The Wild Reviews
Maverick scribbler Tim Wild reviews… things.
This month – The top 5 reasons to get fired
You’re not really that important
The dishwashing gig has begun to go sour. Having begun in a blitz of cheeky good humour and hard work, the relentless grease, detergent, heat and smoke have fogged your adolescent brain and dulled your spirit. The previous week, you have disobeyed the only clear instruction the boss gave you, and allowed a chunky piece of carrot to block the sink, flooding the service area on a busy Friday and earning you the displeasure of a waitress.
This same waitress is left in charge of the rota when the boss goes on holiday the next week, and calmly informs you that you’re not scheduled to work on the weekend. So you go to St Albans, ingest a horse-felling quantity of LSD, suffer a minor psychotic episode, and return to your parent’s home three days later, cradling your weak brain like an injured hedgehog. They immediately inform you that the restaurant boss has called several times asking for you, and that you’re fired for not showing up. With the last pops and fizzles of your trip still affecting your vision, you limp to work to state your case, where you are stoutly bollocked in front of several staff and told to get out.
You’re massively out of your depth
Having talked your way into a swish London PR job by dint of a personal connection and a barely credible CV, you quickly realise that you hopelessly under-qualified for the role. To add to your discomfort, you also realise that the one person who can help you, teach you and protect you is your immediate superior, who is the biggest pseudo-mystical public school drug dustbin asshole you have ever met.
Every time he tries to speak to you, your eyes fog over and a neon sign reading ‘TOSSER’ throbs relentlessly in your brain. He spends all day avoiding other people and only really works at night in a fog of skunk and strong cider, whilst you creep home at the earliest opportunity and stay up late, prolonging the arrival of the next day as long as possible.
Your mutual antipathy comes to a head when he leaves you in charge of a huge account and goes on holiday to Thailand, and you accidentally send an offensive email to over 5,000 of your client’s staff, get called a cunt over speakerphone in front of twenty people, and get told to leave and never come back.
You’re taking the piss
Not wishing to relinquish the regular wages that your poxy office job provides, you are nonetheless drawn to the more glamorous pastures of music journalism, with its heady promises of guest lists, free CDs and the company of hipsters. To solve your dilemma, you begin working for magazines whilst still at your office job, on their computer, during the day.
Undetected, your boldness grows, and you fake illness at 8.45 am from a hotel bathroom in Nottingham, having spent the previous night in fancy dress with a load of transvestites and a strange German man with a lot of space biscuits.
Whilst on holiday, your permanently suspicious boss gets your password from IT and pokes around in your hard drive, finding ample evidence of your duplicity, including invoices, and on your first day back you are frogmarched from the building by security.
You’re taking the piss again
At first, it seems perfect. The local factory, which makes vending machines, needs a warehouseman. Unbounded joy fills your heart when you realise that this entails little more than donning a tan housecoat, making the occasional parcel up and bantering with the UPS man at five every afternoon. A radio and comfortable desk chair are thrown in, and it takes very little time to rig up a small area behind the shelves for the rolling of spliffs and the odd cheeky midday lager.
One fine day you are gently supping your second tea of the day, digesting a bacon sandwich, entertaining fantasies about the work experience girl and one clue away from finishing the crossword when the managing director appears as if from nowhere, hauls you up by the shirt collar and tells you to get the fuck out, right now.
You forget your place
Your boss is a flighty sort. Happy as a clam one day, savaging hapless junior employees the next, you quickly learn that his moods directly correlate with the previous night’s level of cocaine consumption. You would be wise to play your cards close to your chest, pick your moments to speak up carefully, and work very hard indeed.
Instead, in the middle of a meeting where all the senior staff are present, the boss breaks off mid-sentence, flips you a quid and says’ Pop down the road and get me a cappuccino.’ Of all the options available to respond, the only one really worth taking being going and getting the coffee, you instead choose to reply with ‘I suppose you want me to do your fucking laundry done at the same time, yeah?’ and lose your job that very afternoon.
You are utterly incapable of showing any respect whatsoever to your superiors.
Because they are all cunts.
