We had a recent firing here at the Land Where the Idiots Grow.\u00a0 At every job, since I started the life of a wage slave at the age of 15, a firing means one thing:\u00a0 Pennies!\u00a0 No matter what job, the sacked employee\u2019s desk\/workstation\/locker always has tons of pennies.\u00a0 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.
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I\u2019ve worked at my current job since May of 2001, and I estimate that I\u2019ve made about $50 in pennies during that time.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll go ahead and confess:\u00a0 I\u2019m thrilled when someone gets fired.\u00a0 As soon as they\u2019re gone, I swoop in and strip their desk.\u00a0 Not just pennies, put office supplies.\u00a0 Post-It\u2019s, pens, rulers, envelopes, you name it.\u00a0 It\u2019s a bonanza, really.\u00a0 If you want office supplies through the regular channels, you have to go see the supervisor and reenact some twisted scenario where she\u2019s the principle and you\u2019re the 10 year old boy.\u00a0 Then, after being chastised for nothing in particular, the double-locked cabinet is opened and the minimum amount of supplies is handed out.\u00a0 Need pens?\u00a0 You get one.\u00a0 Come back when it runs out.\u00a0 Post-It\u2019s?\u00a0 You get half a pack.<\/p>\n
That sort of behavior has been true at any job, and leads to a hoarding mentality.\u00a0 People steal supplies, beg extra supplies and, before you know it, everyone\u2019s built a secret little mountain of supplies, which they guard with a snarling, Cro-Magnon fervor.<\/p>\n
Cleaning out the desk of someone who was fired is much like robbing a grave in the minds of certain folks.\u00a0 There are two distinct groups:\u00a0 My type of people, who swoop in before the chair\u2019s 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.\u00a0 The latter group is the strongest.\u00a0 There\u2019s a mourning period for their fallen comrade, even if he or she was a total fruitbat.\u00a0 Like the last guy they fired at the beginning of the summer.\u00a0 He talked openly about shooting the place up, and spent the entire day \u2013 every day for six months — watching live footage of a geyser.\u00a0 The geyser went off like clockwork every half hour or so, but he\u2019d still stare at the webcam unblinkingly for the entire day.\u00a0 Maybe he was trying to catch the geyser\u2026see if it would erupt off schedule when it thought nobody was watching.<\/p>\n
Including lunch, our day is eight and a half hours.\u00a0 That\u2019s a lot of geyser watching.<\/p>\n
The lady that was just fired today (worth a measly 72 cents) didn\u2019t watch geysers all day, but she was shockingly dumb.\u00a0 Everyone enjoyed the ten minutes it would take for her to formulate basic questions.\u00a0 She\u2019d 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.\u00a0 And she had a graduate degree in English, so there you go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We had a recent firing here at the Land Where the Idiots Grow.\u00a0 At every job, since I started the life of a wage slave at the age of 15, a firing means one thing:\u00a0 Pennies!\u00a0 No matter what job, …<\/p>\n