Expecting To Be Fired Daily

I once moved hundreds of miles to a new location and decided that while I was making changes in my life, perhaps I would try to transition from successful independent sales drone into management. The reason for this decision was based on a desire to switch up my lifestyle — I was tired of working all hours including nights and weekends and longed for a Monday through Friday 9–5 schedule, something I had never experienced in my entire working history.

Happily, I hit it off with the owner of the company who interviewed me. I would be working directly under her and answerable to only her and a board of directors.

I was supposed to start at the first of the year, then about two weeks away. Since my position was currently vacant, I asked if I might come in for a week in advance on my own time to acclimate myself to the corporate environment, my office, training manuals, marketing materials, etc. so I could have a clearer view of the challenges and be able to hit the ground running on my official start date. My boss was fine with my plan.

Cut to my first day of my self-directed orientation. I walked into my very nice private office and sat down at my desk. I surveyed the computer, the contents of the bookcase, the stack of training manuals on the floor. I opened the desk drawer and discovered my welcome-to-the-company surprise.

Someone had placed an array of business cards in the drawer compartment designed for pens and pencils. There were ten of them, so I picked them up and sorted through them, thinking that they must be some kind of “important contacts” collection that someone had thoughtfully left for me. But hold on, what’s this?

What these cards had in common was: they were all employees in my new company and under the name of the individual, each one had the title of my new job. I was clearly #11 in the sequence.

I stared dumbfounded at the assortment and then I started to laugh. I had no idea who had placed the cards in the drawer, but the message was clear that maybe I shouldn’t order the larger number of business cards since my tenure would most likely be of short duration. The person who put the cards in the drawer could have had either kind intent or something more devious, but it didn’t really matter either way, the gist of my situation had been communicated.

As I continued to poke around the office, the ghosts of these previous managers kept popping up in old ads, marketing manuals, flyers, brochures, etc. I felt like I was a character in a made-for-TV suspense movie; I wondered if opening a closet would reveal their mummified cadavers stacked up like cord-wood hidden behind boxes of promo materials. Happily, once I got my imagination under control, I realized the only corpse I was seeing was the marketing budget for my department blown to smithereens by what were essentially vanity pieces for previous occupants of the office that were now completely unusable. I decided then and there that any future pieces would have as a contact my title and not my name and my corporate phone number and extension and a new generic email address I would create for this purpose. I was already thoughtfully thinking of how to make my successor, #12’s, life easier.

When I went home after my first day, my husband asked me how things went and I told him I had discovered that I was the equivalent of a new drummer in Spinal Tap and that we shouldn’t plan on my salary past the first month.

In a weird case of what could be called perverse consequences, my expectation of being fired at any moment from my revolving door position lifted any anxiety I might have felt about that occurring, since it appeared to be the natural outcome of taking the job. I was sure that better people than I had failed the mandate. My reasoning was that while it was completely possible that I would not be up to the job, I would still do the best job that I could and almost make a game of delaying the inevitable.

The job was hard, it was demanding, but I worked with a great group of people and I ended up staying for almost ten years. I still have no idea who put the cards in the drawer, but if I could I would thank them for liberating me from the fear of failure by introducing it as very viable option on day one.