Yesterday I lost my job. The company founders called me into the office and broke the happy news. They brought up the following reasons for my termination:

• I came in late three times in past two months.
• I was expected to work more than eight hours every day.
• They felt they had to coddle me through their company policies and procedures.
• They had no confidence in me as a designer.

I addressed these points as follows:

• I was late three times but it was never more than ten minutes each time and I stayed well past 5:00 whenever this occurred. You would have known this if you did not leave at 5:15 everyday.
• If I had known the job required me to pull ten hour days (which I was never told) I would have not accepted it in the first place.
• I was never given any briefing on company policies, expectations or any formal or informal training. I recall my first day (which neither one of you even offered to take me to lunch on), I was thrust in front of a computer and told to, “Be an Art Director.”
• I spent the past two months editing files and websites other people developed. I produced one original design. You hated it. The client loved it. Is that not how a designer measures success?

The corporate culture over at Gas Sack, Inc. (my new pet name for that fuck circus) was more oppressive than a concentration camp. Granted, nobody was getting shoved into an oven, but I have never witnessed employees operating under such intense fear; fear of making a mistake, fear of failure, fear of good design. I can recall only two times when I heard people laughing in the office. Two times. In two months. And both times the founders were gone for the day. The art on the walls even sucked. Oil maps of Texas, Arkansas, New Mexico and this. Which is appropriate for a homosexual ski lodge but not so much for an Investor Relations consulting firm.

So now I am back to firing off resumes (seven today), eating ketchup sandwiches and watching Judge Joe Brown and my wife is back to questioning why she married such an unemployable sack of shit.