Best angry termination email ever!

This is an old post from old blog but google keeps sending people here so I figured I’d backfill it in.

This email was sent my last company’s company-wide distribution list by a disgruntled employee, one day after his termination. This has become a treasured document to all those who received it and now I’ve elected to share it with the world. Only names have been changed.

I defy anyone to produce a better post-termination email than this.

From: “Jack Mixfeld”
To:
Sent: Monday, June 26, 2000 7:56 AM
Subject: Why I was fired: a morality tale.

> Ladies and Gentlemen:
>
> Yes, this is a long letter. However, Carl Sagan once pointed out,
> “Extra-ordinary claims require extraordinary proof,” so I have decided to
> write the exposition in the detail it deserves. All will become clear.

> Please bear with me.
>
> On the last day of my training period, Tom Smith, the VP of
> Recruiting, took me into his office, shut the door, and told me I was
> fired. This just happened this last Friday, June the 23rd. It is worth
> noting Mr. Smith’s markedly little regret in performing this action; most managers hate
> nothing more than taking away a man’s livelihood.
>
> Needless to say, I was awfully curious as to why I had just been
> given the hatchet. He proceeded to explain, raising the following
> issues:
>
> i. In his words, the IT department charged that I needed “excessive
> handholding” with regards to finding my way around the systems here.
>
> Hmmm.
>
> For one thing, I was told when I was hired for this position in Los
> Angeles that I would be flown to Connecticut and put up in resident
> lodgings; careful perusal of the website to which I was directed to
> get my itinerary, Sunday evening before flight-time (I had to get
> ready and get packed in an awful hurry to make my Monday start-date,
> you see, so I never managed to look at it beforehand) revealed no
> further instructions with regards to where I was supposed to report,
> come Monday morning.
> This struck me as little matter for concern, as I hardly thought
> that anyone would go to such trouble and then leave me hanging. As it
> happens, I flew out and arrived late Sunday night to find… nothing.
> Nothing at the hotel, no further instructions in e-mail… no listing
> for COMPANY NAME in the local phone book. I phoned/e-mailed all
> contacts to request further instructions. Nothing. (I was later told
> that I was sent via overnight mail such instructions. I never and
> still have not received them.)
> As such, no one contacted me until Monday afternoon, so I missed
> orientation day. If there was some sort of standard rule about
> interfacing with IT folks, I wasn’t told.

> For another thing… no observation really means anything unless one
> has a basis of comparison. How much asking for help is construable as
> desire for “handholding” in the highly situational local corporate
> culture?
> At another programming job I have held, I was assigned a mentor who
> was deliberately, by company policy, left out of the loop of employee
> evaluation (this was standard); there, and at my last position, at
> Symantec, I actually managed to get hidings from my superiors for
> *not* asking for help. So how, then, was I expected to behave? And why
> tell me not to step over a line until after I’d done so?
>
> Read on, Constant Reader. It gets *more* tenuous.
>
> ii. Shockingly, I had included in one of my training modules, as an
> example of a Usenet post (or something like that; quite honestly, it
> was such a trivial task that I don’t remember what the demand for it
> was), a random post from talk.euthanasia that had a reference,
> including URL, to a pornography site.
>
> I can only answer such a charge with a resounding “so what”. No
> actual prurience or obscenity was in the article itself. Mr. Smith
> said that the grounds for concern about such a matter was that I might

> happen to offend the daylights out of a client with such a reference.
> I would say that that’s a classic pigs-might-fly purely hypothetical
> situation, with deucedly little basis in fact.
> If I was the father of a young child, would I be unqualified to work

> for this company on the grounds that I might badger my clients to
> brush their teeth, or take their vitamins? I mean, *really*.
>
> iii. I was also cited in this conversation as repeatedly ridiculing
> the training area’s library.
>
> Mr. Smith further explained that this company has not the time or
> resources for a librarian or more books or what have you, reminding me

> that the stated mission here is to create great systems first and
> foremost.
> I cannot quarrel with the mission, as it is… was… mine as well…
> but
> his admission of the library’s inadequacy does not give him more
> authority so much as less excuse for making this kind of “how dare you

> impugn our library” statement.
>
> In my defense I would largely state that the library is… well…
> ridiculous. It is a loose, shambling collection of assorted books, in
> theory grouped according to subject but in fact simply piled on the
> shelves by pure whim. This by itself wouldn’t be a problem, save for
> that in the training handbook we’re told to consult numerous
> specifically named books in which to research the answers to the
> questions we’re supposed to address in our modules. With every module
> about seven or eight books are cited that we’re supposed to peruse.
> One is lucky to find even one in that library… and many of the
> queries in the modules were sufficiently obscure such that the answers

> were unlikely to be found in any other source material.
> We were told to do our research on the Internet. That is, quite
> simply, even more of a laugh. However useful the net may be, I have no

> confidence whatever in the veracity of whatever happens to be written
> on somebody’s web page (at least a book’s pages have to go through an
> editor or publisher of some sort)… and since I was expected to
> produce in an awful hurry, I was more or less forced to fill out the
> answers to the module questions with whatever I just happened to find.

