humor &satire 27 Nov 2006 09:23 am
10 Things That Will REALLY Get You Fired
On the PANMA listserv, someone recently posted this tired old list of ten things that will get you fired. It’s just so yesteryear. Take #6:”Complain about your job to anyone who will listen.” Are they kidding? The complainers hang on like barnacles because management knows they’re the ones who go right out and get a big shot Jumpin’ Jack Flash jim-dandy employment lawyer. Lots of people quit jobs just to get away from the whiners that nobody has the guts to fire.
Stealing paperclips won’t even get you noticed, let alone fired any more. In today’s complex, freewheeling,”casual” workplaces, filled with nepotism, petty graft, patronage, apathy, backbiting, office politics and soul-eating busywork you have to go above and beyond the average transgression to get canned. But if you’re a really creative self-sabatoging dope who just can’t keep that psychiatrist appointment or follow simple restraining orders, then this list is for you.
Without further adieu, I present to you: 10 Things That Will REALLY Get You Fired:
- Spend your first week making a colossal mashed potato sculpture of Bart Simpson in the reception area.
- Ride your Shetland pony to work and insist on parking him in your cubicle.
- Insert a copy of John Hinckley’s letter to Jodie Foster into your United Way contribution envelope.
- Every office has a glass-walled conference room called “the fishbowl.” One night seal up the bottoms of the doors, fill the room with water and stock the new “fishbowl”. The sight of two dozen stolen koi darting between those expensive Herman Miller chairs will cement your status as legend and instantly make you a former employee.
- Forget to put your Avenging Unicorn away at night.
- Ask if you can hold a Narcotics Anonymous Meeting in the office after hours (bonus: When denied, ask to hold it in the company’s luxury stadium skybox on game day instead).
- Become Donald Trump’s new hair stylist.
- Forget to offer to lick your boss’s shoes clean each morning when you deliver her latte and Wall Street Journal.
- Every day take home a wheelbarrow full of hay, explaining that the boss offered it as part of your compensation. As you leave, the security guard will eye you suspiciously, sift through the hay carefully, find nothing hidden in it and reluctantly wave you through. After ten days the security guard will say, “Ha! I caught you. You’ve been stealing wheelbarrows!” Explain that you actually returned the wheelbarrow each morning, but while the guard was searching the hay, your friends were taking all the plasma TVs down the freight elevator to a waiting truck.
- On Take Our Daughters to Work Day, take Sam Donaldson instead.