YOU’RE FIRED!

Hay Barn, Summerfield, NC

Our 45th POTUS recently hosted a reality show that should have been subtitled “You’re Fired!” in which folks who tuned in could live vicariously and have the experience of being terminated from a job without living the experience. His first one hundred or so days in office seem to be an extension of that show, but of course, this happens a lot in real life too.

There are a lot of reasons that organizations release employees including financial or performance and not all of them are fair. Life isn’t fair and this is just another example for all of us. Changing jobs and even careers needs to be a realized fact for those in the workforce going forward. Technology and the assimilation into a world economy has already drastically altered the employment landscape and one of the keys to future success is a lifelong embrace of learning. Organizations will pay for our life years based on the skills we maintain in our tool kit and the availability or unavailability of those skills in the current job market where we all compete.

I stumbled upon a hay barn recently as I was driving home from a golf game and it reminded me of the first time I was impolitely “dismissed” from a job. There weren’t a lot of reasonable paying jobs or good manufacturing openings in the central Kansas town where I grew up. So, I sought out openings that involved good old manual labor that offered overtime and steady work. One of those jobs involved driving an ensilage truck in tall corn fields and then to the local cattle feed lots. When that work was between jobs, we also baled alfalfa hay fields and unloaded them into dusty, hot barn lofts.

On one late summer afternoon, my buddy and I had loaded a flatbed truck to the brim with freshly baled hay. We took care to interlock the bales to assure that they would stay put. But as evening fell and I slowly rounded a sharp curve on an old country road, the load shifted and half of the bales slid off into the ditch. It took an extra two hours to recover the load and get the bales into a hayloft.

As we returned to our home base completely spent and hungry, the manager of the company who was known for having a beer or two after work, charged out into the yard and demanded to know why we were so late. I explained what had happened and much to my surprise, he fired me on the spot! I was shocked! That was the last response I was expecting and he followed up by directing me to pick up my paycheck for the week. I was so taken aback that I told him I didn’t want his money and left. Later I reconsidered and returned the next morning to retrieve my earnings.

That experience was an eye-opener. It taught me early on that no job regardless of the simplicity or the complexity is ever guaranteed. No excuse or fact is necessarily pertinent to the one in charge. And life isn’t fair, so get over it and move on. But even negative experiences in life can be worth something if you learn from them.