> Some of us trainees even had a good laugh over questions for which
> nobody could even find a halfway-plausible answer (e.g. “What is an
> outrigger?”).
> An unmanned library is okay. A disorganized one is tolerable. A
> hopelessly inadequate one for performing required tasks is not.
> You see… I was a “trainee”. Status of “trainee” implies a
> “trainer”; other folks were luckier, I think, but my assigned mentor,
> Matt Jones, was in Minneapolis, and I had contact with him only via
> two phone calls and a series of e-mailed letters. The point is that,
> ironically enough, for all the trouble to which was went to bring me
> across the continent, I would have been much better equipped to
> complete the training if I’d stayed in Los Angeles. I was in contact
> with others mainly through phone and e-mail anyhow, and if there’s a
> single technical bookshop anywhere in the entire state of Connecticut,
>
> it’s
> a secret well-kept from our community. (Useful books could sometimes
> be had from Barnes & Noble and Borders, but the specialist is so often

> more useful than the general practitioner for our sort.)
> Hardly did I go out of my way to defame our sacred library. I just
> happened to make one facetious remark (among others, to other people)
> to the IT department, however… but I’ll get to that, too, in a
> moment.
> By the by, it seems worth mentioning here that this company’s ad
> that I found on the net and answered in early May promised a laid-back

