfTheMoment on Twitter.

You’ve just been fired. The most important thing isn’t how you feel. The most important thing is finding another job. You’ll have a much easier time if there’s not a Vine zooming around the Internet of you rapping about your boss.

The much better option is to cast your net far and wide for another job the next morning. And when we say far and wide, we don’t just mean looking on Craigslist and LinkedIn. We mean looking outside of your comfort zone. Look at every job in the want ads in the local paper. Think about what you can do and not just about what you want to do. What you want to do is earn enough money to maintain your current level of existence. How you do that, as long as it’s legal, is really of secondary concern.

You can still focus on a career path, but don’t let that focus keep you from paying the bills.

Chances are you’ve never heard of Mark Lollo. John Feinstein wrote about him in his book Where Nobody Knows Your Name, which chronicles a season in Minor League Baseball. Lollo was an umpire. By 2012 he’d risen from umpiring college games to umpiring in Triple-A, even occasionally filling in at a Major League game. But in 2012, just when Lollo was expecting his big break, he was given notice that he wasn’t being invited to umpire the following spring. Not in the majors. Not in the minors.

Lollo didn’t take to YouTube or Twitter to complain about the injustice of it all. He quietly accepted reality. He contacted the guy who’d given him his first chance to umpire a Major League baseball game, a man whose opinion he trusted, to ask if he’d done everything he could to achieve his dream. He was told he had. And that allowed Lollo to move on. In fact, while Lollo isn’t an umpire anymore, he’s still very much in baseball (at the time of this writing). In 2014, Lollo landed a job training and evaluating umpires for Minor League Baseball’s Umpire Development staff. He’s still making a living from baseball, and that’s pretty awesome.

I’ve only been fired once, and it was from the best meaningless job I ever had. That firing freed me for an actual career that’s spanned more than twenty years now. I was working at a video shop owned by a couple who had two sons. The oldest was roughly my age, and it turned out he needed my job more than I did, so I was canned and he took my place. I was crushed. I loved working at the video store. The work was easy, the pay was relatively good, and I got paid to basically watch movies all day. As I said, the best meaningless job I ever had.

After I was fired, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do. The two most interesting options were working as a cashier at a dairy bar called Braum’s or becoming a master control operator at a local TV station. The TV job was obviously much cooler, but Braum’s paid better. Ultimately, it wasn’t that difficult a choice. Neither paid particularly well, but telling a date that I worked at the NBC station in town sounded much better than “I work at Braum’s.” I’d done my time in fast food; I was ready to get outside my comfort zone.

This is the “getting fired can be the best thing to ever happen to you” part of the story. The master control operators at the station were mostly lifers uninterested in advancing to other TV production jobs, and there was no shortage of extra work for an eager pair of hands to do. I took advantage of that and quickly became the third man in a three-man production team. I learned a lot from Mike and Richard, my two direct supervisors, but they expected me to show initiative too. They were happy to have someone semi-capable who could perform the less desirable duties, like directing our broadcast of an Assemblies of God service, which meant getting up around 6:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning. While they got to sleep in, I got to direct a multi-camera event from inside a production truck. I realized one Sunday morning that I was still watching a TV at work—only now I was making television, not just renting out videos.

I left that job on my own, because I wanted to leave Fort Smith and return to Oklahoma City. When you quit a job, the “don’t be an ass” rule still applies: give your two weeks’ notice, be polite, and move on.

Losing your job is hard, but with the right attitude and work ethic, every apparent setback can also be an opportunity. That’s the way you should approach it.

I worked for a few dot-coms, one that was suddenly sold to another dot-com, and then a half year later the bigger fish that ate the small fish laid everyone off and went under. I channeled a bit of frustration about the callousness and coldness of the process into my novel The Weed Agency. I watched a large number of my coworkers go into a meeting to get the bad news. And while they were in that meeting, spectacularly unscrupulous non-laid-off workers raided things from their desks. Can you imagine learning the bad news that you’re losing your job, and returning to find your desk ransacked? These poor folks were told to clean out their desks, only to find some of their colleagues had already started. Our small band of remaining writers set up a dart board near our office entrance. By frequent dart-throwing we hoped to make our office too dangerous for bad-news-carrying HR staffers to enter.

It didn’t work, of course. The pain of being laid off from SpeakOut. com was ameliorated a bit by the fact that we knew it was coming. It was the opposite of a shock. The final months at that place had more ominous foreshadowing than Twin Peaks. I remember deciding to go into the office some winter Sunday to print out resumes and cover letters. I came in to find most of my colleagues already there, doing the same thing.

My most painful firing came from a job as a Pentagon correspondent. For two weeks, the job was terrific; the editor was nice and liked everything I wrote. What I didn’t notice was the rising stress levels of the other staffers or that my editor’s office door was suddenly closed.

[Cue Jaws theme or appropriate ominous music]

One morning, my editor called me into his office and informed me that he had been wrong when he hired me; there actually hadn’t been money in the budget for my job. Now, you would think this would be the sort of thing the company would straighten out before they hired me. But they hadn’t, and thus I was getting laid off after two weeks.

