The Layoff Pennies

We had a recent firing here at the Land Where the Idiots Grow.  At every job, since I started the life of a wage slave at the age of 15, a firing means one thing:  Pennies!  No matter what job, the sacked employee’s desk/workstation/locker always has tons of pennies.  An average firing will result in about three bucks worth, but one lady who got laid off a few years ago had a jar with $24 in it.

I’ve worked at my current job since May of 2001, and I estimate that I’ve made about $50 in pennies during that time.

I’ll go ahead and confess:  I’m thrilled when someone gets fired.  As soon as they’re gone, I swoop in and strip their desk.  Not just pennies, put office supplies.  Post-It’s, pens, rulers, envelopes, you name it.  It’s a bonanza, really.  If you want office supplies through the regular channels, you have to go see the supervisor and reenact some twisted scenario where she’s the principle and you’re the 10 year old boy.  Then, after being chastised for nothing in particular, the double-locked cabinet is opened and the minimum amount of supplies is handed out.  Need pens?  You get one.  Come back when it runs out.  Post-It’s?  You get half a pack.

That sort of behavior has been true at any job, and leads to a hoarding mentality.  People steal supplies, beg extra supplies and, before you know it, everyone’s built a secret little mountain of supplies, which they guard with a snarling, Cro-Magnon fervor.

Cleaning out the desk of someone who was fired is much like robbing a grave in the minds of certain folks.  There are two distinct groups:  My type of people, who swoop in before the chair’s cold and take everything without checking for value (you can sort through your stash in the darkness of your own office), and the people who feel we should respect the dead.  The latter group is the strongest.  There’s a mourning period for their fallen comrade, even if he or she was a total fruitbat.  Like the last guy they fired at the beginning of the summer.  He talked openly about shooting the place up, and spent the entire day – every day for six months — watching live footage of a geyser.  The geyser went off like clockwork every half hour or so, but he’d still stare at the webcam unblinkingly for the entire day.  Maybe he was trying to catch the geyser…see if it would erupt off schedule when it thought nobody was watching.

Including lunch, our day is eight and a half hours.  That’s a lot of geyser watching.

The lady that was just fired today (worth a measly 72 cents) didn’t watch geysers all day, but she was shockingly dumb.  Everyone enjoyed the ten minutes it would take for her to formulate basic questions.  She’d start, say a jumble of meaningless words, stop and screw up her face, then say another string of nonsense words, then close her eyes and huff and puff before finally spitting out the question, which would be blindly simple.  And she had a graduate degree in English, so there you go.