The Time I Almost Got Fired From My Job in High School

This can get you in a lot of trouble.

Hi! It's been a while, yes? Well, let's get right to it.

When you're an adult and you work in a field where you're an "at-will" employee — meaning you can get canned for pretty much any reason, and you don't have the backing of a powerful tax-enhanced union that guarantees job security and mandated break times — you can never be very confident when it comes to job stability.

I've had three situations involving job loss or potential job loss:

• I was let go from my very first "real" job for reasons that I may someday explain in a future post.
• I left America Online because the once the merger with Time Warner was approved, about a year after I started working there, the company celebrated by liquidating the department I worked in. I had the opportunity to stay employed by AOL if I moved to Chicago, but I declined the relocation.
• A turf war between the Seattle and New York offices of Pokemon resulted in Seattle, uh, winning, and as entire departments began to disappear from our office, I saw the obvious writing on the wall and was lucky enough to jump ship to a new ship before the whole thing sank about 18 months later.

I've held a number of jobs during high school and college, the kind of jobs that motivate you to finish school because you don't want to end up having a job like that for life, and I was fortunate enough not to get fired from any of them.

It's never like this.

But I've been around when people at these jobs have gotten fired, and by fired I don't mean the gentle laid off meaning you received two poor performance reviews in a row and HR has been alerted and they put you on 30-day notice with a list of ways to improve your work and you signed a document that verifies you understand the consequences and somehow you still screwed up and there is a final uncomfortable meeting where you're informed that you've failed to satisfy the expectations that have been clearly spelled out in front of you your boss her boss and an HR person and so now you're being "let go" or "terminated" or whatever word they want to use and here's how COBRA works and how you'll get your severance if you're lucky and so on and so forth.

DON'T LET THE DOOR HIT YOUR...
I mean "You're fired, get the hell out of here" fired. This usually happens at a job staffed with a lot of high school kids, like a fast food joint or retail hell.

The closest I ever came to getting fired was shortly after I began my very very first job ever  — not counting when I was a Newsday paperboy, a mostly unrewarding experience that now makes me recall Napoleon Dynamite's conclusion after working at the chicken farm ("That's like a dollar an hour!") — as a janitor at a Jewish community center.

I was 16, and it was the first of my three or four different stints there. I worked with a few other guys from high school, including "Freddy," about whose ability (or inability) to open a beer bottle with his teeth I described in an earlier post.

One of those guys was Ken, who we called Bird because he was like 6'4" and 130 pounds and had a big-beak schnoz and would occasionally squat while flapping his skinny wingspan and squawking like the aviary version of the missing link. Between jobs we'd hang out in the custodians' office-slash-break-room, where there was a phone that acted as a janitor hotline in case someone at the center had an emergency, like a spill or a large delivery or the panicked discovery that some vandal rearranged the letters on the building front's promotional sign from JEWISH ARTS FESTIVAL — LABOR DAY to OLD JEWISH FARTS.

I liked to mess with Ken when he'd come into the office by handing him the phone and saying, "It's for you." The baffled-bird look on his bird face as he realized no one was on the other end was quite amusing.

THE BOY WHO CRIED "IT'S FOR YOU"
One day I was in the break room when I got a call from Josh, a guy in his mid-twenties who ran the youth camps and was known to us as an entitled brown-noser who sucked up to the community center's administrators and treated people in our department with arrogant disdain. (But hey, maybe he was really a nice guy; the custodial staff had a well-earned checkered reputation. And last I checked, 25 years later, Josh is the current executive director of the facility.)

So. I was in the office with Freddy's more-normal brother Bert when the phone rang. I answered it, and it was Josh, who needed one of us to attend to one of the rooms and mop up some shit or pick up a tissue or something. I had no idea where this room was — it went by a name instead of being assigned a number that would have made it easier to track down — since I'd been in the building's employ for only a couple of months. Bert didn't know where it was either, and before I had to sheepishly tell Josh that I couldn't help him, Ken walked in.

"Ken," I said with relief, "It's Josh. He needs something done in [whatever the hell room he was talking about]. I don't know where that is. Can you find out what he wants?"

Ken took the phone. He listened for a moment. Then he said:

"Fuck off and live."

Then he hung up the phone.

I couldn't even process the "...and live" part of the insult, a variation I'd never heard before. I stammered, "Ken, what the hell?"

"There was no one on the other end," Ken said with a satisfied smile.

"Why would the other person be talking?" I said. "He was waiting for one of us to, like, say 'hello'!"

"There was no one on the line," Ken insisted, a little less sure of himself.

"No, man, that was Josh," Bert said.

Bam-bam-bam!

It wasn't hard to guess who was at the door, which we kept locked so people couldn't just stroll in and bother us. Bert opened the door, hiding behind it and clinging to the doorknob as Josh swept in.

He was as tall and lanky as Ken, but not as birdlike, and wore a navy blue yarmulke — I still remember the clips that held it on his thick wavy hair. "Who told me to fuck off?" he demanded. This was probably the most bizarre question I'd ever heard.

Ken raised his wing awkwardly. "Uh...I did," he weakly replied, shriveling up as he stood there.

At that moment I was dying to know what was going to happen next. How do you respond to someone who told you to fuck off? Especially when it was so random? I was kind of disappointed that Josh just pointed a skinny finger at Ken and boomed, "WATCH it!"

Then he left.

We thought that maybe that would be it, but no, Josh reported the incident to our boss, Jim, and soon after that I was summoned to his office, where Ken was trying to cover his ass by claiming that the only reason he told Josh to fuck off was because I pulled my no-one-on-the-phone prank "all the time," which was bullshit because I did it only three or four times, and besides, I wasn't the one who told Josh to fuck off.

Jim yelled at both of us, in the same way my mother would punish my brother and me equally even if my brother was responsible for 85% of the trouble we'd just caused. I promised to never again pull that prank, and Ken promised to never again tell Josh to fuck off.

CODA
Interestingly, a similar situation would occur when I unintentionally cursed out a telemarketer. You might recall that story. But in my case, at least I had the common sense to say "Hello" before dropping the f-bomb. There's a lesson for all of us in this story. Somewhere.