One
Statistically, the most common days of the week to be fired are Monday or Friday. Which partly explains why, when I get to work—today, a Wednesday—and my keycard has been deactivated, I am very fucking surprised.
“Oof,” I say, when instead of gliding through the plexiglass barrier, I bounce right off it. The man behind me, too, is surprised, when he goes careening into my back. The security gates are meant to be a neat assembly line, not a five-car pileup.
I fumble, trying to swipe my card again, but by now I’m flustered—I’ve just made full-body contact with a middle-aged man in a charcoal suit.
“Go,” he orders, slamming his fob down over the sensor, granting me the access I couldn’t grant myself. I’m flushed with embarrassment, my brain frozen on the moment I felt his kneecap make contact with the back of my thigh.
Behind me, the barrier alarms go off again. Another person has been denied, and when I turn, I realize I know this person. It’s Suzy, the copywriter behind the company’s now infamous tagline:Tick your to-do list off one Taskio at a time.
The pull and release of awareness is like an elastic bandsnapping against my skin. The faulty keycards aren’t a coincidence. They’re a ghosting.
I watch in horror while a security guard steers her away, and then I can’t move fast enough. I’m clawing around the bottom of my tote bag, flicking aside dozens of crumpled receipts until I fish my phone out from the debris. It’s vibrating in a short, insistent staccato before I even unlock the screen.
When I do, it’s covered in notifications, each little snippet forming a picture of what’s transpired in the time since I last checked it. Chief among them is a mandatory meeting invite staring at me in all caps, scheduled with HR at 8:30a.m., and long since missed. Which begs the question: can I truly lose my job if no one can get hold ofme?
I have the answer as soon as I flip into my emails. Instead of my inbox, I’m greeted with a lock screen that simply saysContact Systems Administrator.
Next: texts. I’ve been added to a new group chat, aptly titledWHAT THE FUCK?,and the messages are pouring in faster than I can read them, the names of my teammates appearing in rapid succession. My phone starts ringing before I finish crafting a reply. I swipe as soon as I seework wifeon the callerID.
“Annie, where thehellare you?” Carrie’s voice hisses in my ear. “You were supposed to be on the phone with me fifteen minutes ago.”
“I’m here. In the lobby.” My hands aresoclammy. “My keycard didn’t work. Someone else let me in. Am I being laid off?”
She doesn’t even bother to deny it. “Just get up here.Don’ttalk to anyone. Come straight to my office.”
The line goes dead.
—
By the time the elevator deposits me on the twenty-fourth floor I’m half expecting a group of people to be standing by the doors with confetti, shoutingSurprise! You’re unemployed!
Do I find my job ridiculous? I work for a productivity software company, so yes, obviously. Do I want to lose my ridiculous job? I donot.
My best friend Carrie works in the HR department, her door at the end of a narrow hall. I find her in her closet-sized office, a windowless room lined with thick carpet she once admitted was installed to muffle the sound of crying.
We both started work on the same day at Jotter, the now-defunct startup that was bought out by Taskio. Over awkward chitchat with a dozen other new inductees, Carrie and I bonded for life when we realized we were both new to the city and secretly hoping to manifest our own rags-to-richesWorking Girlstoryline, complete with Harrison Ford.
That obviously did not happen—tech guys are either enormously socially awkward computer geeks or cocaine-snorting sales leads that speak in gibberish—but it didn’t matter. Instead, I got Carrie, my partner in crime both during working hours and outside of them.
She’s hunched over her computer, typing away furiously, the echo of her keystrokes bouncing around the compact space. Her head swivels toward me when I enter the room, like an owl. Her hands, I notice, never pause in their typing.
I close the door behind me. “What’s happening?”
“Shitshow,” she says, summing up my own take on the matter perfectly.
In under a minute, she puts me in possession of the facts as she knows them: the big executive meeting that took place yesterday, the list of layoffs that came in late last night.
“I don’t understand. How did I not know about this?”
I usually hear all the big workplace gossip. Carrie is even more skillful. Like a pig rooting for truffles.
I eye her with suspicion. “How didyounot know about this?”
“On my life, I had no idea,” she says. “I don’t even think my boss knew. It feels really sudden.”
“So that’s it? Goodbye, Annie, have a nice life?”