For a couple of moments in that meeting, I seemed to think I could reason with him that he just couldn’t do this sort of thing. It was unprofessional! You don’t hire someone and then let him go two weeks later without cause! Surely they could find some money from somewhere else in the budget to spare themselves the embarrassment they were feeling at this moment. When it was clear that no, today would be my last day, and that I would be paid for my two weeks, and that would be it, and that he honestly couldn’t say when or if the company would have the money to rehire me, then I got angry. Looking back, I wish he had gotten angry as well. He just sat there and took it. He knew his company had screwed up, and there was nothing to be done but apologize. Of course, I was looking for a job again.

Maybe everything happens for a reason; had I remained at that job, there’s a pretty good chance I would have been in the Pentagon on 9/11.

The publisher went bankrupt shortly after my departure. The only good news about your employer going under is that you no longer have to worry about the nondisclosure or non-compete clauses in your contract.

By the way, where the heck did this “non-compete” notion come from? What kind of wussy Communist talk is this? If you don’t want me competing with you, then you must think I’m good at my job. And if you think I’m good at my job, why are you letting me go?

You can sometimes tell when layoffs are approaching. The regular communication and interaction with management and the higher-ups gets interrupted and goes quiet. There are suddenly a lot more closed-door meetings. Projects get suddenly and mysteriously canceled.

If you work for a big publicly traded corporation, you may want to keep an eye on the company’s stock price and what industry publications are saying about your company.

When dark clouds are over your workplace, the best strategy is to keep your head down, work like a madman, and try to make yourself as indispensible as possible. Ask many questions, but spread little gossip. Resist the temptation to grow a beard, put on a fur coat, carry around a broadsword, and ominously whisper to your coworkers, “Brace yourselves. Winter is coming!” like Ned Stark from Game of Thrones.

But there is a good chance that employment winter is indeed coming, and heads are gonna roll—thankfully not as badly as poor Ned’s did. If you’ve been in your workplace for a while, you can sense the atmosphere, the rhythms, the normal level of tension, and what’s out of the ordinary.

If you do get cut, there’s a good chance that after cleaning out your desk, saying goodbye to your coworkers, and trudging to your car, it will be raining cinematically. You will turn on your car’s radio, and a song like “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday” or “Where Did We Go Wrong” will play. You’ll blow your nose with a half-used Kleenex that was in between the seats. You’ll realize that you’ll wake up the next workday morning with no place to go.

You’ll feel like a failure. Maybe your boss told you you’re a failure. Or maybe he said it’s not your fault; you can lose your job even if you’re good at it.

You didn’t deserve this. (Well, most of you.)

There is only one way to survive unemployment: relentless, bottomless, indefatigable determination. It stinks. But you have to turn into a crazed stalker, obsessively pursuing that next perfect job. It’s out there. It might be obscured. You might feel like it’s hiding from you. You are Samuel Gerard, and your next job is Richard Kimble. And you have to do something every weekday—resumes, look online, call up contacts and ask them if they’ve heard of any openings, look for freelance or temp work. Despite what your boss just said, you still have a job. That job is finding your next job.

You may want to say, “Jim, you’re full of crap, you don’t practice what you preach when it comes to remaining determined and resolute when times are tough.” Guilty. Man, during that stretch of unemployment, I was a mess, the perfect portrait of a shiftless, miserable lay-about. All I can say is that you hate in others what you can’t stand in yourself. I stayed up until 3 a.m. a lot of nights. I developed an obsessive viewing habit of Deep Space Nine reruns, calling up the local affiliate when they aired them out of order. I didn’t take care of myself. I ate bad food in portions that would make Adam Richman say, “Whoa, buddy, that’s a bit much.” I was a surly jerk to my friends. I marinated in self-pity.

Eventually I snapped out of it and found a job at a wire service just as my savings were running out. My friends and family increasingly asked why the hell I hadn’t applied for unemployment benefits. I could say it was a bold principled stand, a reflection of my reflexive aversion to government assistance and my affirmation of the need for self-reliance. But the simpler and more accurate answer was that I viewed applying for unemployment insurance as an admission of defeat. Taking some government check would mean that the phone wasn’t going to ring today. I was stubborn and depressed, but strangely—probably naively—optimistic that whatever resumes I sent today were going to lead to a good job. A lot of people will dismiss my reaction back then as stupid, but it worked for me.

I urge the “relentless Terminator-like determination” response to unexpected unemployment not because it’s easy, but because it’s necessary.

As hard as it is to stay as driven after sending out ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred resumes and not getting the returned phone call, there’s almost inevitably a payoff to this approach to your hardship. Despair is easier, but it just keeps you there.

What Would Ward Cleaver Do?

Ward had an advantage that you might not have but might want to develop. They didn’t talk about networking in his day, but men like Ward Cleaver weren’t atomized worker bees, they were part of a community. They knew their neighbors; they belonged to clubs, business-related and otherwise. In the unlikely circumstance that Ward Cleaver lost his job, not only would he work quickly to find a new one, but it’s likely that his company’s nearest competitor would move quickly to pick him up: Ward Cleavers don’t land on the job market every day.