Not laid off (that's a whole other story).
​
Fired. As in I was actively told to kick rocks and not let the door hit my ass on the way out.
​
It was another one of those 'bad thing happened, good thing came out of it scenarios.'

Although to be 100% fair, I brought said "bad thing" upon myself.

I was working what you would call a "foot in the door" job in an ad agency creating reports from employee timesheets. My job was to go around to every employee to collect their timesheet and enter all the information into a report. In addition to collecting timesheets, it was also my job to man the phones while the receptionist took a lunch break.

In hindsight I can't believe there was a salaried position for this. The timesheets alone were a massive waste of time that no one wanted to fill out. What's worse, they were in 15-minute increments.

But even worse than that was the arrival policy. We had to physically sign in every single morning at 9:00 am on the dot.

If you arrived as late as 9:01, the receptionist had to put your name on a list and email it to the entire company with the subject line: "AFTER 9AM ARRIVALS."

And this happened every. single. day.

I lived a half hour away so I made it a point to leave early and rarely ever arrived later than 8:30, so it wasn't THAT big of a deal.

Still, being in my petulant 20s, I felt a growing resentment over the job and the rules because I wasn't a rookie (or a high school student for that matter). I'd paid nearly four years worth of ad agency "dues" in Memphis, and I'd already won two Addy awards for copywriting.

But this was South Florida, and I was a recent transplant. Evidently a lot of people move to Florida and then leave, and the locals here have zero time, money or patience to train someone who's just going to leave in six months.

You have to prove you've put down "roots."

At that age, I was nowhere near "roots." So I had to take on some pretty shit jobs when I first moved here.

For a short period of time I worked in an inbound sales call center, side by side with work release prisoners. We worked in a darkly lit cubicle farm, each one with a phone and a canister of Clorox wipes to clean it with before and after each shift.

The crazy thing is, I was actually pretty good at it. Still, I didn't graduate top of my class to sling shitty cruises next to criminals.

Being a timesheet bounty hunter for the gestapo was a step up.

And there is ALWAYS something to gain from any situation if you get curious and look for it. Collecting timesheets actually gave me a chance to get to know everyone in every department, because NO one turned their timesheets in voluntarily.

I ran with the opportunity to endear myself to the Creative Director and account executives and finally I was able to land some 'trial' copywriting work of my own.

Granted, they were radio jingles for Spearmint Rhino (you're gonna have to look that one up), but at least I was writing again, getting to be a fly on the wall of the creative department and eventually picking up more scraps.

A few months later our agency had the opportunity to do a massive pitch for a new wine called Blue Nun. It was electrifying to be part of it too. Despite arriving at 8:30 every morning, I wound up staying later and later, working all hours helping the creative department with this pitch.

Finally it was pitch day. We'd all been working until 10-11pm every night getting everything just right. That afternoon we got the call that we'd landed the account. It was a massive win for the agency. We were exhilarated and exhausted.

The next morning, every single person in the creative department came in after 9. And I don't mean 9:30 or 10, I mean 9:10-9:15. It was as if we were giving ourselves a little victory reprieve. Surely after all those late nights, the CEO wouldn't care right?

Wrong. That morning, sure as shit, I saw the dreaded SL in my inbox. "AFTER 9AM ARRIVALS." And it was the longest list we'd had since I'd worked there. Because NO one thought this jerk would actually enforce it that day.

I was hopping mad. So I did what any 20-something year old kid with nothing to lose would do.

I hit "reply all" and wrote one sentence.

Perhaps we should also keep track of 6PM departures.

Send.

It was a Friday, and I'll never forget when I was manning the phones at lunchtime that day, the Creative Director stopped by the front desk and said, "Well done. You have much bigger balls than I do."

I went home that weekend feeling pretty satisfied with myself.

The following Monday morning, I was promptly fired by the CEO's assistant.

And it felt incredible.

I had no idea how bad I felt about my job until I didn't have to do it anymore.

Some people spend years living in this kind of occupational misery (way worse than this too).

So really, I have two messages in today's email.

1. There is always something to learn or gain from any situation if you're curious enough to look.
2. Life is too short to work for assholes.

Talk soon,

Katrina "Bad bosses suck" Turner

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