> corporate culture… a promise that was renewed unsolicited by Dave
> Serafini when he first spoke to me on my first day. Can you say
> “cognitive dissonance”?
> Anyhow…
>
> iv. I was having a conversation with Sean Fournier, one of the
> aforementioned IT folks, when he mentioned I could use the library.
> “Library?” I said. “You call that loose pile of books a ‘library’?
> What university did you go to?”
>
> I was being rather less than serious in making that remark, as
> should be fairly obvious from context. I never heard about this remark
> again until Mr. Smith cited it as grounds for my unceremonious
> dismissal.
>
> That implication is… well, gloriously silly. The notion that I am
> rude and/or unprofessional would come as a surprise, if not grounds
> for raucous laughter, to anyone else who knows me.
> At Symantec, many folks have an office nickname. Mine was “Mister
> Spock”.
>
> I was *that* habitually calm and professional… and routinely
> ridiculed for it, just as I have been at other places where I have
> worked. As such, since techies are so often wiseacres, and since this
> company actually advertises itself as being a bit less serious, I
> decided to apply the “when in Rome”
> rule.
>
> Many thanks to Sean Fournier for, instead of having the least little
> chat with me about this, adhering to the time-honored
> “TEEEEEEEEEEACHERRRRR!!!
> HE’S PICKING ON MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” policy.
>
> Talk about handholding. (N.B., Fournier, this is what a *real*
> insult looks like.) Colleagues are well-advised to bring their
> beverage of choice with them whenever attempting contact with Mr.
> Fournier; it’ll be handy for rinsing out the dustbunnies from their
> mouths after their profuse kissing of the carpet at his feet.
>
> v. On my next to last day, as I sat minding my own business and
> scouring one of my Java texts, I was confronted by some haughty black
> chick about the jeans I was wearing. (Someone mentioned her name to
> me, but I’ve forgotten. The local grapevine will gladly fill you in,
> I’m sure, if you really care. Check local listings.) Our conversation
> went something like this:
>
> Her: “Friday is casual day. Then you can wear jeans and sneakers.
> The rest of the time you’re supposed to be wearing business casual.”
>
> Me: “You’re kidding me.”
>
> Her: “No.”
>
> Me: “I have some slacks at the corporate apartment. Do you want me
> to drive back and get them?”
>
> Her: “No. Your dress is not appropriate.”
>
> Me: “You’re not kidding.”
>
> Her: “No.”
>
> Me: “Okay.”
>
> True to form for the standards of professional conduct so loftily
> upheld at COMPANY NAME, this confronting of yours truly was done
> right in front of all the other trainees.
>
> I wasn’t told. A dress code is something with which I would never
> have had a problem — in fact, I have a serious tendency to overdress
> for work — but no one said anything. This is the only tech shop at
> which I’ve ever worked in which there was more of a dress code than
> “You must be wearing a shirt.”
>
> But that’s not the bad part. Flashforward back to my conversation
> with Mr. Smith. He said that she said that I said, “You’re shitting me.”
>
> Now, I never swear at work. I hardly swear at all beyond the
> occasional “bloody hell” picked up from having read too much verbiage
> authored by Brits. I pointed this out to Smith. He replied, “That’s
> what she said.”
>
> My, my.
>
> For mercy’s sake let’s put aside, for a moment, the non-argument of
> Mr. Smith’s rebuttal. This little incident occurred in a whole roomful of
> witnesses who could have confirmed my nonfoulness of mouth. Yet, here
> it is being cited as basis for termination. No trial, no jury, no
> appeal.
>
> I have never known a person I’ve met in the bowels of a corporation to ever,
> ever admit he was wrong and reverse a decision, no matter how
> inaccurate the information upon which the decision was based later
> proved to be. I am reminded of that scene in the movie _Little Big
> Man_: “Your miserable life is not worth the reversal of a Custer
> Decision.” Nonetheless, that sort of blind faith in a person just
> because s/he’s in authority is something I would have stood in line
> not to see again, even if I was unharmed by it (once you discount my
> profound visceral disgust at the sight, of course).
>
> Some of you may have read Harlan Ellison’s accounts of some of his
> nastier encounters with antiSemites. To paraphrase him: don’t pity me.
> I’ll get another job. Pity *them*.
>
> Mr. Smith did not, I’m sure, present his grievances with me in
> exactly this order. By the time, however, that all of the ones
> mentioned here came to light, I told him I’d heard enough. I quite
> honestly didn’t want to feel obligated to rebut even sillier quibbles.
>
> You might have noticed that all five points have little to nothing
> to do with pace or quality of work. I would further like to point out
> that I e-mailed Mr. Jones daily, sending him updates on my progress
> and enquiring for his opinion of my pace; I never received an
> unfavorable word from him.
>
> Indeed, I received no warning whatever, from anyone, that my fate was
> being sealed. I might not have gotten the Java application done on
> time as described in the module… but considering that I’d been asked
> to learn Java in four days, I feel I can say that with a clear
> conscience. If there exists a man who has gained a sure hand with Java
> in four days, I want to work for him.
>
> I was UPS’ed the pink slip the next day. All that is stated there
> under reasons for dismissal is two words: “unsatisfactory
> performance”. I can see why no one dared to elucidate further. I, on
> the other hand, am happy to have the honor myself.
>
> Many thanks to Mr. Smith, et al. for raising the bar of fear and
> paranoia in modern corporate culture to new levels. Twelve days into
> the job, 14-hour days, satisfactory progress, no real political faux
> pas (you have to have a boss or a client for those, and I never had
> either)… and still fired without warning. Hoo boy. All that time and
> trouble to send me to Connecticut
> — company car, company housing, all expenses paid — all blown,
> before I had a chance to return them even one cent on their
> investment.
>
> I don’t generally like to be this crass… but there’s really not a
> nice way to say this — the thesis of this piece — and it’s
> well-supported by the facts at hand.
>
> COMPANY NAME is a Mandatory Ass-Kissing Employer. Period.
>
> Heaven knows this isn’t the only such company. I was hoping that I’d
> never end up working for one again… mainly because I work for high-tech firms.
> High-tech and… well, basically stupid ways to run a business…
> don’t mix. However, to quote my favorite line from Shakespeare’s _The
> Merchant of Venice_, “Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in
> vain.” In a perverse sort of way, I rather enjoyed the experience;
> it’s so often pleasantly bizarre to witness up close such massive
> parallel cluelessness.
>
> Those of you who are capable of doing something useful for a living
> are hereby advised to update you resumes and run for your professional lives.
> Those of you who think this is all just sour grapes are advised to put
> my theory to the test, although I’d bet my whole next paycheck that no
> one will dare. Even if you are confident that you’re so marvelously
> gifted and profitable that no one would dream of getting rid of you
> needlessly, you ought to be reminded that, if you hang around
> coprophages long enough, those same bad habits tend to rub off on
> you… and brown-nosers have a universally bad reputation for good
> reason. Also, one should consider that many supposedly decent people
> are total authority whores, who will automatically assume that your
> termination will be justified no matter how wildly not so it may be.
> Remember how the FBI and the BATF managed a 90% approval rating from
> the American public for their conduct in the Waco affair, even though
> even the most favorable interpretation of events is that they spooked
> a group of religious loons so badly that they burned themselves to
> death?
>
> Did I mention that a disproportionately high percentage of trainees
> were folks who were freshly out of college? Are you aware,
> furthermore, that many companies like to hire inexperienced people
> like that, just because such young folk can be abused, yet be unaware
> that they’re *being* abused?
> You saw the pictures of the child labor used in the mills in the 19th
> century in history class, did you not?
>
> You will probably not keep your job here unless you regularly
> tongue-kiss your masters’ buttocks with unrestrained emotion. No other
> explanation fits the facts, I’m afraid. And it’s not hard to find a
> better employer, especially if you’re a techie.
>
> If you’ve read this far, thank you for your kind attention. I hope
> you’ve enjoyed reading this as much as certain other people didn’t.
>
> Good day, and godspeed.
>
> Fondest regards,
>
> Jack Mixfeld